I've been a Newsweek subscriber for a long time now. I first subscribed while going to college in the States. And I came to value it even more when I moved to Europe in 1990, as it kept me in touch with current events in the U.S.

Lately I feel that Newsweek's quality has been suffering. I'm not talking about articles that I find uninteresting or un-newsworthy, because "newsworthiness" is a matter of personal opinion, and those articles still tell me what's topical in the U.S. at the moment. I am referring to news articles that are one-sided and that promote issues or ideas instead of objectively reporting on them.

For example, there used to be a few pages at the back of every issue called "Tip Sheet," with hints for the modern consumer on what to do and buy. This section was re-christened "The Good Life," and it is now clearly aimed at the wealthy. Each week the section proposes items like a pair of deck shoes for over US $3,000. Or how about a personal yacht, ranging from an "entry level" model priced at 3 million euros, up to a more respectable Trinity yacht for around 24 million euros?

To what extent is it the media's responsibility to assist in the dissemination of information about sustainable development (SD)? This rather provocative question became the main topic of a round-table discussion entitled The Role of the Media from the Perspective of Sustainable Development, which took place during the National Forum on Education for Sustainable Development on 29 January 2005 at the University of Geneva.

Dr. Jacques Mirenowicz, co-editor of the Swiss-French magazine La Revue Durable, began by saying that the subject of sustainability is a complex one, and the media is needed to simplify the subject for public consumption. This is, after all, what the media does every day: They take possibly complex subjects and present them in a simpler form. Dr. Mirenowicz went on to say that not only is SD complex, but it doesn't fit in the "time frame" that the media typically work with. That is, the media deal best with the present: It is much easier to describe what happened in Iraq today than to explain how global warming and lifestyles of over-consumption will affect the planet over the coming decades.