-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: April 17, 2007 12:29:47 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Unless It's Bad News, Don't Tell Us About Life Elsewhere
"There are countries that have confronted practically all the tough
issues of social and public policy that we, in the United States,
are facing: immigration, minority rights, healthcare, providing for
an aging population, managing social and economic inequalities,
halting environmental degradation and much more.
"Other countries have exactly the same problems as we do, yet one
thing we never hear about, oddly, is how successfully they've dealt
with them.
"It’s as if American working stiffs aren’t supposed to hear that
their counterparts in Germany get six weeks a year of vacation,
that Canadians are healthier than we are, and that ordinary people
in most countries of Europe don’t need to worry that they’ll be
financially ruined if they get sick, or that they won’t afford to
educate their children or even to retire."
Why ignoring our northern neighbor matters
By Miami Herald.
http://www.mediachannel.org/wordpress/2007/04/17/why-ignoring-our-
northern-neighbor-matters/
Amid all the wailing over the decline of U.S. journalism, word that
The Washington Post is shutting its Toronto bureau was barely
audible. The Post follows The New York Times, Wall Street Journal,
Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times in ending full-time coverage
of this country’s northern neighbor. By this summer, The Toronto
Star reports, no U.S. newspaper will have a staff correspondent in
Canada.
So why should you care? After all, if Canada were brimming with
news U.S. readers would naturally demand to know what was happening
there, and metro papers here would oblige. But by conventional U.S.
standards of newsworthiness Canada is a nullity. If it’s true, as
Churchill remarked of the Balkans, that some places produce more
history than they consume, Canada would be the opposite, a black
hole that imports trends, culture, politics, histories from
elsewhere — from Scotland, England, France, the United States and,
lately, the West Indies and South Asia — and emits no perceptible
light.
At least that would be the explanation a budget-minded U.S. news
executive might offer. The problem with that is that it says more
about the wafer-thin imagination of our journalists than the
realities of contemporary Canada. And I think it also says
something about the weirdly selective way in which our media deem
certain parts of the world worthy of notice.
Here’s an example. Some years ago — the late ’80s, early ’90s — the
U.S. media became utterly smitten with Japan. The genius of
Japanese industry, the gold-plated work ethic of Japanese workers,
the sky-high savings rate of Japanese consumers — all were subjects
of innumerable newspaper reports, magazine articles, books and
learned publications, many of them fawning, nearly all of them
deeply impressed. Japan’s customs, institutions and social norms
were themselves newsworthy. Japan was a bristling economic rival
and, consequently, it was a country that the United States needed
to learn from.
And learn what exactly? Lessons of hard work, sacrifice, obedience,
the virtues of putting up with less, the blessings of a less
clamorous, less individualistic and more compliant society. Japan
was admired for its scarcity of lawyers, abundance of patriotism
and sturdy deference to authority. (That these blessings came with
fewer civic rights, a sham democracy, a denial of war guilt and an
emperor-worship most of us would consider pagan wasn’t a key part
of the message.)
The Japan example suggests that under certain circumstances U.S.
media can take an interest in foreign societies, even when they
aren’t churning out what we would normally consider news. But the
ideological tilt was unmistakable.
By contrast, our media have never mustered comparable interest in
countries that, like ours, are developed and industrialized, but
that have chosen a direction of social and public policy radically
different from that of the Japanese juggernaut that we were being
encouraged to admire. I’m referring to the countries of Western
Europe, among which I’d include — spiritually, not geographically —
Canada, which has developed a European-style social democracy right
over the border.
These are countries that not only are our economic partners, but
have confronted practically all the tough issues of social and
public policy that we, in the United States, are facing:
immigration, minority rights, healthcare, providing for an aging
population, managing social and economic inequalities, halting
environmental degradation and much more.
They deal with exactly the same problems, yet we never hear how
successfully. It’s as if American working stiffs aren’t supposed to
hear that their counterparts in Germany get six weeks a year of
vacation, that Canadians are healthier than we are, and that
ordinary people in most countries of Europe don’t need to worry
that they’ll be financially ruined if they get sick, or that they
won’t afford to educate their children or even to retire.
This is not to idealize the solutions countries like Canada’s and
Europe’s social democracies have arrived at. They are criticized
for being sclerotic and rule-bound, for discouraging initiative
through burdensome regulation and excessive tax, for dampening
imagination and enterprise. There are reasons why so many of their
brightest and most ambitious talents come here.
But that doesn’t justify this country’s spectacular lack of
interest in places that, whatever their shortcomings, have made
great strides toward creating humane and democratic societies that
in many respects are, unfortunately, quite unlike ours.
For an imperial power, the United States is an oddly incurious
place. Our media don’t help. They should poke and prod and demand
that we pay attention to people abroad even when they’re neither
disaster victims nor terrorists. Instead, by their inattention, the
media perpetuate the dangerous belief that our divine right is to
speak and be heeded, never to listen.
- Edward Wasserman is Knight professor of journalism ethics at
Washington and Lee University.
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