“Iceland’s government topples amid financial mess.” Wow. Now there’s a headline for you. Countless other articles about Iceland have similar titles, all with the same dramatic effect. After reading that, one has to wonder if the world really is coming to an end, whether there is going to be domino-effect of governments keeling over across the globe. The headlines about Iceland seem to suggest it anyway.
The main problem with those headlines is one of the problems journalism has had since the days of Joseph Pulitzer and the Spanish-American War: yellow journalism. Some of you may be unfamilar with the term, but every time you see those tabloids by the check-out aisles in Kroger, you're seeing yellow journalism at work. In other words, it's sensationalism.
The headlines about Iceland are claiming that the government has toppled, leading the unweary reader to believe that hell has broken loose (or frozen over, as the case may be) in that country, and that a mob of angry freezing anarchists are running rampant (presumably they look like this).
Listen folks, that just isn't true. Iceland hasn't all but ceased to exist—instead the current prime minister announced that new elections would have to be held, since the coalition that formed the ruling party in the Althing (the Icelandic parliament) had broken apart. All that means is that a political alliance broke up and now there needs to be a change in who makes the decisions. Big deal. That's hardly the toppling or coup I expected to read about when I first saw those headlines.
Now, don't get me wrong, I don't mean to be insensitive—I know Iceland's banks have truly collapsed and that the economy there makes America's seem rock solid by comparison. All the same, this governmental shift is the sort of thing that happens every so often in England, Canada, Australia—basically every democratic nation not named the United States. In these countries, there are no set terms for the chief of goverment (usually a prime minister), and so when things start to go awry and the people become dissatisfied, national elections are held to form a new government. It's a foreign concept to most Americans, raised as we are on the idea of our national government changing in four year intervals, but this how a large part of the world operates. I'm not an Icelander, but I would imagine that for them this isn't quite the doomsday scenario our news organizations makes it out to be.
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