Unit 1: Intersections of culture and media
The underrepresentation of various world regions from the media has led to Americans having a distorted view of the world in general. Miller (2008) noted that the American News Media focused on less relevant American stories like the death of Anna Nicole Smith more than important global stories. It is essential to note that this perspective was in 2008 before the rapid growth of social media.
Americans had to rely on mass media for information on what was happening in the world. Still, the media was more focused on what is profitable rather than what is important. The war in Iraq was well covered to justify the presses of the American troops in the region. This was thirteen years ago, and the world has changed drastically, bearing in mind an ongoing global pandemic. Today, traditional mass media has been replaced by social media, which dictates our perception of the world.
Despite this, Miller, (2008)’s theory that various regions of the world remain underrepresented in American’s perception of the world still holds. It is perplexing to me how we pay less attention to the suffering the people in North Korea undergo while under the “supreme leadership” of Kim Jong-un. It is more confounding than the American mass, and social media are saturated with progressive social justice warriorship.
About half the global population, African, India, and China remain underrepresented in the media even though people in these regions suffer from disease, malnutrition, and slavery (Saha et al., 2018). Balanced media coverage should focus beyond the three hundred million individuals in the United States and more on the rest of the world. This is more so during this period of cultural homogenization, whereby cultural diversity is steadily reducing.
References
Miller, A. (2008). How the news distorts our worldview [Video]. Retrieved 28 August 2021, from
Saha, A., McRae, L., Dodd Jr, C. K., Gadsden, H., Hare, K. M., Lukoschek, V., & Böhm, M. (2018). Tracking global population trends: Population time-series data and a living planet index for reptiles. Journal of Herpetology, 52(3), 259-268.
