The “Every Picture” series highlights the power of photographs in the media and reviews the impact of size, color and placement of pictures along with their captions. The first installment reviewed how the New York Times painted a picture of Arab grief and suffering while portraying Israelis in a more aggressive and less sympathetic manner in a series of articles from June 30 to July 3 about the murder of three Israeli teens and a Palestinian teenager. If that article had a subtitle, it could have been “Palestinians trump Israelis”. You might think this second article in the series could be entitled: “Palestinians trump the World”, but the reality is much more subtle than that.

On July 7, 2014 the New York Times posted, on the top of its front page, a large color photograph of a Palestinian youth who was injured during riots against Israeli police. The bruised teenager…

Johanna Laakso is a professor in the Finno-Ugric Department of the Institut für Europäische und Vergleichende Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft at the University of Vienna. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Helsinki where she also taught until 2000 when she moved to the University of Vienna. Besides her native Finnish, she speaks English, German, Hungarian, Estonian, Swedish, Russian, and French. Professor Laakso is known to the readers of  Hungarian Spectrum under the pseudonym Sentrooppa-Santra; she is one of our frequent contributors on linguistic topics. I’m very grateful that Professor Laakso agreed to write a post on the new  Magyar Nyelvstratégiai Intézet (Hungarian Language Strategy Institute), the brainchild of Viktor Orbán. It is time to learn something about this attack on yet another academic discipline. Surprisingly little can be read about the issues involved in the Hungarian press. Professor Laakso’s article makes it all clear. The current Hungarian government’s penchant for changing everything has even reached language…