For anyone interested in international news or life as a freelance journalist, I recommend listening to this recent segment of NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook: http://onpoint.wbur.org/2014/03/12/congo-stringer-foreign-affairs-media.
The interview is with a reporter who freelanced (worked without a contract), writing news stories from Congo, Africa, at the age of 22. The reporter’s story brings into question how international news gets reported to the West, and how much appetite there is in the West for international news. I personally have found that I only have a limited bandwidth where I can care about and attend to reading daily on any given foreign storyline.
There was also something I heard on the Diane Rehm Show in a segment “The Future Of The World Wide Web:” http://thedianerehmshow.org/shows/2014-03-12/future-world-wide-web. This was that attention is a valuable currency, now that the internet is quickly becoming a ubiquitous utility like electricity.
I think this is especially true in the information business, where the ability to choose what you want (to read, write, publish, or even research) is a large part of what being “good” means. I attribute this last thought to comments by The New Yorker editor David Remnick, speaking about Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue, in a New Republic article: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/116917/david-remnick-interview-russia-obama-and-editing-new-yorker.
I follow international news through BBC, NBC, and the PBS Newshour. There is the added dimension of the literary world--through Skype or email regarding writing and art. Email is used 97 percent of the time. I read the Remnick article. Alamgir Hashmi-Pakistani Poet, writes brilliantly about political issues within the country and out, along with Raquel Chalfi-Israel, Momilla Joshi-Nepal and more. I do think much of the American public does not have the vaguest idea about political concerns within distant, non-European countries, let alone attitudes across borders with the exception of Western/Eastern political boundaries, and then, understanding is vague. Americans get filtered news and even when unfiltered, are not prepared to decipher it. Last semester we watched a frontline presentation which I had seen before on Al-Jazeera--mind boggling. Examples of cross cultural communication. A group of engineers are in Saudi Arabia and one is arrested for exposing the bottom of his shoe in public. A Muslim teenager comes to intake and says, "Allah be praised" so softly and touches his heart; repeating several times--in retrospect, he was absurdly scared. Then, he chanted, Inshallah - if it be God's will. Great confusion with assumptions by some reporters, e.g. "I understand," when the reporter may not have the foggiest idea. It can be difficult to decipher American to American--to assume we can address cross-cultural communication without vast knowledge of that culture, and maybe that particular individual, places us on delicate ground.
ReplyDeleteA charming movie titled Ballot Box, nonfiction, follows a young woman who has been assigned to collected ballots in rural parts of the Middle East for the purposes of voting--to promote democracy and it's clear how non-translatable that concept is to many.
Thanks for your response, Diane. Those two films you mention -- one by Al-Jazeera and Ballot Box -- sound interesting. I also agree with many of your points, especially the one about Americans not caring much about news from countries outside Europe/the West.
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