a one way street

I've been so busy with work lately that my strongest of actions have not been able to match my even weakest of intentions. While the hours are long and I put in a lot of effort, getting home at the end of the day leaves me just too tired to write anything substantial and with some solid thought behind it. My only way out now is to try to grab as many free minutes I can get during the day between work, and during the weekends. The weekends themselves are filled with other activities, but more importantly, bring with them the lethargy that prevent one from doing any strenuous mental activity. Unfortunately for me, I am a typical human being suffering from all these maladies.

Two days ago as I was spending a few minutes of my free time at work browsing the internet for the latest news, I realize there's just so much information being passed around by the media these days that its practically impossible for any average human being to take in all of it, or even half of it. There's politics - which can be divided into local politics, national politics and geopolitics, to put it elementarily. Then there is business news, again with its plethora of sub-headings and sub-regions, and you can divide every subgroup of the news today in this manner. No wonder news sources today provide one with dozens of options to sift through this huge information wave and only listen/read/watch the news they are interested in.

In the midst of this whole juggernaut, I too have some very specific interests which I try to write regularly about here. As I grew older and my thought process developed in the way that it did, I was attracted to this concept of information asymmetry. This information asymmetry, though widely talked about in corporate circles and management books, exists in the world in general, in the world of global media as a rule.

As a member of the third world, one must, today, accept the sad truth that one must see/hear/read what the media of the first world wants it to. Invariably, all of us have started to see this world from the eyes of the western media, thus steeped in their own attitudes and most importantly, mostly about them.

I've always maintained that for the developed world, its always about them. In my previous post I pointed out that in the United States Government, for example, the focus is not on what the Americans are doing in Libya, but on whether the American President went by the rules before sending his troops there. The same has been visible in all these "NATO" led campaigns, where the last priority, if at all, is the dignity of the third world they are in, and the lives of the people there.

Thus for most of us, our international news will consist of western politics, immigration issues and of course, pop culture. Your country, if you are in a third world country, will most likely end up in some western agency's report on human rights, or closed economy, or environmental pollution, or some standard of living which the developed world does not have to stand trial for.

There is a news site that I am a regular at - http://www.slate.com/. Its sort of a modern, younger, less serious publication of The Washington Post, the newspaper based in Washington DC, USA. While the site does report serious matters from American politics and the rest of the world, it also includes a lot of other articles, mainly humor and lifestyle. The kind of members who regularly comment there seem to be liberals, who are not afraid to be critical of their government's policies and their politicians. Thats all good, I say, but there are some attitudes that eventually give themselves away. 

One of my biggest peeves with the western-controlled media is the absolute unimportance they attach to lives of people in the rest of the world, especially the poorest of the third world. The American media, for example, was regular in its updates of American casualties, and the numbers would be added up and reported regularly during the height of the American War on Iraq. Till today, I haven't come across a single news source from these media giants which puts a number of the many Iraqi lives that were lost, are are being lost every day. This same attitude was demonstrated by a visitor to the Slate site, when he, criticizing his government's policies, talked of how their policies have cost 4000 lives and so many billions of dollars. 4000 lives? If you consider the lives of the many innocent Iraqis caught in the cross fire, it could be 4 million!

As mere recipients of news, we get to hear of Iraq these days only because the west is there. Of the over 200 countries in this world, I am sure if we take the top 20 countries in terms of their economy, will be sharing 95% of the news disseminated in the world. Out of these 20, I am sure the top 10 will probably take a lion's share as well. Of course, I do not have raw data to back this up, but I want to use these numbers merely to illustrate the huge skew in global reporting.

I merely wanted to write a post earlier about the utter lack of reporting on Africa in the global media. In fact, what I wanted to do two days ago was to simply scan the global news sources, mainly Google news, in its various national editions, and try to see how many news items pertain to African nations. Of course, Libya will be on top of the list, now that the "free world" is fighting that dictator who feeds them oil. Then there is the fighting in Cote d'Ivoire, where the incumbent president apparently refuses to move to let in the winner of the latest general elections. Hmm, apart from that I couldn't find any other big political news reported in the global media.

In my opinion, when one is exposed to media sources where you get your news from the point of view of somebody else who is in completely different sphere of thought processes, and maybe working towards completely different ends, you eventually start thinking like them. European and American pop culture for example has made inroads into every corner of the world. Can you imagine the possibilities? Now Indian kids are being taught to dunk their chocolate cookies in milk, and Indian college kids make a bigger deal of their "relationships" than real married people!

In my entire post, i haven't even mentioned the word "propaganda" yet! Maybe i'll talk about that in a few days.