I picked up Newsweek today. I don’t know why I keep buying it and/or Time, but I still succumb on occasion.
Well, I started to read it, got through most of it, when I noticed something missing. To double-check, I went back to the Table of Contents. Yep, I was right:
There was no international section. Not a single story about any event in the outside world. Two full pages dedicated to bull riding, 3/4 of a page on the “scandal” of Starbuck’s coffee prices rising while coffee bean prices are falling, 2 full pages dedicated to a photo of champagne being poured on Shaq, but nothing about Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, Latin America, etc.
Ya know, I gotta apologize for my thread last week about European attitudes towards America. When one of the two major U.S. “news” magazines feels it can ignore 95% of the world and its readers won’t get upset, maybe y’all are right, we are cretins.
They’re always doing these huge spreads about the next big product the corporate America is shoving down our throats–the PS2, Pearl Harbor (mostly about the movie, not the historical event), or some other dumb thing. These features always gushingly positive.
I don’t know about you, but on my map of “the world” the U.S. is shown in clear relief and surrounded by an ocean. Other vague land masses are depicted, with the designation “Here be dragons.” Some are colored red to indicate “commies.” There are “keep out” signs posted along all the borders. Isn’t that all we need to know?
[sub]Sua, put down that fetid rag and get thee to http://www.economist.com. If you want I can call you and read some passages from The Fighting Never Stopped if it will make you feel better.[/sub]
Hmm, what’s wrong with the bolded parts of that quote?
Besides, Newsweek rocks, despite the occasional corporate product handjobs. Way better than Time or US News & World Report. I look forwards to getting my copy out of the mailbox when I get home tonight.
And I’ve always thought that cowshit was much more pleasant than horseshit.
Funny story- about ten years ago, I was at a party in D.C. I got introduced to someone who worked for U.S. News, who asked me what I thought of that rag. I thought I was being diplomatic - I said I thought the news reporting was good, but the “News you can Use” fluff section had to go. Of course, that’s the section she edited. Surprisingly, I didn’t have sex with her.
Hey Sua? Right there on page 28 is a story entitled “Dropping the Bomb,” a three-page story about the prospects of U.S.-Russian nuclear disarmament. Now that ain’t a lot of international news, but it’s a freakin’ “Special Report” issue. Not that I’m likely to give a rodent’s patootie about any of the “medical breakthroughs” that take up almost half the issue, but it looks to me like they just bumped the boring international stuff to make more room for the sake of selling more issues to aging baby boomers.
For the benefit of anyone from outside the United States that might be reading this, here is how a typical Texas local newscast might begin:
“Several Texans are missing and feared dead tonight after a 50-megaton thermonuclear warhead vaporizes the capital of England.”
This will be followed by a live remote from a trailer park where a reporter is asking an old lady how it feels knowing that her son has apparently been vaporized.
Eh, TV news is the same the world over. Typical ITN bulletin: opposition leader accuses PM of something, Geoffrey Archer in court again for something or other, massive earthquake in Latin America (but not many Britons killed, whew) and an amusing tail-end story about a panda that can’t get it up.
Saw a comedy take on this theme a few years ago. In a spoof of tabloid style TV newscasts, the “deathometer” was introduced slightly to the right of the newsreader’s head.
“Three people were killed today when their car…” KER-CHING! goes the deathometer, and shows a big 3.
“A house fire in Melbourne last night has claimed two lives…” KER-CHING! 5
“And in Bangladesh, an earthquake has killed fifteen thousand people…”
*KER-CHING!*14
(points to deathometer)“Of course, those are the racially adjusted figures.”
I have to disagree. We get a huge amount of overseas news in the UK, and coverage of events in the USA is out of all proportion to their importance to the average British citizen and voter.
The top story on the BBC News website at the moment, for example, is the military coup in Pakistan. But recently we have had detailed coverage, in all media, of:
The Texan woman who drowned her children in the bath (relevance to ave. Briton: 0)
Timothy McVeigh (0)
US death penalty in general (0)
The other guy they just executed (0)
The American who’s just been sentenced for terrorism in Peru (0)
Texas floods (0, unless it’s God punishing Bush over Kyoto)
The bichon frise that was killed in a road rage incident (0)
Bush, Bush, bloody George Bush, again and again and again (relevance 0, but Schadenfreude high; he’ll be taking over from the impotent pandas as the funny story at the end soon).
The balance of power in the Senate (0)
Hanging chads, dimpled chads, etc ad nauseam (0)
You would be extremely hard-pressed to see a single news bulletin which didn’t contain a major story about the USA or the EU.
An equivalent of the situation described in the OP would be if one of our major news magazines – the New Statesman, for example, the Economist or the Spectator managed to produce an issue with no foreign news at all. That is pretty much inconceivable.
Yeah, I agree with Tom. My impression is that media reporting here is quite well balanced between National and International news.
So anyways…you guys in the US didn’t read the survey last week that suggests that people in the US work 400 hours a year more than their German counterparts (yip, 10 whole weeks). Can’t find it online but here’s the numbers:
What about informed debate and comparing international employment rights, unemployment rights, ‘capitalist’ health care and tying that to employment, is Kyoto still “dead” according to the US media…Weird shit.
A few years ago (1995?), the Fox5 news had the yearly New York Gun Death Tally, and they’d bring it up every day with something like, “And now it’s time for the Gun Death Count. Today’s shooting of two people in a Queens parking lot and the accidental shooting in Staten Island bring the count to 327 gun deaths this year.”
I just looked at cnn.com and there’s no mention on there of a military coup in Pakistan. I wish they would cover it, though, so I could find out if any Texans got hurt.
