I’ve already noted the pro-soccer bias in my local news for failing to report on the FIFA elections.
The local news here is also blatantly anti-democratic, because there’s been almost no coverage of the Iranian elections. It’s like the media in DC don’t trust people with the vote.
As a gay, atheist Hindu, would you like it if the media considered all gays to be atheist and Hindu? Or all Hindus gay and atheist? That’s what you’re doing to the Muslims. Of the over 1 billion Muslims in the world, there are a few with a loud voice and determination to do harm. That puts them in the news and then people associate those terrorists with Muslims in general. I have a hard time saying we should attack any group that’s over a billion in number and spread across the whole globe.
No, and there’s nothing “trivial” about it. Ignorance of foreign affairs is pervasive among Americans, and news coverage – or lack of it – is largely responsible. The idea that news coverage is equivalent as long as some international news story is out there somewhere, buried in the back pages of a newspaper or magazine, or on a website somewhere if you just make the effort to really look for it, is pure fantasy. That’s not how news works, and indeed that’s not how communication works. It’s the same fantasy that says unlimited political spending doesn’t impair the right of the little guy to also be heard, because in the real world the result is that the little guy is drowned out in the prevailing cacophony of whatever is flooding the media, and he may as well not even exist. In both cases, the evidence is the results in what people know and believe.
Yes. In general, with rare and few exceptions, American media routinely and systematically short-changes their audience in coverage of world affairs. Which is why Americans as a group are more insular and have much lower knowledge of international affairs than residents of most other first-world nations, with consequent serious implications for foreign policy. And domestic policy, too, for that matter, since many are clueless about how anything works in other countries.
It’s entirely unsurprising when you read headlines like Major Parts of the World Ignored by US TV News in 2013. The head of Public Radio International, Alisa Miller, gave a TED talk a while ago on this very subject.
And even worse, even when there is international coverage, it tends to be focused on sensational events and/or events perceived to have a US focus rather than events that are necessarily newsworthy:
Previous studies have concluded that there is a lack of international news coverage and that international coverage, when it does exist, is sensational, negative and related to United States interest in some way.
http://library.uww.edu/documents/library/ethesis/OrtizVazquez2004.pdf
Results show that four variables contribute significantly to the discriminant function in distinguishing between covered events and not-covered events: normative deviance of an event, relevance to the United States, potential for social change, and geographical distance.
http://crx.sagepub.com/content/14/4/396.abstract
This report sums it up pretty well:
People in other countries do know more about the U.S. in general than Americans tend to know about them. Stephen Hess discusses the asymmetrical flow of international news. “The United States pays far less attention to other countries than other countries pay to the United States,” he reports (2005, p. 18). He cites several studies that show, for
instance, that 50 percent of foreign news in Canada and Japan focuses on the U.S. A Mansfield Center for Public Affairs survey covering a seven-month period in 1992-93 counted 1,121 Japanese television reports about the United States and just 92 reports about Japan on American television (1996, p.10). Latin American newspapers carry twenty times the number of stories about the U.S. than American papers carry about Latin America (2005, p.18).
And it isn’t just the amount of news that contributes to the lopsided effect. Philip Seib, a professor of journalism at Marquette University, says that “much American news coverage is grounded in naivete’ that produces a solipsistic view of international affairs—an intellectual unilateralism that poorly serves the public” (2007, p. 27). And a survey of Asian and European university students studying in America shows that they felt that American news coverage of their countries is “inadequate, biased, and inaccurate” (Viswanath, 1998, p. 958). A Pew Research Center for the People & the Press survey of the top news interest stories of 2008 reports that the fourteen top stories all concerned domestic topics. Only the fifteenth rated story was international, followed closely by 35 percent of Americans, and it was the Beijing Olympic games, hardly a hard-hitting news topic.
http://www.globalmediajournal.collegium.edu.pl/artykuly/wiosna-2009/profozich-foreign-news-coverage-APA.pdf
I feel compelled to point out that the OP of this thread arbitrarily decided that people who disagree with him must be Pakistani in another thread.
Bravo, +1, concur, would allow to rant again, etc. Once you let everyone think it’s okay to demonize a particular racial, ethnic or religious group, you can’t just stuff that cat back in the bag. That train’s never late.
The solution isn’t Pro-Muslim or Pro-Pakistani racism.
Those mods were openly Pakistani and the only ones closing my threads…
Anyway. You forget that a lot of countries exist outside the USA. Most other countries can tell the difference between Pakistanis and Hindus, and most are also less violent against Muslims.
Anyway, what about those living in the MidEast or Malaysia, who are of Hindu Indian descent? You seem to be racist against Indians too.
“Pro-soccer bias fails to report”??? How can it be pro-soccer and fail to report? Did someone get enough sleep last night?
USA Today, the NYT and the WSJ reported the news 2/26, just to cite three of the hard copy papers with the biggest circulation. Your “local news” has no probabitive value in comparison, and you would do best to drop the whining about it.
Internet news is available to any of the 80+ of the population which has PC access, and is therefore “local”.
Search “Iran” on Google news and you well get hits from the NYT WSJ CSM Forbes Fox Mother Jones and the Miami Herald just on the first page. That should be enough enough to satisfy any reasonable news hound.
And as for Iranian “democracy”, last I heard all candidates had to be approved by the religious authorities, which would make it a theocracy and not a democracy. Or are the supreme Mullhas out of the electoral process picture now, as they should have been all along?
That doesn’t even make sense. You came into this topic complaining there was too much pro-Muslim sentiment in the media. You’re wrong, pushing back against “Islamophobia” is not pro-Muslim, its balancing out the narrative. Without fighting against that slur, then the media will definitely be biased, but against Muslims. You want to pretend that’s a normal thing, and the proper thing
How about this? You accept there shouldn’t be any Islamophobia in the media. You accept that some people will support them outside of Al-Jazeera or and outside of the Middle East. Once you consider that support to be normal, and not pro-Muslim, then we will have the unbiased media we should have
Hindu or Hindi?
The exact opposite is true: it is not “fantasy,” it is reality that the public must make the effort to inform itself, and as I pointed out in my last post the news is not “buried”, but is easliy available to anyone who wants to spend oh, about 5-10 minutes or so searching for any topic.
Yes it is.
What does the little guy have to do with your pet topic the FICA elections? BTW soccer is not popular with the US “little guy”, and would not be if he was subjected to flood of soccer cacophony.
What is the US public missing, now, that if it was well-informed about would make a difference in public policy? And by what exact mechanism could it make a difference? Petitions to Congress, or something like that? Be specific.
I never watch TV news or read a newspaper, and I know all i nned to know at this point about such topics as ongoing China-Japan maritime tensions, and the homicidal maniac Kim Jong-Un, and the same sources available to me are availbale to anyone with a PC, laptop, tablet, or hell, even a cell phone.
Japan? Three reports a week sound like enough to me unless there is a really big story afoot. Same goes for Latin America. Since you know so damn much tell me what I am missing that I need to know about either. Be specific.
2009? What was going to internationally in 2009 that the average American needed to know so damn much more about? And if we had known all we should have, how, exactly, would it have made any difference for the better in international events?
“Substantial” basically means worthy. No need to do any better than that on the “large” international stories, and no need to devote limited space to small stories.
A commendable POV. I hope some other contributors to this thread adopt it.
Hindu is a religion and its members, Hindi (with English) is an official language of India, I think.
…
Yeppers. That’s why I posted my query to the individual who keeps asserting he’s “atheist Hindu”.
Erm, what?
Erm, what?
It’s a claim multiple people on this board have made. It’s perfectly possible to be an atheist Hindu.
Most people on this board are Christians or come from Christian cultures. They don’t really understand how other, older religions (like Hinduism and Judaism) work.
Okay, you’ve made it clear that you don’t give a shit about the problems I and my family have to suffer when you stir up Islamophobia. So, I’m just going to put you in the enemy column. Let me make this clear to any bigots in this thread. If any of you think I’m going to sit idly by while you try to harm me and mine, you are sadly mistaken.
Sorry, but how is this related to what you quoted?
You are correct, I admit to agreeing in part with the EDL, I quote the Daily Mail and to some that makes me an out right islamophobic racist which is far from the truth, in the past I have criticed both the EDL on their forum and the DM on their comments page.
The problem with Islamic groups is that they will not admit that there are problems within Islam, they are always on the defensive blaming others Why have we not seen large groups of Muslims taking to the streets condemning that which is being committed in their name? It is not happening and that is why Islamophobia exists, people see the lack of action by Muslims against Islamism as agreement with the evil that is committed in their name