[elemenohpee]

How would the media know that their viewers don't care about Iceland if they never told their viewers about Iceland in the first place?

I don't understand why people insist on using the "shadowy figures gathering in smokey rooms" straw-man, Herman/Chomsky's propaganda model has been around for 25 years: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_model

[rayiner]

Because as a general rule, Americans don't care about anything that happens in a foreign country, with four narrow exceptions:

1) we care about the pomp and circumstances surrounding the British royalty (weddings, deaths, etc)

2) we care about what happens in Israel

3) we care about events that make us feel morally superior (rapes in India)

4) we care about things that could affect us (terrorists in Afghanistan, EU's sovereign debt crisis, etc)

American media doesn't even cover what happens in major European countries like the U.K. or France or Germany, much less in minor ones. And it's not just among regular people. Even educated, well-informed people generally don't care about what happens abroad. It's just American exceptionalism at work. We feel we are so dramatically different from anyone else, either in other countries or in other times, that nothing that happens in those other places could possibly have any relevance to us. The idea that we would look to other countries for ideas on how to solve domestic problems is completely alien to us.

[elemenohpee]

Your comment doesn't seem to address the idea that I was bringing up, that the media has a role in shaping what people care about rather than being an impartial conduit that is slave to peoples' desires. For example, how much of the attention that is paid to British royalty is because it is presented as something that should be paid attention to?

[LyndsySimon]

While I don't think we'd agree on whether or not this is a good thing, I really think you hit the nail on the head.

I know I personally view world news through the lens of "how will this affect me?". If I want to learn something about how things are going in Iceland, I'll read Wikipedia (which I do fairly often, but most people probably don't).

As for looking to other countries for a solution, I'd say that's part of what makes us Americans. The idea of "we rebelled against the European power for a reason, we don't want to be like them" is ingrained into our culture. I don't think that's a terrible thing, but rather one of the things that make us unique. Diversity is not a bad thing.

The other part of what defines American culture is our individualism. That's changing rapidly these days, as our population centers become more concentrated and a larger percentage of the population are more closely tied to a larger social community. I think you'll see a bit of a "whiplash" effect, as we quickly lose many parts of our "Americanism" and become more like Europe. When that happens, the media coverage will change to reflect that.

[elemenohpee]

Not blindly imitating European countries is one thing, being ignorant of their policies and their effects is another. The latter is the case here, and it would take some pretty convoluted rationalization to spin that as "diversity".

Individualism has historically been correlated with urbanization. Just because people are living closer together does not a community make. In fact, urbanization has tracked with the breakdown of old communitarian social relations and its replacement with market relations. If anything is going to erode that, it will be new "solidarity economies" and things of that nature rather than the simple concentration of population.

[readme]

I would be interested to know what percentage of average American TV news viewers could locate Iceland on a map if it was not labeled.

[grey-area]

That would say something about the state of American education rather than the state of Iceland, if so.

[SG-]

The same people likely couldn't point out a lot of other 'big' countries/continents or even US states, so I don't see what that argument proves.

[readme]

My point is that TV news caters to the lowest common denominator of brains so they aren't going to tell everyone about a country they can't locate on a map. That is of course, unless, there are "terrorists" there, or Israel is involved.