THE AMERICAN, THE MEDIA, AND MY “ASS”

I can approach a university graduate raised in the U.S. and tell him that all government officials in Africa ride donkeys and horses to work! Worse still, I can tell an average man brought up in the States that all Africans sleep in trees; and probably add that Africans graze the grass pasture fields for meals! That does not sound too good but if I did, the most popular – and perhaps the ‘the most educated’ – response I’m going to get would sound like: “Oh really!”

A gaffe, you might call of what you just read but believe you me, Americans could easily pass for the group of people who know least about the rest of the world.

Once I accompanied a compatriot to a car lot in Fargo, North Dakota, to pick up a car he had just bought. While my colleague was busy signing up for auto insurance on his new car, I got into a chit-chat with the sales associate, a mother of two, I learned. And a section of our conversation went like this:

“…so where do you come from?” The lady asked, apparently noticing that I was fresh in town. “I’m from Ghana,” I answered, and without waiting for any further questions from her, went on, “have you heard about Ghana at all?”

“No, but is it in Africa?” She queried while still searching through her mind, perhaps she could remember if, at all, she knew anything useful about Ghana. Indeed this lady looked smart and I thought to myself that it’s not a big deal if she had not even heard the name Ghana before—after all, she has nothing to do in connection with Ghana, and I was definitely not going to expect every single individual to know about the rest of the world.  But what followed after that brief moment of silence was rather a question that shocked me to the bone!

“Ghana,” she murmured to herself and looked me in the face, “is there a war going on there?” And she kept looking me right in the eyes with a facial expression that said it all: this must be one of the refugees from the war-torn zones of Africa!

Well, while I might be wrong reading the lady’s mind, I definitely hit the nail right on the head complaining that Americans know very little about the world outside their country.

Fact is the U.S. has had a policy of isolationism from the beginning, (of course, except after the attack of the naval base at Pear Harbor on December 07, 1941, by the Japs). This policy was made even clearer by George Washington in his fair well address when he minced no word saying, “It is our true policy to steer clear of entangling alliances with any portion of the foreign world.” But all that does not explain why American people know very little about the global world, because information is readily available these days, so much so that anyone who wishes to study could easily get the facts just by listening to the radio and hanging out on the net.

Citing my daily life encounters in the States to support my argument could cause me talking for days but what I figured could be the highest contributing factor to this mess is the media – yeah, the media in the U.S., I mean. Particularly, the skewed media reportage toward what they seem to think makes the news when it comes to matters overseas.

I would agree with anyone, that indeed, the U.S. has a lot going on every minute and that home news alone would definitely fill the bulleting each day. It is, however, interesting the way some of the national media quickly grab “the negative news” from the international community and actually make it the running news for days, and yet fail to see equally useful newsworthy events, especially when it has to do with Africa.

When the Tunisian uprising started up it was capture moderately well by CNN. The same network had enough incentive to even send a reporter to Egypt to file the mess that was going on there with Hosni Mubarak’s regime. And, of course, we all saw enough video of what happened to Saddam, all on the same network. It is interesting, however, that roughly a year after these series of events, the media would not fill us in with the aftermath of the news they made so popular to their audiences – and when they do at all it turns out to be a fragment of the whole show!

I wouldn’t want to believe that some of the western media are bias against the easterly world. Neither would I like to say that it is professionally lousy. If I did at all, the National Public Radio network would prove me wrong!

To put it in a nutshell, I’d say this ‘media tactic’ of making it big news when it’s about negative development in the third world and making very little of it if it’s a positive development must stop before the media end up creating dumb-thinkers around!