Wednesday morning, media studies professor Tony Conrad put my video analysis class through an exercise. Its purpose: to uncover our opinions on the media, the information we were receiving in regard to the war that has just begun in Iraq, whose information we trusted and what issues we felt were being ignored in favor of the existing news coverage of the war.
Obviously, in a department where students learn the ways images and media can be manipulated to coerce emotional and intellectual reactions, skepticism about the information Americans receive from any source ran high.
But the blame cannot fall solely on media conglomerates, which have been criticized for using war and conflict as entertainment fodder since the first Gulf War.
Students need to take a proactive role in gathering knowledge for themselves. With free Internet access provided to UB-associated individuals both on- and off-campus, there is simply no excuse for reading only what we are told in The Buffalo News and our free copies of USA Today and the Times or watching the recap coverage of CNN and its rival news networks.
The average American newspaper article is written at a level easily understood by most fifth-grade students. It would be na??ve to think there is anything about the current political climate that can be fully explained in terms like these, as the simplification of concepts can easily blur lines or cause subtle changes in meaning to be lost - as any news reporter knows from the experience of having his or her own work edited.
This catering to the lowest denominator (an outgrowth of the entertainment industry) is also reflected, as one classmate pointed out, in the speeches we receive. His example was that while President George W. Bush's speech to the American public Monday night was vague and appealed to an emotional side of an argument, British Prime Minister Tony Blair's speech to the House of Commons (and, via cable television, to the entire world) carefully laid out each of the resolutions, guidelines and restrictions broken by Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq.
It may surprise students who have had little exposure to international news sources, but there are countries in which "news" and "entertainment" are not as close to synonymous as they are here. In many cases, newspapers and other media outlets in these countries not only provide more detail than similar reports related by our own mass media, but they also provide alternate points of view.
A major international hub like London has multiple daily newspapers, each with its own standards and editorial beliefs. While The Star may be a tabloid, The Mirror will provide a left-leaning view, while more conservative readers can look at Daily Mail. Meanwhile, we've got only The Buffalo News.
The solution to this lack of variance in media coverage is not to sit back and turn on the television to watch CNN; it's to go to the campus libraries or log onto your computer and start looking for papers from other parts of the world.
Want to know what the French think of Americans? Don't take the word of some idiot whose knee-jerk reaction to France's lack of support in the current conflict was to rename a Belgian food. Google will translate almost any page from its own language into English, and major news sources like "Le Monde Diplomatique" (mondediplo.com) allow English-speakers to see what's being said about Americans in Paris. If it's the opinion from India you're looking for, that can be found as well. You can even try www.arabworldnews.com for a side of the conflict's story in language most university students should be able to understand.
Increased isolationism seems to be the trend in today's United States. But that doesn't mean college students have to - or should - remain complacent, following in the footsteps of the couch potatoes who have come before. There is plenty of news out there that isn't being told by CNN or MSNBC. Issues like the second generation of the Patriot Act, health care funding cuts, environmental protection and atrocities in other countries are being ignored while Stone Phillips introduces another series of war-time human interest stories.
Any person should know just from discussing this conflict that there are as many perspectives on the war as there are people in the world - over six billion. So reading one newspaper or watching two television stations simply doesn't make sense.
College is a time when we're supposed be proactive about our education.
This would be a good time to start.
Photo: Meredith Forrest Kulwicki
