As diverse and generally wealthy the US is, its media is so poor that most of its citizenry is effectively ignorant of what is happening outside its borders.
It's a topic TomDispatch takes up in "Juan Cole, The Media as a Security Threat to America" in connection with floods in Pakistan - and what that all means.
"Call it strange or call it symptomatic. These last weeks, Afghan War commander General David Petraeus has been on a “media blitz.” He’s been giving out interviews as if they were party favors. Yet, as far as I can tell, not a single interviewer has asked him anything like: “General Petraeus, twenty percent of Pakistan, which supposedly harbors Osama bin Laden and various militant groups involved in the Afghan War, and whose intelligence agency reportedly has an ongoing stake in the Afghan Taliban, is now underwater. Roads, bridges, railway lines, and so U.S. supply lines have been swept away. How do you expect this cataclysm to affect the Afghan War in the short and long term?”
In these last weeks, the Afghan War has once again been front-page news. Yet only a single reporter -- the heroic Carlotta Gall of the New York Times -- has thought to focus on the subject of how the Biblical-style floods in Pakistan might affect the U.S. war effort and the overstretched supply lines that play a major role in supporting U.S. troops there. While you could learn about rising violence in Afghanistan, the perilous state of the Kabul Bank, and many other subjects, reporting on the floods and the war has been nil, with even speculative pieces on the subject largely nonexistent.
We know next to nothing about how U.S. supplies are now getting to Afghanistan, or how much the cost of getting them there has risen, or how this might affect U.S. operations in that country. Given the scale of the catastrophe and the degree to which the U.S. is embedded in the region, you might at least expect the American media to be flooded with commentary on what the event could mean for us. Think again. As Juan Cole (who runs Informed Comment, which offers the best running commentary available on the Middle East and whose most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World) indicates, this startling journalistic blank spot is just a modest part of a far larger blankness when it comes to one of the truly horrific weather events in modern memory."
It's a topic TomDispatch takes up in "Juan Cole, The Media as a Security Threat to America" in connection with floods in Pakistan - and what that all means.
"Call it strange or call it symptomatic. These last weeks, Afghan War commander General David Petraeus has been on a “media blitz.” He’s been giving out interviews as if they were party favors. Yet, as far as I can tell, not a single interviewer has asked him anything like: “General Petraeus, twenty percent of Pakistan, which supposedly harbors Osama bin Laden and various militant groups involved in the Afghan War, and whose intelligence agency reportedly has an ongoing stake in the Afghan Taliban, is now underwater. Roads, bridges, railway lines, and so U.S. supply lines have been swept away. How do you expect this cataclysm to affect the Afghan War in the short and long term?”
In these last weeks, the Afghan War has once again been front-page news. Yet only a single reporter -- the heroic Carlotta Gall of the New York Times -- has thought to focus on the subject of how the Biblical-style floods in Pakistan might affect the U.S. war effort and the overstretched supply lines that play a major role in supporting U.S. troops there. While you could learn about rising violence in Afghanistan, the perilous state of the Kabul Bank, and many other subjects, reporting on the floods and the war has been nil, with even speculative pieces on the subject largely nonexistent.
We know next to nothing about how U.S. supplies are now getting to Afghanistan, or how much the cost of getting them there has risen, or how this might affect U.S. operations in that country. Given the scale of the catastrophe and the degree to which the U.S. is embedded in the region, you might at least expect the American media to be flooded with commentary on what the event could mean for us. Think again. As Juan Cole (who runs Informed Comment, which offers the best running commentary available on the Middle East and whose most recent book is Engaging the Muslim World) indicates, this startling journalistic blank spot is just a modest part of a far larger blankness when it comes to one of the truly horrific weather events in modern memory."
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