If you’re going to campaign to save the world, then best do it with a strong command of the English language. Dean Frenkel weighs in on the fury that surrounds a young Swedish climate activist. Why do Australian conservatives bristle at Greta Thunberg? It begins with who she is, not what she’s saying. They are insultedMore

Thunberg is a Swedish resident who speaks English as a second language.

Many 2nd generation immigrants speak better English than 6th generation Australians.

These Australians are not jealous of Thunberg’s speech-competence nor do they necessarily want to speak better than her, instead they have a deep-seated bias against people who speak too well.

Greta’s accomplishment as an elite English speaker is amazing for someone born and raised speaking Swedish in a non-English-speaking country; even more-so that she probably hasn’t spent a lifetime nurturing her English.

Most Australians don’t speak clearly and many don’t speak confidently or functionally and it’s not only tradespeople who are impeded but also politicians, judges, air traffic controllers and doctors - it’s across the board.

  • Deceptichum@kbin.social
    7·
    1 year ago

    New Matilda had put out some interesting stuff in the past but if this low tier clickbait garbage by Dean Frenkel is the direction they’re going I suppose I should write them off.

      • Icaria@aussie.zone
        3·
        1 year ago

        ABC News on the air is okay.

        ABC News website? Why? Just… why? Half the time you load it up, every second story is a human interest story about the struggles of being poor, disabled, a woman, or gay. And I don’t mean a mix, I mean they seem to have a different theme for each day of the week. Tuesdays are Poverty Porn day, Wednesday Women’s Woes, Thursdays it’s a slate of disability inspiration porn that’s so saccharine and maudlin that I can’t read it… and I am disabled. Instead of having to pick the news stories that interest me, it’s a struggle just to pick the actual news stories.

        • Ilandar@aussie.zone
          1·
          1 year ago

          That’s only the lead stories that get pushed to you by default on the front page, it’s much better if you make the effort to customise your feed. In any case, cost of living is a big issue right now and those human stories are probably quite important for some readers.

          A fairer critique of ABC News would be the clickbait headlines they run on the front page, that are often quite misleading compared to the secondary titles or the articles themselves. For example, there was one today with the headline ‘PM warns there will be no other constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians if Voice fails’, but the actual article title was ‘“Not focused on hypotheticals”: PM not considering other forms of Indigenous recognition if Voice fails’. Those are two quite different statements. And if you actually read the article itself, or watch the Insiders interview it is based on, nowhere does Albanese directly say either of those things. That was actually a line that Speers, who co-wrote this article, asked while questioning Albanese. Somehow that question not being answered directly has been twisted into an assertion from Albanese.