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Americans and their Media, Ego and Ethnocentric Judy Stillson | 9/12/05
While the world watched in disbelief the disaster of the New Orleans disaster relief effort (BTW, FEMA Director Brown resigned today - good riddance), one got the spectacular sense that America was indeed the center of the universe.
Even the venerable BBC devoted the top of its broadcasts to news from the storm-ravaged gulf coast. America, in its darkest moments, mattered most to the world.
Of course, in the real rest of the world, devoid of devastating tragedies, the United States takes a rightful back seat to local and more pressing developments, but nowhere on the planet is the rest of the world given such a backhand as in the USA.
The American media machine, between the broadcast networks and the major newspapers, offer little world view to the American public. The news machine is oiled with American dollars, spinning American news, producing distinctly American views.
Unless there's a major crisis, the television networks barely have a presence in most parts of the world, civilized or otherwise. In most foreign nations, the networks don't even have a bureau, relying on reports from the Associated Press (AP) or Reuters rather than doing their own leg-and-camera work.
This kind of world-blindness leads to an ethnocentric narrow-mindedness in the US populace. We have no idea what life is like in Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa or even our close neighbors in South America.
We are meant to believe that our stock market matters more than any other, that events in the US are more important, more newsworthy, more in the way of the making of a world opinion.
Naturally, these assumptions are wholly false. The United States may still be the most prosperous nation in the world, with one of the highest standards of living, but we have a small fraction of the world's population (roughly 1/20th) within our borders, and are dwarfed by the populations of two countries - India and China - from which we receive almost no news coverage.
Thanks primarily to the internet, some of us are aware of what is going on beyond the borders of the United States, and the opinions of people in other parts of the world. There are massive changes occurring all over the planet, yet the American media, sadly, has blinders on and they are obscuring facts and subtle events from the public.
We have become so insulated against the rest of the world that it often seems much of it doesn't exist.
That is a circumstance which will some day come back to haunt us.
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