Yesterday, I asked my mother about this wedding in Sweden. She said, “What wedding?” My mother is of Swedish descent and lives in Minnesota, which is filled with people of Swedish descent, so naturally I assumed that the big wedding of some princess there would be news in Minnesota. But it wasn’t.
Since I look at media from various parts of the world on the Internet, including the front pages of Swedish newspapers on newseum.org, I knew about this wedding. But apparently, the U.S. media had deliberately ignored it:
http://www.iii.co.uk/news/?type=afxnews&articleid=7951918&subject=economic&action=article
Which is why my mother, who looks only at American media, didn’t know anything about it.
And this rather trivial incident points to something I argue for in my book Soccer, the Left, & the Farce of Multiculturalism. It’s not enough to use just our media when trying to be well-informed, because our media can boycott things. I first noticed this with soccer, but it occurs in other realms as well. More familiar to many people is that they will slant things, of course, but they don’t just slant, they boycott as well. One example of this is the story of Amanda Knox, the American student in Italy who has been in prison for murder. This story was huge in the British media, especially their tabloids, but was hardly covered at all in the American media, except in her hometown of Seattle. Otherwise, it was ignored. A woman I know who loves Italy had not heard of it, and wondered where I had heard about it. “It wasn’t in the New York Times,” she wailed. But one cannot count on the New York Times, or any newspaper or news source, to give you everything. And counting on the media in one’s own country to give you everything is just asking for trouble.
Since I look at media from various parts of the world on the Internet, including the front pages of Swedish newspapers on newseum.org, I knew about this wedding. But apparently, the U.S. media had deliberately ignored it:
http://www.iii.co.uk/news/?type=afxnews&articleid=7951918&subject=economic&action=article
Which is why my mother, who looks only at American media, didn’t know anything about it.
And this rather trivial incident points to something I argue for in my book Soccer, the Left, & the Farce of Multiculturalism. It’s not enough to use just our media when trying to be well-informed, because our media can boycott things. I first noticed this with soccer, but it occurs in other realms as well. More familiar to many people is that they will slant things, of course, but they don’t just slant, they boycott as well. One example of this is the story of Amanda Knox, the American student in Italy who has been in prison for murder. This story was huge in the British media, especially their tabloids, but was hardly covered at all in the American media, except in her hometown of Seattle. Otherwise, it was ignored. A woman I know who loves Italy had not heard of it, and wondered where I had heard about it. “It wasn’t in the New York Times,” she wailed. But one cannot count on the New York Times, or any newspaper or news source, to give you everything. And counting on the media in one’s own country to give you everything is just asking for trouble.
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