Posted on 08/02/2018 6:20:03 AM PDT by yesthatjallen
Journalists who cover the regular gatherings of the leaders of European Union countries got a rude surprise this week from the Belgian government: Most of them will have to pay for the right to do their jobs.
Before they are allowed to cover European Council summit meetings in Brussels, journalists have to undergo background checks conducted by the countries where they live. Naturally, the largest number of them, about 1,000, live in Belgium, where the European Union is headquartered, and a new law there requires the journalists to reimburse the government for the cost of the checks — 50 euros, or about $58, for a credential that lasts for six months.
The press corps here is not amused.
“This is unprecedented and completely unacceptable,” said Tom Weingaertner, president of the International Press Association in Brussels. “The state is in charge of ensuring security and press freedom and we are not prepared to pay twice for this,” referring to reporters who already pay Belgian taxes as residents.
“There is no other democratic country, as far as we are aware of, that is asking for a similar fee,” he said. “This is a restriction of press freedom and it sets a very big precedent.”
NATO, which is also based in Brussels, said it is not sure whether the fee will also apply to credentialing for its summit meetings.
The fee feeds into the image of government in Belgium — a nation divided along linguistic lines, with seven overlapping governments, six parliaments, and the highest average tax burden on wages of any highly developed country — as an overpriced, inefficient jumble.
ETC...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
The media ARE not amused. Journalists...no English 101 required.
1. “Media” is a plural noun. It takes a plural verb. Any professional writer should know that.
2. It’s about time that “journalists,” who frequently demand that gun owners be licensed before they can exercise the rights guranteed them under the 2nd Amendment, be required to buy licenses to practice their disreputable trade.
Of course the argument will be that it stifles the free and unfettered flow of information. If that’s true, what does licensing gun owners stifle?
Regulate guns that Shall Not Be Infringed, freedom of press is next.
“The word media comes from the Latin plural of medium. The traditional view is that it should therefore be treated as a plural noun in all its senses in English and be used with a plural rather than a singular verb: the media have not followed the reports (rather than ‘has’). In practice, in the sense ‘television, radio, and the press collectively’, it behaves as a collective noun (like staff or clergy, for example), which means that it is now acceptable in standard English for it to take either a singular or a plural verb.”
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/media
The word is borrowed from Latin but in English we do not slavishly adhere to the foreign rules and meaning. And no, decimate does not mean “reduce by one tenth” in English as it does in Latin.
Perhaps Jim Acosta would prefer covering the EU to POTUS?
Righteous indignation, indeed. We Americans treasure our 1st Amendment rights.
Too bad we don’t treasure our 2nd Amendment rights also.
I was not aware the official rules of language had been reduced for the benefit of the lowest common denominator.
You can have a vibrant, adaptable, ever changing language that is spoken by millions around the world, where the rules change over the years based on common usage, or a dead one like Latin were the rules never change and brownie points are won by nitpicking the details. You just can’t have it both ways.
Words like canyon and tomorrow were spelled differently less than a hundred years ago. The definition of words like nice, awful, font, fathom, guy and wench have changed from their origins. We have gone from Bridget Jones’ Diary to Bridget Jones’s Diary in my lifetime. In the 1920s a bimbo was a tough guy.
That’s the English language. Hey, I don’t make the rules!
Yep. I gotta pay, be vetted and approved for a license to exercise my 2nd Amendment God given right, so does everyone who wants exercise any part of the 1st or any of the other Amendments.
See how this falls apart so fast. And the 2nd is the only one that specifically includes the phrase “shall not be infringed”.
Funny that. (not funny — HA HA....more like funny — WTFO?)
Yes it is. The word has morphed over the years into a collective noun.
Speaking about a sports team, would you say "the team were not amused?"
I suppose a limey might; but not likely in the U.S.
Your analysis makes sense. The media as whole entity is singular, the same with a team.
Forty years ago I would have agreed with you; sadly that is no longer true. The LCD won decades ago; makes no difference to me. They can use their words, I'll use mine.
The new common phrase that makes me wince daily, e.g.
Instead of "if they had known" the pompous-sounding. "if they would have known..."
Even dictionaries have played along. I view the phenomenon as "White Ebonics."
Fixed it. BTW, the journalism monopoly is a.k.a "the Associated Press and its membership.”People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices.- Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations (1776)The AP “wire” is a continuous virtual meeting of all major US journalism outlets, and it has been going on since before the Civil War. Not about “merriment and diversion,” either - but precisely about business.In that context it is naive in the extreme to assume that they are not conspiring against the public. The object of that conspiracy is to suppress ideological competition among journalists - and it works. The default ideology of journalists is cynicism towards society, and concomitant naiveté towards government. IOW, socialism. A.k.a, “liberalism."
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