Internationals criticize
U.S. media
By Sarah Szczepanski
Assistant
Features Editor
Aside from a bit of graying hair, Purdue student
Danysh Hashmi hasn’t noticed much difference in the Pakistani president
Gen. Pervez Musharraf.
The president still looks like the same man who
used to stop by his parents' house for dinner or a game of volleyball.
Hashmi said it is strange to see Musharraf so often
the subject of American media — media that have been criticized
by the rest of the world for a lack of foreign coverage.
"American media globally is thought to be very
concentrated on America," said Hashmi, who has lived in Pakistan, Australia
and Canada.
"It's thought of to be representative, but yet
they also try to avoid things that are not pro-American.
"There are a lot of things that the Pakistan media
and the BBC (British Broadcasting Company) are airing that the Americans
don’t show."
Mohan Dutta-Bergman, an assistant professor of
communication, agrees that in terms of world news coverage, the American
media have been turned inward.
He said it is part of American ideology —
the sense of not needing to know about the rest of the world because
there is nothing to gain from it.
Tanvir Khan, a junior in the School of Management
from Pakistan, said he has faced the affects of this ideology firsthand.
"Nobody knew," he said. "Many Americans asked me
where I was from, I said, 'Pakistan' and they didn’t know where
that is."
Khan, who reads three newspapers a day, said when
he looks at other countries' newspapers the front page is full of international
news.
"In America, it's mostly what's happening in the
50 states and then there will be a short story about the rest of the
world," said the.
Dutta-Bergman, who grew up in India, said part
of this has to do with the news value of proximity.
If there were to be a train wreck in Canada or
Great Britain, it would receive more coverage than a similar wreck in
a non-Western country, Dutta-Bergman said.
Hashmi said this could cause problems because foreigners
see that their country's news is not well-represented in America's news.
Treating things as independent episodes rather
than series of events within a historical context is also characteristic
of American media, Dutta-Bergman said.
"It ties in with the notion that 'We are Americans;
we are the best and we don’t care about the rest of the world,'"
he said.
Dutta-Bergman said that this creates a lack of
global knowledge.
But he said the drastic increase of foreign affairs
coverage hasn’t been because American media have become "other-orientated."
"It is more because Americans are scared of what's
going on in the rest of the world," he said.
While the increased international coverage can
open a window into the rest of the world, Dutta-Bergman said people
must be careful to be aware of multiple perspectives on any one issue.
Every news story has a political frame, and if
someone only gets news from one place, they lose sight of other perspectives,
he said.
Dutta-Bergman said people should try to read as
many news sources as possible and look at the different ways in which
they are covered.
"The gap would jump out at you," he said.
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