I was listening to the latest edition of Here’s the Thing, with Alec Baldwin. Josh Fox, the man who directed the excellent documentaries Gasland and Gasland 2, was on. It, like every previous edition, was fantastically packaged - Baldwin smoothing things along, Fox being given the space to really explain how awful fracking is. I recommend it. But there was this weird sense, listening to it, and it’s one that I’ve encountered a lot.
A sort of “we, the people” feeling is probably what I’d call it. Specifically, the American people; more specifically, citizens of the United States of America. Maybe it takes something like that - a generally positive, inclusive condemnation of corporations rather than states - to really highlight this attitude, but it’s kind of everywhere.
It’s also something that every country does. The UK does national pride, too, both in an ugly racist way (the BNP, the EDL, the general anti-Islam streak you find in certain urban and suburban communities) and a sort-of nice way (the Olympics opening ceremony, the Queen’s jubilee, the Royal Chestburster). There are news stories that make it into our news that would never grace the US media. But - and maybe this is contentious - it feels like the US does it more than most.
Take the cadence of the reporting of Edward Snowden’s leaks, for example. Every news story I have read has talked about the fact that the US government doesn’t spy on US citizens (a contentious claim by itself), and only foreigners, as a moderating factor. As if monitoring the internet use of people in other sovereign states is perfectly okay.
Or, going back, the reporting on the BP oil spill in 2010, and how every US media outlet referred to it (inaccurately) as British Petroleum, as if a giant oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico caused primarily by the shoddy workmanship of American contractors was a distant echo of the War for Independence. Or the hysteria over North Korea based on next to no information. Or the fact that on the same day as the Boston marathon bombing, a wave of bombings in Iraq killed 75 people and injured 350 others, several orders of magnitude larger than anything that happened in Boston, and it was a story that was buried in favour of a comparatively smaller domestic story.
This probably isn’t a huge revelation. Most countries have a media bias toward their own domestic issues. Even if the US does it more than other countries, that’s still not exactly new information. It’s what it betrays, though. If we cover three American deaths instead of seventy-five Iraqi deaths, does that mean that we have to acknowledge that those three Americans were more than twenty-five times more valuable to us than the seventy-five Iraqis?
I switched to NPR News recently for my daily compressed dose (it used to be NBC Nightly - mistake), but even they’re guilty of a slight skew. We have a problem, in that newsrooms have to editorialise now more than they did in the past. Every story is immediately accessible, so you have to decide what people want. And that desire opens you up to some weird moral charges.
I think I’ll continue to listen to a mix of the 7am podcast and the Guardian website when I move. I want to stay informed. I want to keep abreast of current events. I just wish that somewhere was really committed to presenting it without deciding first what I want to know.
