I get New York Times email updates, and when the Haiti story first came out it got billing behind Conan O'Brian quitting the Tonight Show. (head smack yes?)
American self-obsession is so commonplace I hardly notice it any more - but yes! head-slap time.
In a similar vein, when the Tsunami of ? what year? 2004? hit, I was googling disasters of similar magnitude and discovered that these happen much more regularly than our western-centric media tells us. But hey - if a few hundred thousand people are being killed in China by Typhoons, what's that to us? Riiiiight...
One Very Good feature of the internet is that our awareness of the world is no longer limited to what "our" media tells us. I can regularly read daily papers from any part of the world.
"American self-obsession is so commonplace I hardly notice it any more - but yes! head-slap time."
Right, well, I mean.... That's more like an example of celebrity-obsession than American-obsession, and the celebrities in question happen to be American. Agree that Americans tend to think of ourselves as being At the Center of the World, but I don't feel you've diagnosed this particular example correctly. Celebrity news tended also to trump Katrina news in this country. Perhaps we are more celebrity-obsessed than people from other countries (That is certainly the impression that our mainstream media outlets give.), but I'm not necessarily convinced that that's the case.
That being said, yep, it is indeed a headsmack-worthy example of the way that major media outlets choose to prioritize "news." And, sure, Americans as the primary consumers of this "news" are not well-reflected here. But I tend to think that this is what happens when Big Money and Major Corporations influence news. People of color--and especially poor people of color--get badly overlooked.
Anyway, I wonder what the paper front page of the NYT looked like that day? Argh. I hope it wasn't a Conan vs. Leno spread. That is just...really offensive. Ugh.
4 comments:
American self-obsession is so commonplace I hardly notice it any more - but yes! head-slap time.
In a similar vein, when the Tsunami of ? what year? 2004? hit, I was googling disasters of similar magnitude and discovered that these happen much more regularly than our western-centric media tells us. But hey - if a few hundred thousand people are being killed in China by Typhoons, what's that to us? Riiiiight...
One Very Good feature of the internet is that our awareness of the world is no longer limited to what "our" media tells us. I can regularly read daily papers from any part of the world.
"American self-obsession is so commonplace I hardly notice it any more - but yes! head-slap time."
Right, well, I mean.... That's more like an example of celebrity-obsession than American-obsession, and the celebrities in question happen to be American. Agree that Americans tend to think of ourselves as being At the Center of the World, but I don't feel you've diagnosed this particular example correctly. Celebrity news tended also to trump Katrina news in this country. Perhaps we are more celebrity-obsessed than people from other countries (That is certainly the impression that our mainstream media outlets give.), but I'm not necessarily convinced that that's the case.
That being said, yep, it is indeed a headsmack-worthy example of the way that major media outlets choose to prioritize "news." And, sure, Americans as the primary consumers of this "news" are not well-reflected here. But I tend to think that this is what happens when Big Money and Major Corporations influence news. People of color--and especially poor people of color--get badly overlooked.
Anyway, I wonder what the paper front page of the NYT looked like that day? Argh. I hope it wasn't a Conan vs. Leno spread. That is just...really offensive. Ugh.
No, the NYT very soon changed to being all about the earthquake.
Yeah, good. I mean, the NYT isn't quite on the level of People Magazine or anything.
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