In My Opinion

The News We Are Not Getting

By Yuri Kawabe

Madonna adopts a baby girl from Malawi. Prince William and Prince Harry visit Lesotho. Have you noticed those countries on the news when our beloved celebrities are not making an appearance there? Did you even know where those countries are? I didn’t.

Media coverage influences what we think about. While some countries such as Japan, Russia, China and England keep coming up in our everyday news, some don’t get coverage often or at all. Within a month, the CNN website posted approximately 100 articles about England. Guess how many articles about Lesotho, where many citizens suffer from hunger and AIDS, have been posted? Zero. Searches on the New York Times and USA Today websites both showed the same result.

Scholars Wayne Wanta, Guy Golan, and Cheolhan Lee found through their research that “the more media coverage a nation received, the more vital to U.S. interests the country was seen to be.” Are countries like Lesotho and Malawi not important? While media doesn’t report on the situations in those countries, where hundreds of people are dying everyday due to AIDS and starvation, stories such as the sale of new iPhones make it to mainstream international news. International news prefers to cover events, not issues, meaning unless a crisis happens in certain countries, American media will not take time to report on those countries. But Lesotho has a greater need for immediate help than England does, and without media coverage, the situation in those countries will remain unknown.

International news may give audiences favorable or unfavorable impressions of countries, but we must realize some countries will never even register on most Americans’ radar. The media expanding their coverage would allow those countries to be recognized, and recognition may change this dilemma. The media is powerful and influential; therefore variation in news coverage must be improved.