I am currently working on a research paper for a Political Science class called Media & Politics. The goal of the paper is to conduct original research into a topic that deals with the broad question: "How well does the media live up to its role as facilitator of democracy?" There is a huge range of potential topics, but I chose to take a look at international news coverage and biases inherent within U.S. coverage of international events, namely ethnocentrism, a tendency by journalists to compare foreign countries/issues to the U.S. For the research side of things, I randomly sampled 20 articles from U.S. news sources covering 3 different countries involved in the European Debt Crisis, the international topic I used to ground my paper. Using the LexisNexis database, I was able to find all the articles I needed, quickly peruse them for evidence of U.S. ethnocentrism, and record my results. However, throughout the whole process, I couldn't help but think about the future of international news coverage.
We've been learning throughout the semester about the decline of newspapers, and with them, a decline in the number of quality journalists contributing to the "Iron Core" of news, or the collection of pure facts from which all news (TV, radio, blogs, etc) draws its information. In 10 years from now, what will coverage of international events look like? The European Debt Crisis is a major geopolitical event with huge implications for the global (and specifically U.S.) economy, but with shrinking budgets and readership, will U.S. news sources have to limit their coverage of major overseas incidents to save costs? The Debt Crisis isn't "sexy" or dramatic, but it's still vitally important information that we should all be aware of- are we going to have to turn to European-based sources like The Guardian in the future rather than the New York Times? I'm concerned that the effect of declining news coverage will make us, as a nation, less aware and informed than we have been in the past- it may be easier to get information now than it ever was, but if the quality & amount of that information continues to shrink, global connectedness might not even matter.
Graham,
ReplyDeleteYour thoughts and research are very interesting, and very different from the other blogs I have read. Although I do not follow completely, I know I can agree with you that media isn't fully covering the right areas. Instead of covering news that could bring our country and others out of economic debt , media covers terrorists of our nation, and by terrorists I mean any person in any shooing/bombing/malicious act. I think if people were more educated and able to be involved through media with international news and many of the subjects you discussed, we would all be able to make more informed decisions, and be more informed individuals.