There’s a reason why Americans know so little about the world outside our borders, and it’s not simply because too many of us are watching FOX News. For example, take this recent tidbit from our nation’s paper of record…
Until this month, when it added Verizon, Apple sold to just one carrier, AT&T, limiting its distribution — and, analysts say, the size of the head start it had over Android.
I’ve seen this wisdom matter-of-factly repeated throughout the media over the past couple weeks, and of course, it’s not true. Until this month, when it added Verizon, Apple sold to just one carrier in the United States. Apple sells through dozens of carriers worldwide, and has recently seen its most dramatic growth in markets outside the United States.
And these tech and business writers covering Apple… they know that. So what explains this prevalent slip? I think my headline says it all.
Nearly everything you read, watch or listen to in the American-centric media is produced from an American perspective… a perspective that probably could correctly place Egypt on a map, if it cared to. But, well, most of the time, it doesn’t.
Boy, you really blew the whistle on Steve Lohr forgetting the word “domestically” that sentence.
Not only that but our news sources are blatantly WRONG.
In case you missed it, that map mislabels IRAQ as EGYPT.
This is why I barely pay attention to America’s MSM…it’s useless and often incorrect.
I kept looking at Egypt on the map and thinking “What’s Goldy talking about, Egypt’s not labeled at all.” And then I looked at rest of the map. Good job, Fox News.
But it’s not *just* Fox News and it’s not *just* American solipsism. Our education system sucks, plain & simple; they probably couldn’t label a US map correctly, either.
Please let this be ‘shopped…
If you want to talk about solipsism, it takes a pretty narrow perspective to pretend that any significant amount of America is ever watching Fox News.
On Thursday, 1,145,000 Americans tuned into Fox News. That was plenty to “win” the “cable news” rating numbers on the day, sure, for whatever that arbitrary distinction means. On the other hand, on that same day, 8,870,000 Americans tuned into that night’s airing of “Jersey Shore” on MTV.
According to the US Census, there are roughly 307 million Americans. It takes an enormous distortion of perspective to imagine that 0.373 % is “too many of us watching” any channel.
Though I guess it’s arguable that any amount of people watching Fox News (or Jersey Shore for that matter) is too much, it seems like a gigantic stretch to imagine anyone in America taken at random is getting his or her news from Fox or any other “cable news” pundit shoutfest.
Those numbers only take on an appearance of statistical significance when compared (arbitrarily) to each other, right?
@5, I suspect that a large-scale study would discover that, by and large, Americans are not getting their news.
@3 I, too, couldn’t immediately figure out what was wrong. I first looked at the caption and thought, “Is the problem that they’re paying too much attention Israel (etc)? Is it that Egypt isn’t identified like the others (yellow, bolded, etc)?” It took me a good couple of minutes to even read the labels of the other countries.
Well, at least the spelling is correct.
This happened in July 2009.
http://mediamatters.org/mmtv/20090727004…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/07/28…
http://fromtheleft.wordpress.com/2009/07…
Please be troll. Please don’t tell me you really believe your data supports your statement, Goldy.
I completely agree with Goldy. For instance, if this…
http://www.rawa.org/temp/runews/rawagall…
…was happening regularly in the U.S., the people who support Obama (the man with the most power to stop it), would demand that he put an end to it. But it’s not happening in the U.S.. And it’s not being done by a Republican. So, instead of focusing on ending it and refusing to support the man who enables it, we focus on easy targets, like Republicans who say stupid things.
In the meantime, another family is destroyed by Obama’s refusal to stop bombing civilians with flying robots.
http://www.theonion.com/video/in-the-kno…
And another classic:
http://www.theonion.com/video/nation-of-…
Al Jazeera English and BBC International. I try to watch a broadcast of each one every week so I at least have a little sense of what’s going on.
CBC’s better at international news than most of the US stations, but not by much.
I must say, though. MSNBC’s Egypt coverage has had more depth than I expected. I think it’s because Engel’s lived in Egypt and speaks fluent Arabic.
@9 You fact-checking sonofoabitch! Nice catch rob, ty.
I know I was generally disappointed in Fox News back in 2009. Feel free to consider this as part of that dark period in American journal-ish-ism that appears to have no end.
@2: I think that was the entire point of posting it. I’m pretty sure Goldy was aware it’s mislabeled and was making a point about Fox News being stupid.
That being said, I’m not sure I think mislabeling a map this badly is the same thing as leaving the word “domestically” or “in the U.S.” out of a sentence about a cell phone. Do I know the iPhone is available on other carriers in other countries? Yes. Do I give a rats ass, given that as a T-mobile customer I still can’t get it here? No.
@5: You have a good point about the viewership figures but the danger of Fox News is that it drives stories for the entirety of our lazy-ass media.
A Fox News guest or pundit makes some insane assertion that shouldn’t be up for debate, like the validity of evolution. The alleged “news” portion then promotes a story about the “debate” occuring (on their own programs) about evolution and does a couple pieces.
Other cables channels pick it up because “it’s a story now” and they don’t want to be left behind. Websites catering to Beltway elites write stories about “the debate”.
You see the story make its way to newspapers and broadcast news because if everyone’s talking about it, it must be worth covering. Not a headline or top story, but a solid second tier story that everyone sees about “the debate”.
At the end of it, people don’t want to think so they throw up their hands and say “I guess the truth must be somewhere in the middle”. Suddenly teaching creationism in public schools is the “moderate” thing to do.
All these comments miss the point. The point is that Goldy is just a fatuous Apple pimp.
For this post to matter I’d have to give a shit.
Apple products are cheaper overseas because that’s where they are made.
This doesn’t change the fact that I can’t install programs on it.
This also doesn’t change the fact that a 3 year old could make a better piece of hardware for that kind of money.
Is there anything else?
My father, bless his heart, sent me two US$20 bills for my first birthday living overseas. I called to thank him, and gently let him know that we don’t use American money in Australia.
Some Australian friends went on a trip to the USA in 2009, and gently informed the Americans they met that the financial crisis was global.
Gently, ever so gently, Americans will learn that the rest of the world is not America and thankfully, never will be.
@18 Great post. Thanks.
@21 Heh. We had the same issue here (US $) with well-meaning family, like other English speaking countries were actually just distant suburbs with funny accents…much like the woman from the south I remember yelling at an Italian waiter “Cold, CO-WALD!” in reference to her drink, as though the problem was that she just wasn’t speaking English clearly enough in Italy.
When MSNBC is actually on, I like to tune in. But that’s only select hours in the mornings and evenings. Most of the programming is old Datelines and prison documentaries. Fox is only one of two cable news networks that has 24 hour coverage. CNN is dull. News is news. So if I get news from Greta or Geraldo, so be it despite any bunders in their graphics department.
Hopefully, Comcast will infuse some badlly needed capital into MSNBC and try to make it into the top dog organization it once was – like way back when during the Florida recount.
I linked to the fox frame capture on my facebook page with little additional comment and got a stream of comments from right wing coworkers that it had to be Photoshopped as Fox News never made mistakes. What is it about these people that makes them follow something so blindly? I think that TV news is mostly crap, right or left bias aside. If I put up similar mistakes I’ve seen on CNN I doubt I get comments from anybody.
@9 When this happened may not be as significant as that it happened. I never thought I would say this, but I now find myself admiring the sagaciousness of Miss Teen South Carolina 2007, who in her own adorably inarticulate way, tried to warn us about this trouble with maps.
That Fox News made this mistake in 2009, with people still snickering at the poor dear, just makes their gaffe that much worse.
not surprising at all. And, like, you wrote, it doesn’t matter. This ignorant society would disgust our Founding Fathers if they were alive to day. There’s a perspective you’ll never hear from Michelle “Balloon Head” Bachmann.
Hah spot on – the tech pundits are constantly getting this one dead wrong with their boneheaded U.S.-centric focus. Apple is in a global game, and just watch, their REAL future iPhone targets are giant CDMA providers in India, and even more gigantic TD-SCDMA providers in China; Verizon is just their putting a toe in the water. And note that when Apple originally approached Verizon with the iPhone years ago, Verizon management basically spat in their face; now they’ve come begging for it.