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Wednesday, November 06, 2002 I'll be the first to admit that Americans, as a whole, are ignorant of the world around them.
The american people's perception of the world around them is dictated by what the mass media decides to spoon-feed them on a given day. An hour or two of nightly broadcast news or a few pages of print media a day isn't going to keep you from being in the dark, no matter how good.
Most americans don't even seem to realize this, and it makes them come off as arrogant and shallow. A lot of the people I know have never even left the United States, and since moving to Los Angeles, I've met a great many who have never even left California.
These kinds of things do disturb me greatly. [Here's a good article that might enlighten some of you to how the rest of the world percieves americans, and america.]
You spend a lot of time in the book on the deterioration of the American media due to corporate consolidation. Who did you write that for? Americans or for people overseas?
In particular, overseas people. That is one real blind spot. Even in very sophisticated foreigners' analysis of America, they just don't get it. They'll say, "How is it that you guys don't know about Sept. 11 in Chile?" Or, "How is it that you don't know what your government is doing overseas in Iraq, that you are imposing economic sanctions that have killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi kids? How do you not know that?" Sorry, they actually say, "Why don't you care? Where are the American people on this?" I keep having to say to them, "Don't blame the American people. They aren't told this information. And if you were an American and you were exposed to the same media diet that Americans get, you wouldn't know it either. So don't be so self-righteous."
[ 11/06/2002 12:53:00 PM ] [
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