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It’s fair to say that France doesn’t have a international broadcast news service of the stature or popularity of the BBC World Service… and France’s international TV service in English, France24, (a pet project of Jacques Chirac instituted in the last days of his presidency) is worthy but rather under-resourced, and frankly looks and sounds like a struggling local cable news from Minnesota.

However, one of the small pleasures of living in Paris is tuning in to Radio France Internationale (RFI) on 89.0 FM. For news in the morning, I find it a much better source for a roundup of international news than the local news stations. Like the World Service, RFI is jointly funded by the state broadcaster and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and most of the time, seems to maintain its editorial independence.

France Inter, France Info and the private stations RTL and Europe1 are often thoughtful and interesting. But they are dominated by big-name media stars and an interminable analysis of domestic French politics that often leaves me longing for something that isn’t Eric Woerth’s latest scandal, more speculation on the imminent cabinet reshuffle, or wall-to-wall coverage of French sailors in the Route du Rhum.

By contrast, RFI seems refreshingly free of big-name media stars, and is just as likely to spend 15 minutes examining the US mid-term elections as it is to interview a foreign relations expert on Burma, or cut to live to a reporter in Ouagadougou to talk about their recent International Festival of Contemporary Theatre.

The Maison de Radio France, by the Seine in the 16th arrondissement

RFI broadcasts in 19 different languages overseas, but its French service is unapologetically focused on sub-Saharan africa, where it enjoys the largest audience of any Francophone radio station in the world – between 30 and 45 million listeners. Listening to RFI opens up a continent of politics that is rarely discussed in English language meda: for example RFI’s coverage of the recent elections in Guinea and Ivory Coast was fascinating.

Among Parisian listeners, the station caters largely to an audience in the suburbs. While France Inter often sounds like the 6th arrondissement arguing with the 7th arrondissement, RFI’s focuses on events happening in the often unloved swathes of le 93 and le 94:  film festivals in Montreuil, schools in crisis in Aulnay-sous-Bois, or the plight of the homeless in Chelles. It makes for fascinating listening, and provides a very different image of the city than one gets from most of the French mainstream press.

Possibly due to having too much free time and no other life, spoken word podcasts have become a little bit of an addiction, providing an easily digestible form of non-fiction and current affairs that doesn’t involve picking up a book.

None of the podcasts I subscribe to generally deal with music, although occasionally music does crop up, including Radio Open Source‘s tribute to Dave McKenna – recordings of, and interviews with, one of the finest solo jazz pianists of the past half century. Here’s a taste:

Dave McKenna: Blues (excerpt from Radio Open Source)

Listening to Lord Melvyn Bragg somewhere over northern Europe in 2006

A favourite format of mine is the long-form conversation, where two people talk for an hour or more, with minimal editing. In fact, the less production I hear, the more I enjoy the podcast. Over a couple of years, a regular listening schedule has developed that has effectively created a personalised on-demand radio station on my iPod. The lineup looks a bit like this:

• Electric Politics: George Kenney‘s weekly interview show is recommended for anyone looking for deeper perspectives on how America really works (or doesn’t). For better or worse, George’s show has done more to shape my political views over the past few years than any other single influence. Consistently illuminating
• Radio Open Source – Chris Lydon hosted the first ever podcast, and he still churns out interviews several times a week. Unashamedly “liberal” but very eclectic, some recent highlights include Mahmood Mamdani’s analysis of the Darfur phenomenon, and James Carroll on being an American and a Catholic today.
• NPR’s Speaking of Faith often posts soundfiles of its raw conversations, and I often find these more useful than the edited broadcast show.
• Knowledge@Wharton – Business and Economics themes from the staff at Wharton Business School
• In Our Time – Melvyn Bragg‘s Thursday morning roundtable about the forces shaping our intellectual world – science, theology, medicine, literature, philosphy, architecture. A show about everything, except for last week, when they talked about Nothing.
• This American Life – Andrew Dubber reckons this is the best radio show in the world. Who am I to argue?
• Rue des Entrepreneurs – Economic and business viewed through a spectacularly un-businesslike prism, every Saturday morning on France Inter
• Friday Night Comedy from BBC Radio 4 – OK, so I have a crush on Sandi Toksvig, alright?
• 2000 ans d’Histoire – Now I’m living in France, this weekday show helps in widening my understanding of the social, political and military history of the place.
• A Prairie Home Companion – Garrison Keillor‘s inimitable descriptions of life in Lake Wobegon, Minnesota.

I should probably make more of an effort to keep up with things back home in New Zealand – for instance maybe subscribing to Chris Laidlaw’s Sunday morning show on Radio NZ National? I’ll just have to find time to fit it into the schedule…

George Kenney (Image: Chad Evans Wyatt)

As a riveting piece of writing, you can barely fault the article on Iceland after the credit crunch in the April edition of Vanity Fair. Michael Lewis’ feature contains anecdotes of drama and pathos, an account of a testy interview with outgoing Prime Minister Geir Haarde, as well as nuggets of wisdom unearthed before and after the crash. It’s a recommended read.

Skaters in Reykjavik in winter (Photo: Stuck in Customs. Creative Commons.)

But I worry that Lewis, in his lucid account of what went wrong in one of the richest countries on the planet, has indulged in a little amateur anthropology along the way. Take this passage, for instance, on gender relations:

“I note a slight tension at any table where Icelandic men and Icelandic women are both present. The male exhibits the global male tendency not to talk to the females—or, rather, not to include them in the conversation—unless there is some obvious sexual motive. But that’s not the problem, exactly. Watching Icelandic men and women together is like watching toddlers. They don’t play together but in parallel; they overlap even less organically than men and women in other developed countries, which is really saying something….”

And elsewhere, a passage that could have been cited as evidence of colonial arrogance in Edward Said’s Orientalism – a direct comparison of Icelanders to wild beasts:

“We assume [Icelanders] are more or less Scandinavian—a gentle people who just want everyone to have the same amount of everything. They are not. They have a feral streak in them, like a horse that’s just pretending to be broken.”

Haukadalur, Iceland (Photo: taivasalla. Creative Commons)

I wonder if this tendency to describe the Icelanders as somehow “other” or “exotic” is a way (conscious or unconscious) to make VF‘s mainly American readership feel slightly better about their own economic predicament: “yes, we’re in the shit, but look at that naïve bunch of fisherfolk from a quaint country we’ve barely heard of – at least we weren’t as foolish as them”.

Lewis’ exploration of the arcana of Icelandic culture reaches its apotheosis in his account of how Alcoa needed to certify its building site in Iceland “elf-free” in 2004 before it could commence construction of an aluminium smelter. A picturesque episode, but not substantiated or sourced.

Despite a long Google search, I can’t find any reference on the web to this event, except for Lewis’ own article. Even Wikipedia’s article on Huldufólk uses Vanity Fair as its source. Lewis was probably told this story in good faith, but this is how urban myths are born.

Of course, New Zealand has also been the scene of sniggering over the supernatural – in 2002 parts of the world media picked up on a story about a taniwha (a river-dwelling monster/spirit) that stopped work on a major highway project.  The real event, as recounted in this report, was a more prosaic story of relations between a local community and a government department.

Near Akureyi (Photo: Stuck in Customs. Creative Commons)

When Michael Lewis writes about the recent economic history of Iceland, he tells a clear and compelling story. His précis of H. Scott Gordon’s 1954 treatise on the economics of fisheries is actually fascinating. His interviews with British, Icelandic and American economists are enlightening and pertinent. I just wish he’d left the elves and wild vikings out of it.

Le Monde carries good coverage today of the liberation of the journalists Christian Chesnot and Georges Malbrunot after 124 days as hostages of the Islamic Army insurgent group in Iraq. Since the kidnapping on August 20th, this is a story that never died in France – every night French TV news ended their bulletins with a note of how long Chesnot and Malbrunot had been in captivity. There was also a rare show of unity across the political spectrum in the French media, with Edwy Plenel, the editor of Le Monde expressing his solidarity with the staff of Le Figaro, for whom Malbrunot was a correspondent.

Indeed the unity of outrage around the world about the victimisation of journalists in the Iraq conflict has been remarkable. While I don’t want to idealise the job of a journalist, the deliberate targeting of the media by terrorist or insurgent groups seems, at best, counter-productive. And the fact that Malbrunot and Chesnot were French, spoke Arabic and had many years of experience in Middle East reporting makes their kidnapping even more bizarre.

As Chesnot’s brother, Thierry, said today, “C’est un magnifique cadeau de Noël” .

It is tragic that the same edition of Le Monde also has to detail the assassination of Gambian journalist Deida Hydara.