I think it's because my trip was so short that I never adjusted fully to the time shift, but I slept very poorly while in Denmark - average of about 3, maybe 4 hours of sleep. So I did a bit of Danish/German TV channel surfing. I watched a fair bit of CNN Europe (or whatever they call it). Anyway, this "world" news was extremely U.S.-centric. I wasn't that surprised about it, but there were a couple of times where I thought, "Why do people in Denmark or Sweden or Germany need to know about an anti-meth ad campaign in Montana?" The funny thing was that there were all these U.S. news stories, with a few world (as in non-Iraq) stories mixed in . . . and then they went to the sports update. Rugby, soccer, cricket, sailing, formula one car racing . . . and one quick Kobe-Bryant-had-a-big-game basketball highlight. I think there was a gold update too. So the "world" aspect of CNN's coverage appears to primarily concern sports. Apparently Europeans don't care about regular local news, just sports.

In a somewhat related story, while I was at the conference in Aarhus, one of the speakers was from Nigeria. After he presented his paper, during a Q&A time, someone made mention of Western political and media influence - he responded to the question, but made an aside reference that woke me up: "Much of the time when it comes to how evangelicalism is presented in Africa, it is assumed that George Bush speaks for the evangelical church." Well, now, that's a bit of a problem, isn't it? Regardless of how you personally feel about this prez and his performance, it's jarring to hear that he's assumed to be speaking not just for the U.S. government, or the people of the U.S., but for mainstream Christianity in the U.S. Apparently Christendom is alive and well. We have far to go.

Labels: conference, culture, travel