Whether Americans are truly interested in world events or whether they would say yes to a blanket question about it are two different matters entirely. If you looking comparatively to test marketing, consumers usually do not appreciate ingenuity before it becomes a status quo. Take the walkman, test marketers said they would have no use for it. Now, moreso than ever, you are given a plentiful smorgasbord of world news providers via the internet, to the extent that what big networks provide is virtually irrelevant as a proportion of total media coverage. This is huge change from 50, even 20 years ago.

TV media companies are simply providing what the average television is interested in, what catches their attention and keeps them tuned in. Sure, you could argue they perpetuate ignorance, but they are simply following the basic forces of capitalism and profit maximisation.

Whether they are the chicken or the egg is irrelevant. As I see it, the very expectation that a corporation will make an about turn and pursue an altruistic and presumably unprofitable market catering to a niche interest is no better than blaming MCD for making you fat.

Nice comment RedSky. I think that schooling is a factor too. I was lucky because my parents saw the effect of the public education system on my older brother in middle high and decided to send us both to a private high school. (I also went to a private middle school as my parents saw the damage that it caused my brother.) I don't know how it measured up to other schools in a national sense, but it was a much better education than the local public schools.

I agree that it's unrealistic (and silly - you gave a great example) to expect corporations to turn to real news with historical background unless there is a market for it. There is a market for it, but it is small at the moment. It makes me think of the creation of such companies like "The Real News" to fill that niche using the internet to minimize costs and, hopefully one day, compete.

Watching CNN International and CNN North America was shocking, its like it wasn't produced by the same company.

Great video. A related personal anecdote: when I was a senior in high school, I read Philip Gourevitch's "..We Will Be Killed Tomorrow: Stories from Rwanda," a book on the Rwandan genocide of 1994 and the aftermath (500,000 - 1.2 million people were killed in 3 months). This really got me interested in politics. Eventually, while helping my brother move out of his apartment, I saw that his girlfriend had a big collection of old TIME magazines. They covered the entire 1994 year. So I looked through them to read through the coverage of the Rwandan genocide and was amazed at how little there was. I then compared it to how much coverage was given to video games and found that video games were given more coverage than the genocide. Even though I was (and am) a huge fan of video games, I was disgusted by this gap. No doubt there are many reasons for this gap, but there is also no doubt that one of those reasons is market economics: demand for Rwandan news coverage by Americans was low, and thus supply was as well.

Ever since then, I've been convinced market rules of economics (supply and demand) are immoral when applied to things such as the media. Ideas, such as compassion, should not be bought and sold to people in the same ways a hamburger or a video game are. There needs to be a better way. My personal belief is that we need more democratic media in this country and in the entire world, something that gives the majority of the human race, no matter their economic status, a voice and way to be heard.

If you've agreed with me so far, I'm sure what I have to say next may change that. There needs to be a way to force people to listen, to a certain extent. In the same way that we require people to pay taxes and get a basic education, to learn history here in the USA, and we use the force of the law to do so, we need to be willing to require people to give time to those voices of the world. I think there needs to be mandatory education for our entire lives on such subjects like history and politics. It may be oppressive to have the government force people to learn about global current events, but it was also "oppressive" to force our children to learn about the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. But we agreed that such a requirement was for the greater good. And so I'm saying that forced learning about subjects, even perhaps the religions and ideologies of our enemies, is also for the greater good. And I'm also not saying such government-influenced education would replace the market driven "education." It would be a competing alternative. And as capitalists say, competition is good.

Check out The Real News if you want video based foreign news. Most of it ISN'T about America.
http://youtube.com/profile_videos?user=TheRealNews
http://www.therealnews.com

I disagree with your premise RedSky. The evidence I've seen is that most people aren't interested in the pablum offered by our news stations. They're just not disgusted enough to turn off the TV or write angry letters en masse.

Here's a report released by the Pew Research Center where they examined the public's perception of the news media. People agreed that there was too much gossip and the topic they were most interested in during the summer of 2007 was Iraq. There was no public clamoring for full-tilt coverage of Paris being driven to jail.
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=362

The more powerful a country is in economic and international relations terms the more incentive it has to focus on national news.

It's rational to maintain limited coverage of flooding in a country that's a very minor player in economics and international relations and is on the other side of the world.

I don't agree with the stipulation that news should react to demand based incentives based off commercial interests, the news should not be a commercial enterprise.

Freedom of information and its spread through the populace is the basis of democracy. When you have news dictated by business interests then its easy for private interests to not report certain items to the populace, think of way private business does not report any thing that runs counter the the administration, its not acting as a news organization, it simply acts as a regurgitates for the administration. The word torture was avoided by news organizations because saying the US tortures would imply the US president was lying. Which he was. Thus you have 'enhanced interrogation methods'.

For me a news organization must report on what is going on, within a contextual time frame, this is key, there is news you don't know you wanted to know until someone reports it to you. Notice how any big large story once reported echo chambers through the rest of the networks once it breaks. Because no one risks it now, and when someone does imitation sets it.

Yes most people derive their news from the Internet now, but that is also problematic, because one must want to get the news to start digging for it online to get the full story.

As George Orwell said "To see in front of ones nose requires a constant struggle", its especially true now.

>> ^justinianrex:
The evidence I've seen is that most people aren't interested in the pablum offered by our news stations.

I think you mis-attribute the demand side of the equation. Advertisers, who pay for the content of all broadcast media have a small set of criteria

1) want to pay for advertising to people who are likely to buy.
2) don't want people not to buy our product due to offense they take with the program

What the citizenry at large wants is irrelevant, it's what attracts, and does not offend, those who buy, even if they are a small minority.

Most international issues are messy, they require a level of understanding which does not correlate well with rampant consumerism. If you care about conditions in Chinese sweatshops you may be less likely to buy random lead laced land-fill fodder made there, so why would I want to advertise to you, or have the people I am advertising to aware of the ramifications of their purchases beyond "you will feel good when you buy".

viewers are not consumers, they are product, programming is not product, it is manufacturing, advertisers are the consumers. Given these facts we see just what we would expect in a laissez-faire economy, minimum manufacturing cost necessary to supply product which meets the consumers expectations, which don't include, and often excludes "well informed population".

Only requiring responsible behavior as a precondition of access to public airwaves will have any effect on the problem.

Honesty though, fuck statistics. Make up your own mind. Form your own opinion, get self actualized, and evolve already! Were all waiting for you outside the beehive!

Curiousity - You went to a great private school?

Maybe they should have taught you how to spell curiosity, rather than making you believe private schools are superior in any way, shape, or form.

People of the US ! "They"'re hiding you the truth ! In fact, we're all gone with the dolphins. Goodbye, and thank you for the green bucks !

Is Bakalex related to Choggie?

Hey!!Watch it motherfucker, we're not all kissy-kissy!!!

"They're just not disgusted enough to turn off the TV or write angry letters en masse."
-No, they are kept too busy buying into the nightmare, and have no time nor will to do otherwise....gonna take some major shift,be it natural or contrived to defibrillate...similar to perhaps, a couple of skyscrapers collapsing into two tidy piles???

Can't think now, news are on!

This reminds me of my last trip to the states. I was in a Fry's Electronics in Anaheim California. I usually like to make small talk with employees in other countries as I did with one girl stocking the shelves. It came up that my friends and I were from Alberta, she responds, and I quote: "Alberta? Where's that? Mexico?". I wouldn't have even expected her to point in out on a map, but I figured average Americans would have at least recognized Alberta as a Canadian Province, but hey, was I ever wrong.

For those looking for world news try some of these
http://www.newspapers24.com/
http://www.worldpress.org/
http://www.worldpress.org/gateway.htm
http://www.ipsnews.net/

PS: Would be interesting to see the geographical distribution of Videosift posts..

(edit)

Content on Videosift is mostly from the usa, but how much is non-usa content?
We already have 3 geographical channels, uk/canada/asia
While in my tag research
http://www.videosift.com/talk/Video-tag-cloud-a-quantitativequalitative-reseach
also french iraq japan japanese
were mentioned.
Then we have
-india ~73 posts
-china ~118
-brazil ~42
-australia(n) ~180
-new zealand ~38
-south africa ~22
-iran ~83
-korean ~53
-german ~180
Well, I could go on but I'm afraid the distribution could be quite similar to the news map, but with more focus on uk/canada/japan (and france) because of their pop culture.

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my news stations by the order that I look at them. WikiNews.org, SlashDot.com
techdirt.com, cnn.com. Im a geek so I spend most of my time on the tech stuff. I come here for information on all things. Like this video.

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