"An Outsider's View of American Culture"

This reading comes from a very cool book called DISTANT MIRRORS: AMERICA AS A FOREIGN CULTURE. Janusz Mucha is a sociology professor at Nicolaus Copernicus University in Poland. This small segment of his essay deals with what he sees as the limitations of American media, particularly television.


Mucha, Janusz L. "An Outsider’s View of American Culture." DISTANT MIRRORS: AMERICA AS A FOREIGN CULTURE. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1998. Pg 47.

"...A third reason why the American is generally more ethnocentric than the average European is the nature of mass media. Reading American dailies (with perhaps the exception of the New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Washington Post, USA Today, and a few others), we get an impression that the entire world consists of some extension of the United States. [...]
American television does not help much. "Headline News" and "CNN" provide information about the rest of the world on a regular basis, but the major networks do not, unless, as we discover in the print media, there is news of sensational nature. Local television stations inform mostly on local crimes or local economic and political happenings, such as the daily whereabouts of the president or governor. For local television, the world is further restricted, ending at the borders of the country."


My two biggest questions when reading this segment are: Do local television stations NEED to cover national and world news when we have CNN and other major stations that will cover these stories (including BBC News on some satelite systems) but NO OTHER SOURCES for local news but these local stations? And; Is it the responsibility of the mass media to educate us about and inform us of the goings on in other countries?