Byline: Matthew Russell Lee of Inner City Press at UN
www.innercitypress.com/uncnn1svu033109.html
UNITED NATIONS, March 31 -- The UN increasingly moves in a dream world, and media like CNN only take notice when pop culture or a dwindling number of hot button issues are involved. How else to explain the UN's bragging that its decaying building is to appear in the background of a spin-off television crime episode tonight -- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit -- and CNN showing up at the UN for the first time in a while, to cover not politics but show?
After a panel discussion about Battlestar Galactica at the UN earlier this month, a UN official breathlessly told Inner City Press that negotiations were still ongoing if Law & Order would include a quote from Radhika Coomaraswamy, the Under Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict. On the Battlestar panel, Ms. Coomaraswamy said she'd watched not panelist Edward James Olmos' "Stand and Deliver" but moderator Whoopi Goldberg's "Sister Act" back in her native Sri Lanka, "with female friends."
At the March 31 noon briefing, after UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon's Spokesperson Michele Montas read out her office's second teaser for the Law & Order episode, Inner City Press asked if Mr. Ban had any response to the president of Sri Lanka openly rejecting Ban's call for a cessation of the bombing in Northern Sri Lanka. Ms. Montas called the president's statement that the country will not give in to international pressure, placed on the government's web site, a mere "media report" to which the UN has no response. Video here at Minute 14:57.
When Inner City Press went on, tongue in cheek, to ask if Ms. Coomaraswamy's quote had made it into the Law & Order episode, video here at Minute 21:30, Ms. Montas said, may I suggest that you watch it tonight?
Media analysis: one wag quipped, of the so-called "CNN effect," that the network has devoted more focus to the TV show at the UN than to the 3000 civilians killed in the conflict in Sri Lanka this year. Another noted that with the UN now so often rebuffed "in the real world" by the leaders of Sudan, Sri Lanka, North Korea and elsewhere, and told to be quiet by the UK and World Bank, it may be comforting to parlay the UN's icon status into publicity: at least something's going right, in the world of fiction.
And see, www.innercitypress.com/uncnn1svu033109.html
