Dataharvest 2015

Greek cartoons depict Germans as Nazis, and German media depict Greeks as lazy and corrupt. Anglosaxon media draw yet another picture about banking and oligarchs – and all European tax payers’ money is involved. Harald Schumann from Germany tries to cut through national rethorics and uses close collaboration with economists to depict the situation for French and German tv-viewers. Carried by a personal storytelling style the viewers are guided through the situation. The method: thorough bread-and-butter-journalism: Interviews, reading documents, more interviews, reading more documents. But Harald Schumann notes three significant experiences: National media have failed in telling the whole story, when Schumann and his team travelled the crisis-countries, all information had been unveiled, but this was not reported elsewhere; parliaments fail to control the troika both on EU and national level – so how should journalists deal with post-democracy?; understanding the economics behind the politics is crucial. Hence the inclusion of numerous scholars, and yes, they are Keynesian, thus the right ones to challenge the decision by those in power who follow the neo-classical economic school. Journalists must surmount their economic illiteracy, if they want to tell the whole story.

http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/051622-000/macht-ohne-kontrolle-die-troika, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E6aNwBwEm6U, http://www.tagesspiegel.de/politik/eurokrise-die-troika-macht-ohne-kontrolle/11406286.html, previous film http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/048116-000/staatsgeheimnis-bankenrettung

The World Economic Forum mentions inequality as the number one risk tendency. International Monetary Foundation discusses inequality and the relation of equality and robust growth. And two scholars’ book about inequality has become a bestseller. Katharine Round and Christo Hird set out to do a documentary on the subject. Meet them and hear “the making of” The Spirit Level on how to turn abstract research about the relation between inequality and health into a capturing documentary.

http://reports.weforum.org/outlook-global-agenda-2015/top-10-trends-of-2015/1-deepening-income-inequality/, http://www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/sdn/2014/sdn1402.pdf, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/mar/09/society-unequal-the-spirit-level, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/jun/30/the-spirit-level-documentary, http://dartmouthfilms.com/spirit-level, http://thespiritleveldocumentary.com/about