It’s all in the perception

Mildly alarmed, I clicked on a story through Google News which read, “Has Obama Snubbed the British Prime Minister?” It took me to an opinion piece in the Cleveland Plain-Dealer Leader [see comments] listing the ways in which Obama’s recent meeting with Brit PM Gordon Brown had been an unmitigated disaster.

Weird, I thought. That’s not what the other stories I read had mentioned at all. I thought it had gone, I dunno, okay?

Not according to the folks in Cleveland, who wrote, among other things:

Brown clearly took care in choosing his gift for President Obama, presenting him with a pen holder crafted from the timbers of the 19th century British warship HMS President. The HMS President’s sister ship, the HMS Resolute had previously provided the wood for the Oval Office’s desk. Therefore the PM’s gift was clearly not a last minute thought.

Obama, however, did not take the same amount of care in choosing the British leader’s gift – 25 DVDs of American classic movies. In fact, some believe he put absolutely no thought in to it at all for several reasons: Brown could get these movies anywhere himself, and US DVDs are typically incompatible with UK DVD players. Oh, and Brown is blind in one eye.

Yikes! The paper also quotes a British counterpart, the Daily Telegraph, as saying, “President Obama has been rudeness personified towards Britain. His handling of the visit of the Prime Minister, Gordon Brown, to Washington was appalling.”

Luckily, a Daily Telegraph story about the Obama-Brown meet’n'greet was right next to the Cleveland one on Google News’ little feed. So I clicked over to the Daily Telegraph.

I’m sure the folks in Cleveland accurately quoted whatever story they read, but I didn’t read that story. Instead, what I got was a spec piece entitled, “Has Gordon Brown’s Meeting With Barack Obama Restored His Fortunes?”

Apparently, if a gift of movies is a slight, all has been forgiven. Now the Telegraph asks whether Brown has watched “Raging Bull,” one of the 25 movies that he brought back from America, drawing comparisons between the pummelled pugilist made famous by Robert DeNiro and the occupant of Number 10 Downing.

But the punches they’re talking about don’t come from Obama’s snubs, rather from the public and the press back at home. In fact, read what the Telegraph has to say now about it:

The machinations about his press conference which was perceived by some – albeit no one in the Prime Minister’s travelling party – as a snub are unlikely to matter long term. It is clear that the White House belatedly realised that they had not thought out some of the arrangements before Mr Brown arrived, fuelling the theory that they did not really care about their guest. The phone call from the President to Mr Brown’s departing plane helped soothe some of the hurt.

It’s interesting to think that, even in an age of immediate global information, we still have these regional differences in our persepctives. It’s still that which is local that matters most to us — as well it probably should.

Similarly, I read recently about a breakthrough in stem cell production. If there’s anything more global than science, I don’t know what it is. Building on Japanese research, teams of Canadian and British researchers managed to find a way to turn adult skin cells into stem cells — without also risking the creation of cancer cells.

It’s a breakthrough — something for the scientists to be proud of, sure! But here’s how it was portrayed in the press:

From the Globe and Mail: “Canadians Make Stem Cell Breakthrough”

From the Scotsman: “Scottish scientists create ‘ethical’ stem cells”

From Agence France-Presse, under the headline “Stem Cell Breakthrough Now Goes One Step Further,” the lede was “Pioneering work by Japanese stem-cell researchers two years ago has taken a major step forward.”

All of those are accurate – all those researchers “coulda bin a contender“ for the lede of the story – but this is just something to think about the next time you read a story that panders to your national/provincial/local pride.