The Bizarre Theater of the World Cup Press Conference – Breaking News Report

"It was a weirder-than-usual moment in the routinely weird ritual that is the World Cup news conferences, a daily piece of amateur theater where the questions are often repetitive, the players are generally bored, the coaches find 50 ways to say nothing, and journalistic neutrality repairs to the nearest bar, breaks open a beer and cheers for the home team.

There are plenty of international tournaments with plenty of potential for missed cross-cultural signals. But the World Cup is unique in having so many participants from so many countries all appearing in the same forum, with the same ritualized regularity, match after match. After a while the news conferences, with their long-winded, multipart questions, their laughably imprecise simultaneous translations and their rigid, time-controlled formats, begin to seem like parts of one giant whole, their details spilling and flowing into one another."


read the newstory by SARAH LYALL


The Bizarre Theater of the World Cup Press Conference – Breaking News Report: Spread the love MOSCOW — No one expects scintillating Socratic dialogue, or even normal reportorial discourse, at a World Cup news conference. But even by the tournament’s relaxed standards, the opening remark to Russia’s coach the day before his team played Spain last week was unusually obsequious. “I wanted to give you a small present,” […]