Reflections on news

Sorry- time just got away from me and it's been a while. I was exchanging some email with a friend of mine back in the states and I was talking to her about how different news is here. It's interesting to hear about the US from different perspectives. There is only one "local" newspaper here which is printed in English, and it is a general newspaper about the gulf region, not about this country specifically. There is also no local news as we know it. Back in the US there is generally local news and that's followed by national news. There is also cable news like CNN. There is no such thing here. The closest we get to a local TV news show comes from Dubai, and there is NEVER any news about the Kingdom on it. It's kind of like the whole country doesn't exist. Most of the news we get that's truly local is completely word of mouth.

There is also the issue of distance in this country. The eastern province is a 2-3 hour flight from here and driving is 1) incredibly long, 13 hours or so and 2) not exactly great conditions. The roads here are nothing like they are where you are. There are regular reports of truly horrific accidents with people going off the road because conditions can be quite bad. Even doing the 1 hour commute we have to the site is sometimes at very low visibility because of the sand. Our current vehicle has 2 gas tanks because it can be a great distance between gas stations. I say all this to tell you that internal travel, which is a way that news travels, is also difficult here. You don't get internal travelers the way you do in other places. If you are traveling internally it is usually because you have to for business.

So back to the topic of news. Generally we watch the international version of CNN, which is quite different than what we see in the US. The news is truly from around the world and there's not a preponderance of airtime devoted to US news. I used to watch BBC America back in the states and here we watch BBC straight. Again, much more news about world events especially news from Africa and Asia, which quite frankly, we don't see a lot of back in the states. I've been exposed to stories that simply don't make the newscast back home.

The other really big difference is trying to see US news events through a totally different filter. We only see US news as reported by foreign nationals, whether from London, Hong Kong or wherever. It is so difficlt to tell if the news is just the news or if it's editorialized at some level. I read US newspapers online and quite often a story that I read in the US papers is almost unrecognizable as the same event we have heard on a newscast. The perspective is just different. You are hearing about the event from the slant of how does it effect the home country of the news cast which is a very different way to look at the story. Truth be told, I have no idea what things are really like back home. I only know what I think they are like.

A good example of this is the "Tea Party" event on April 15th. If you look at online news it was this grass roots protest that took place in 700 cities across the country and involved tens of thousands of people. The Atlanta and New York coverage of the event was fairly detailed in the NY and ATL papers. It didn't even get a single word on international news here. If I hadn't read about in in an online newspaper, I would never have known it happened.

So my question is, if the news I get about the US is filtered or missing because I am out of the country, how much of the world news that I used to get at home suffered the same fate? Was it accurate? Was it the whole story? What stories were missing completely? Anyway, food for thought...watch this clip as it makes my point pretty well.