European Commission sworn in by EU High Court but Wasteland Media Takes Little Notice

Update: Please note that the European Union was expanded to 27 States on January 1, 2007 as Romania and Bulgaria joined the ranks of Member States.
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What a difference, and I am not sure it is a good one from the standpoint of the European Union or the major news media, if we look one day later after President Bush's inauguration, to the January 21, 2005 swearing-in ceremony of the 25-member European Commission by the EU Court of Justice in Luxembourg.

We found the story at the Scotsman Online at EU High Court Swears in European Commission.

The European Commission is the executive body of the European Union.

Nevertheless, the home page of the European Commission had nothing about the swearing-in ceremony, not even at its press release page, as of 5 p.m. Brussels time on this Friday, the day of the ceremony.

We did however find a mention of it at:

the Agenda page of Viviane Reding, Member of the European Commission from Luxembourg
and
the Agenda page of Joe Borg, Member of the European Commission from Malta

EuropeanVoice.com has a rather confusing calendric entry regarding the ceremony.

The online front page of the BBC has nothing about it and concentrates on music, murder and soccer. How low the BBC has sunk in recent years.

CNN.com has an online front page filled with stupid garble about marginal events of little importance. An irrelevant photo captioned "Bush's father and Vice President Cheney give the president money for the collection plate" highlights the page and CNN then goes in one breath from that meaningless photo to Bush's very important inauguration message of US policy "with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world." What jerks the people at CNN are, treating the inauguration address and Bush and Chaney in church as vaudeville.
There is no mention of the ceremony in Luxembourg.

Google News has nothing about the ceremony but a lot of muckraking.

USNews.com has nothing about the EU on its front page.

The International Herald Tribune features Middle East events of no long-term importance.

The German FAZ.net has nothing about the EU and features yet more news about a corrupt German politician. So what is new?

Even our favorite German newspaper DieWelt prefers a sensationalistic article about nuclear weapons problems to sober reporting of Bush's inaugural speech. No word on the EU.

When T.S. Eliot wrote "The Wasteland" he was probably foreseeing modern mainstream media:

"What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? [with emphasis on the rubbish] Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, [MSM - mainstream media - calls those broken images headline stories today] where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. "

In any case, the EU ceremony, on the world scene, is apparently a "no event".
On the other hand (we will exclude the on-the-ball Scotsman), when one looks at what garbage the major news media generally carry as their main news features, we can thank the Lord for blogs and bloggers.

The Scotsman writes about the EU ceremony:

"The ceremony in Luxembourg came two months after EC President Jose Manuel Barroso finally had his team approved by the European Parliament.

In their oath of office before the European Court of Justice, 25 EU commissioners – one from each EU state – promised not to favour their countries. The pledged to work “in the general interest” of the EU and vowed “neither to seek, nor to take instructions from any government or from any other body” until the end of their posts in 2009.

The Commission is the EU’s driving force and executive body. It drafts EU laws, oversees their implementation and ensures the free movement of goods, services, capital and people across the union.

Over the years, it has been given a greater role in steering economic policies. Mr Barroso, a former prime minister of Portugal, has given key posts to reform-minded figures to revive Europe’s sluggish economic growth. "

Compare that message with President Bush's inaugural address and much in the difference between the missions of the United States and the EU worldwide will become clear. The United States has the responsibility to protect freedom and liberty on this planet, whereas the EU is provincially centered on its own economy and its own welfare, operating by means of commissions and committees, and taking its freedom and liberty for granted, which it has only by the grace of the military power of the USA.

Our advice to the mainstream media, by the way, if they are to survive the advance of blogging and similar "grass roots" developments, is that they learn to be able to distinguish and at least partially separate the wheat from the chaff in reporting daily ephemeral events and concentrate at least occasionally on things which have long-term significance. The inaugural address is one such piece of news which sets the tone of world policy of the USA for coming years. It should not be treated as vaudeville and should be given treatment in breadth. One begins truly to wonder what idiots are in charge of much of the major news media.