A rude awakening
Sept 11 is forcing US media to step way from trivia, scandals and celebrity - to get serious with world. Will bad habit return?
Nov 23, 2001

For Americans, there has always been a distinct disinterest in the outside world, in particular during the past 10 years after the end of the cold war.

People come to rich and powerful America to seek sanctuary, not the other way round.

USA is big, its welfare - or pain - having little to do with anybody outside. They have to know about America; Americans don't need to know about the countries from where they come from.

To them these nations, with few exceptions, are in a mess anyway.

Only 8 to 10 per cent of Americans have passports. Most travel to South America, Canada and Europe for leisure.

When he first stepped into the White House, George W. Bush had visited fewer countries than many Singaporean teenagers - Mexico, Britain, China (as a youth visiting his father who was then ambassador) stopping at Tokyo.

At the heart of this lack of knowledge - or interest - is the media. Singaporeans visiting the US will know its inward-looking coverage. O.J. Simpson warrants more space than Asia's economic downturn.

Its world coverage is limited to a few nations it has special interest in.

Suddenly, information-neglected Americans are faced with a New World they never knew existed, where people hate them enough to inflict such horrendous attacks on them.

The tragic ignorance has led to Sikhs being attacked (one killed) for being mistaken as Osama bin Laden's men because of their turbans and beards.

In the last decade, the fourth estate was looking less like an estate every day - and more like a fun house, said one columnist.

"We've seen foreign news reduced to a trickle; coverage of movie stars and celebrities has migrated from the entertainment pages to the front page…" he added.

Shrinking World View

Before Sept 11, foreign news was largely irrelevant. One of the most serious problems has been an almost universal abandonment of foreign coverage, especially by television stations

Veteran journalists who really knew the political history, languages and cultures of other countries suddenly found themselves out of networks' jobs.

Indeed, most of the nation's dailies, perhaps 95 percent, practice journalistic isolationism. They devote twice the space to comics as they do to international news. They take the weather almost as seriously as momentous events from abroad.

For media tycoons, there is a good reason to avoid boring foreign news. There's no profit in it. Readers prefer news about the latest US serial killer than the danger of Indonesia breaking up.

There's "dizzyingly high" margins of profits in domestic bloodshed, sex and scandal, none in the world's problems.

"The easy money culture led to habits that still haunt the industry," notes Philip Meyer, who holds the Knight chair in Journalism at the University of North Carolina.

Dumbing down

The impact is a general dumbing-down of the public in world affairs, says Caryl Rivers, a professor of journalism at Boston University and a regular contributor to MSNBC.com.

"As a journalism professor, I see so much sloppiness, trivia and misinformation that I sometimes just want to bang my head on the wall for a few minutes because it feels so good when I stop," says Prof Rivers.

He adds:

"The quality of information that citizens receive is crucial to the proper functioning of a democracy.

"Newspapers can be of high quality and make a profit-though perhaps not an exorbitant one. The same is true of the television and on-line worlds.

"In the long term, it's the trash that may fall by the wayside as fashions shift, while the outlets that offer good value may be able to flourish.

"(Recently) we have seen superb reporting. We have flipped from channel to channel or read through our papers and heard nary a word of gossip. We haven't heard much about movie stars, or thin thighs, or infidelity or stuff to buy.

"Maybe, just maybe, consumers will get used to this kind of quality, and demand more of it."

Will this enlightened mood prevail after bin Laden is gone?
Seah Chiang Nee