For what it’s worth, my newspaper gave the hostage situation the main headline and all of the back two pages. Clinton’s health was relegated to a sidebar, and there were no stories whatsoever on the front page dealing with the campaign.
Uzi how and why is internet severely limited? Just curious.
And yes, as a nation, the US does tend to be rather insular. That comes from a variety of factors. Like Canada, we’re isolated over here compared to nations on other continents. These days that shouldn’t make much difference, but there’s a certain degree of historical lag.
The lion’s share of our population is not particularly well educated, especially when it comes to the rest of the world. As several people have pointed out, most people in this country would be hard put to find Chechnya on a map. Hell, most people here don’t know the capital of Canada!
Because we are geographically fairly isolated, and absurdly wealthy as a nation, most people here believe (when they think about it at all) that what happens in other countries doesn’t have any impact on them. Arrogant? I suppose so, but in a non-thinking sort of way. The fact is, other nations don’t impinge on most people’s lives here to the extent that they do on other continents. Most people don’t look far beyond the day-to-day.
The news media are businesses. They’re going to provide the news that they believe will interest people.
Does this excuse us? Probably not. I get annoyed and exasperated at the degree of insularity and global ignorance we demonstrate as a people as well. But perhaps it will help you understand a bit better.
Speaking of idiots…You did note that there were three channels that I could watch the news on, didn’t you? So, I could watch the one that was showing what I was interested if I expended the 1/100 of a calorie to hit the button on the remote. You did figure that out, didn’t you? Or, are you having a bad comprehension day? Wait? I could even turn off the TV and pick up a book as one intrepid poster figured was a good way to get current news.
And Bryan: You are correct. Who cares what a bunch of goat felching, camel jockeys in the middle of the desert think? I mean, what could their opinion on the other side of the world matter to anyone back home? It isn’t as if they could do anything about it…
In all seriousness. There are about 500 nationals here at any one time. They have the same channels I get. They all speak English at one level or another, but most don’t read even if they can. The OP occured to me as I was channel surfing. It seemed odd that there was nary a mention of the incident while other channels were covering it as it happened. And everytime I went back to MSNBC it was the same thing. Nothing new, just different talking heads saying it. I guess it gives the hardcore political junky a hard-on, but is it really news? Of a sort, I guess. On the other channels one of the worst terrorist incidents in modern history is occuring and being reported as it happens.
As MsRobyn pointed out: People just don’t care about East Bumfuck, Russia. Media outlets know this and report what they think people want to see. Fine and dandy. They want to make money and there is nothing wrong with that. Back to Yemen - A guy is sitting in his room watching TV and is probably taking it pretty seriously as it involves Muslims. He switches to the US channel because he wants to know what people in the US may think about this. He gets nothing because they are talking about an election that isn’t happening for another 2 months and not about what he is interested in. It occured to me that he might draw some conclusions about this that might not be kind to Americans.
Two reasons:
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Firewalled to block out things that may be offensive in a business environment. Most larger companies do this to make sure that employees don’t download porn, or go to subversive websites like dilbert.com to download the latest mission statement generator. ;).
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Very limited bandwidth. Using a WAN link that goes all the way back to Canada is costly and not everyone has access to it. Which leads me back to my statement about ‘severly limited’. I shouldn’t have responded the way I did because it leads the reader to believe that I don’t have access to news on the internet, which I do. It should have read more like this, “severly limited for the majority of users here”. The point of the OP was how it could be perceived by others as stated in the bottom of my previous post.
As I’ve argued with my fellow Canadians about. Why should the media in California, where the population equals that of Canada, care about what happens in Canada when it would be hard to cover all the news locally as it is.
I work in Yemen. Illiteracy is over 70% and quite a bit of those who do read learned to in a religious school of some sort. You and I can discuss things like this because we have the skills to think outside the box and realize why the news media may not be reporting on a major event like this. The typical Yemeni does not. All he sees is insular, uncaring Americans ignoring the rest of the world. He sees the face and doesn’t look past that.
That would be Toronto…Oops, sorry that is the center of the Universe, not the capital of Canada (Canadian inside joke).
I understand this perfectly and agree completely. It was just in this instance the navel gazing really, really bugged me enough to start my first thread ever and rant about it.
Actually, I was suggesting the book as a more productive use of your time than watching something that causes such a whining reaction in you, and prompts you to project your whining onto this message board.
Well, I didn’t insult other nationals (“camel jockeys” ?), I just said their opinions of Americans isn’t something the Americans need feel great concern about, and if those opiions are caused by knee-jerk reactions to what the American media does, those opinions are even more useless. If one were to watch the news in so-called “camel jockey” nations, one might conclude (wrongly) that every Arab hated Israel and/or the United States, that they started each day by chanting “Death to America”, etc. That opinion would be completely unjustified, as is your opinion that the placement of news stories proves the Americans are ignorant.
Ironically, the crisis in question had nothing whatsoever to do with the Americans, and yet they’re somehow at fault because the amount of coverage they gave to it was not to your liking. Get over yourself.
Well, doncha know? This is how our media acts and this is a reflection on all of us. We’ve proven – because we pay attention to our media – that we approve of their misguided priorities when it comes to reporting stories.
Because we don’t express our own disgust about these misplaced priorities.
Because those of us who care about news (beyond it being the noise that plays over our dinner or as we fall off to sleep at night) don’t watch BBC news on BBC America, look at overseas websites as well as getting a good abstract from all of our “homegrown” sources, including newspapers, broadcast networks and 24-hour cable outlets.
Because we’ve proven our dereliction of interest and a mass lack of curiosity already by the fact that the majority of us speak only one language. This is not at all indicative of the facts that unlike our European counterparts, we already speak the primary language of business in the Western hemisphere and can quite literally travel more than 2,000 miles across our landmass without running into language barriers.
Because the fact that half of us, give or take a few thousand, still support Bush and/or the Republican party indicates that we do not take the opinions of the international community seriously. If we took them seriously, we would, of course, agree with them.
Because we’ve further proven our insularity in that the majority of us do not travel abroad. This has nothing to do with economics, the vast availability of easily reached and extraordinarily diverse leisure and learning opportunities here within our own borders/continent or the fact that unlike our more socialist European allies, we’re not all availed of a month or more of vacation time and having just a week or even two off at a time makes travel with 24 or more hours of downtime on either end a tad bit difficult. It’s because we’re boors with no interests further than the ends of our noses, doncha know!?
Yada yada yada, we have heard that whole song and dance before. It wasn’t persuasive the last time and it isn’t this time and won’t be next time.
What a crock. There are Americans who do care about foreign relations, because they work for companies/agencies that conduct international trade. Most Americans, however, don’t. So what? They can live fulfilled happy lives speaking only English and travelling only within their own borders which, as you point out, are huge. Is the life of someone who never leaves the island of Manhattan somehow worth less than that of a person who travels on Eurorail? Prove it. There are Americans who live out quiet lives in small towns, just as there are people all over the world who never leave their villages/towns/cities. If you want to claim that Americans believe a lot of crazy inacurate things, I’ll just point out that crazy inaccurate beliefs are actually pretty common worldwide, so the observation is useless.
You can only “derelict” something if you had a duty to it in the first place. Are the Americans obliged to care about this hostage crisis, or any crisis happening beyond their borders? If some Americans do care, is that a positive thing or just highlighting the dereliction of the others, who don’t?
This whole thread is classic strawman, in which some stereotypical “American” is postulated and then railed against because he cares more about football, trucks, nekkid cheerleaders, beer, Friends and an upcoming election than about something happening thousands of miles beyond his borders. The Americans are not unique in paying more attention to their own problems than to those of others. It’s childish in the extreme to suggest this is some flaw exclusive to the American character.
Actuyally, it occurs to me that I should have gone with my first instinct: that TeaElle was being sarcastic. I couldn’t be sure, though.
I’ll go with Skynews, they seem to have it right.
A majority of Americans may well not care about the rest of the world but they probably should in this climate of the Global Village.
America is a current world leader and as such, is usually in the news of most other nations. It is also a target for terrorists.
A nation that is unaware of the rest of the world and doesn’t understand other cultures, is more likely to be unprepared both physically and mentally for things such as world change or terrorist action.
Americans that I have contact with here, have noted the huge difference between media news stories here and back home. They can’t believe how insular the US is, but only since leaving have they become aware of this.
Also, isolation is not a valid arguement for this ignorance and lack of interest, if it were, NZers would be the most uninformed and ignorant nation in the world.
In any event, I suspect this was the top of the hour frontpage news in most places. I got a mention of Clinton’s heart bypass surgery, but the Russian massacre definitely took center stage.
AFAIK, Americans actually have the highest proportion of advanced degress in the world, though due to poor inner-city public schools (and, in my opinion, criminal neglect by poor inner-city families including blacks whites, and some hispanic groups), we have a higher share of poorly educated people than we should.
Well, the NZ’ers have to look outward, because nothing interesting ever happens in their own country.
I kid, I kid.
Anyhoo, were Americans as truly ignorant as is being implied, the popular response post Sept. 11 would have been to obliterate every Muslim-majority nation on Earth. This would be expected if Americans were too ignorant to make distinctions between the hijackers and other Muslims. Though there was an increase in anti-Muslim violence and sentiment, these are not viewed positively by the mainstream and have no chance of becoming the default American view.
Had I to nominate a nation for the “most uninformed and ignorant” award, it would likely be some nation with less than 50% literacy, a government-controlled press, and little or no access to electronic news in the form of radio or television. By those standards, the U.S. isn’t even in the top one hundred.
I don’t think anyone would put America anywhere near the top of the list of most ignorant nations of the world. I think they might, should the list only include developed countries or Western nations.
Also, literacy is not necessarily correlated to ignorance of world affairs. Japan is one of the most literate nations in the world, but also one of the most insular - more to do with history and what they are actually educated in, and how they were educated (ie rote learning or critical thought).
Well, if you want to compile such a list and exclude everyone that would score lower than the Americans, of course you’ll end up proving the premise.
In any case, there is no compulsion that all Americans should feel the same way about a subject. There are nearly 300 million of them, after all, making them the third-most-populous nation on Earth, and you’ll never get 300 million people to agree on anything. The kicker, though, is that a rather huge variations exist within that population, so you can readily find people who care about Russian hostage crises. Eventually, someone will write a book on the subject and I expect it will sell reasonably well in the U.S. The OP seems to be complaining that not enough Americans care, which strikes me as simpleminded whining.
I was about to argue with this when it occured to me that it may be exactly what my OP was about without me realizing it.
If you show the world that you don’t care what happens in it outside your borders and if there are people in that world that feel that you have wronged them in some way, then what sympathy do you hope to generate from them when they start to plot things like 9-11? And while it may be irrelevant to the terrorists how you feel, to the common man in the street who may give a rial here and there to the organizations that support these terrorists it may make all the difference in the world. The difference being: are you thinking, feeling human beings like he considers himself to be, or the infidel that must be driven from his land. If he can’t empathize with you he is not likely to think twice in his support of terrorists, now is he?
What does any of that tripe have to do with the decisions made by a network news director about the order of reported stories?
I’m not arguing with you. The citizens of the US should take a greater interest in the larger world around them.
But let’s look at a few things. First, most Americans have limited time for news. We don’t have hours to look through magazines, newspapers, and television. We tend to want our news in half-hour or hour-long increments. We also expect a lot of information in that (let’s assume) 30 minutes, which is the length of most newscasts in the US. When you factor in commercials, it’s maybe 22-25 minutes.
What it comes down to is priorities. Americans want to know about America. We care about who’s going to be president, who’s not working and why, whether we need to worry about Frances, how the stock market is doing and why, and how our favorite football team did Sunday afternoon. Shallow? Maybe, but unless we’re willing to watch more public broadcasting (and even that’s not perfect) or cable news for long periods of time, we’re just not going to see everything.
There is a principle in journalism called “What’s in it for me?” Journalists tend to look at things that are important to their local communities, or the entire country. They don’t want to lose an audience to other channels because they’re covering news that isn’t important to its audience, no matter how important it really is.
That said, coverage of this unfortunate incident has improved. It’s been on the front page of my local newspaper for three days running, and has been featured on National Public Radio’s news programs.
Again, there are a lot of outlets for news. You don’t have to rely on American news.
Robin
Bryan, you are an idiot, but as you are from Quebec it is understandable. In any case, I am not willing to carry this on with you any further.
Well, that’s nonresponsive (though mildly amusing), so the question remains: how does the arrangement of television news stories prove that Americans are ignorant or insular, or that the possible beliefs of nonAmericans that Americans are ignorant or insular are justified?
It’s my opinion that that no such proof exists and that your motives for starting this thread are simple vague bellyaching, but I’ll stay open to evidence if you can ever manage to present any.
I’m not holding my breath. The out-of-left-field slam against Quebec is no better reasoned than any of your slams against the U.S. (though if you have some well-reasoned basis for believing Quebec citizens are of below-average intelligence, please describe it), so if anyone here is to be considered ignorant, I nominate you.
Uzi, as a Quebecer a fellow Canadian, and a TV journalist, let me tell you to shut the fuck up and learn something about American news on the cable channels.
They’re 24 hours baby. Know what that means? It means that if you were watching the lowest-rated cable news channel 8 to 16 hours earlier, you would have noticed that the first and only story was the Russian hostage situation.
By the standards of people living in the turbo-charged media capital of the universe, having hundreds dead and wounded in Beslan was OLD news by the time Clinton’s heart condition rolled around, and positively ancient when the janitor story came down the pipe.
Churning things forward is what 24 hour cable news is all about my friend.