scribblings on the edge

It's terrifying to notice how much the western news neglect to tell on a daily basis. Very little of what happens outside our own countries and comfort zones gets told. What makes the news are often issues fed down the line from larger media feeds, and quite often those are either American or at least Euro-American sources. Which is why most people here know about the Virginia Tech shootings and Anna Nicole Smith's babydaddy, but not of the fighting in Somalia or about the unrest in the Philippines.

I am not saying that one event is more important than the other - well, with the very notable exception of Anna Nicole Smith's babydaddy, because let's face it, who cares? What I am saying is that there is a bias in news media, and that bias is very often Euro-American. Jukka Sihvonen, a Finnish researcher, has said in his articles that the news media reports often that which evokes most emotional responses. It does not seem to matter if the emotion evoked is sorrow, shock, frustration or just plain disgust, as long as that what is reported evokes these emotions.

So tragedies that happen to ordinary people in an environment where there shouldn't be any tragedies catch our attention faster than expected and/or ongoing tragedies in environments where they have been happening for a long while. Yet maybe these tragedies, like the constant fighting in Somalia, affect the international politics or even regular lives as much, if not more so, than these sudden, unexpected tragedies. For instance, the fighting in Somalia means that peacekeepers will need to be deployed to the region, which means that the UN will need to make an effort. UN sending over peacekeepers means that they need to be drafted from member states, and that affects individual countries like my own, for instance.

This is just me pondering about the priorities portrayed in media. Today when I opened my computer and went online to check the local news - well, what the Finnish media is reporting in general - I noticed that most news were either about Princess Diana or what changes the American experts are recommending for the Iraqi police force. While both news are noteworthy, it took me a while to dig up something that wasn't about Iraq, Princess Diana, sports, or the stock market. For instance, did you know that there's a humanitarian crisis brewing in Niger? Or that the tensions between China and Japan are rising on the issue of Taiwan? For that matter, how many of us have missed the news about the fires in Greece? I didn't know about them before I went and specifically looked for European news. But I did find out about Ian Thorpe's doping predicament quite fast, as well as about whole entrapment charade involving a US senator, about Bush's latest speeches, and about half a dozen other issues that are being spewed around in both international and national media.

Hell, it took me a lot of digging to find out anything substantial about Finnish politics in a Finnish paper.

While I could go on and on with just examples of what gets reported and with how much volume, I won't. I'm just left wondering how much of what is reported in the media is affected by the hunt for the most emotion-evoking story, and how much of it is dictated by western bias, or to be more accurate, by western political bias. A lot, it would seem. So what the modern Euro-American news media is actually doing is, well, selling their purpose of informing cheaply for the attention gained by emotional, political stories.

Of course, all that I've written above is just a very simplified, generalised idea of what I think is a real problem in major news medias. There is a flip side to all these things, though. For every Reuters and CNN there is an  AllAfrica Global Media or an Al-Jazeera or an ANN, not to mention all the smaller, alternative news media that mostly recides on Internet, but still manages to reach an audience. For every media outlet with a Euro-American bias, there is a newsfeed with another kind of bias: international, apolitical, religious, anarchist, socialist... You name it. The thing about media is that its content, no matter how topical or emotional it is, is always told with a certain bias embedded in it. Yet somehow no other bias seems so offensive and all-pervasive to me than the Euro-American one. Of course, this is just my opinion. Considering that I am European, this bias should probably provide me with a perspective that I am familiar and agree with, but it doesn't.

So what is the point in this post? That perhaps we shouldn't accept the viewpoints the media offers us? That maybe Anna Nicole Smith's babydaddies and Princess Diana's memorials are not just that important when compared with what is happening in Niger or in Afghanistan or in Philippines or in Greece. That the eight people that died in a traincrash in Brazil are just as important as those four who were beheaded in India. Or that maybe we might need to know about the tensions between China and Japan as much as we need to know about what is happening in the membership negotiations between the EU and Turkey. The world has become truly global both economically and politically, and that change has dictated that we cannot remain regionally-biased, or for that matter, allow ourselves be distracted with filler-news when there are real events happening.

What I'm trying to say is that what we get from our local news media and from the major news medias is not enough.

I am a person with a multitude of projects that are often left unfinished. I am someone who once had different blogs and journals for different purposes, yet only one that I actively used. That blog is my LiveJournal account, Fool's House, which I still happily use. What I noticed, though, is that while I feel comfortable writing about my life and sudden flights of fancy there, I really needed another blog to keep up with my studies.

Cue the beta testing of Vox, and a kindly soul who gave me an account code here. First, I did not know what to use this account for, but I still signed up for one. After signing up, I promptly forgot about even having a Vox account. Then a few weeks ago, I noticed that I'm supposed to write my bachelor's thesis this year. I had been thinking about putting up a study/research blog to collect links, material and thoughts about whatever there was on my mind, so of course, the first thing I thought about was hosting a new blog on my domain. Well, my service provider - may they rot in their  offices - turned out to be a relatively untrustworthy, so I decided to use this account here that had been empty and unused for so many months.

Now, this is just a roundabout way of me introducing myself and what this blog will entail. So hello to anyone who is reading this. I am Heli, a third-year-student of English Philology at the University of Turku. I'm a Finn, a female one at that, very much a geek, and nearly panicking because I can't figure out the topic of my bachelor's thesis.

I'll be writing about my thoughts on all things academic, and on any topic that might relate to one of the fields I'm interested in. Considering that I have minors in Contemporary History, European Studies and Media Studies so far, most bits of my writing will be, well, ranging from one topic to another. I hope I'll be able to figure out what I want to write about in my thesis through the keeping of this blog. Who knows, maybe I'll be able to incorporate some bits of what I write here into my thesis.

Nah, that's probably asking too much.