A few weeks ago, I was lost in a rather desolate part of Prague, looking for a joint called the “Cross Club” – a place full of moving machinery and great live techno/reggae/house music. I randomly ran into a couple of French students, Julien and Caroline, who were also looking for the place. Hey, I might’ve been lost and freezing at 1 a.m., but at least I’d made the first French friends of my life.
Julien (who’s English is quite good) and I got to talking, about what it’s like to be from Paris, why he’s studying in Prague, and the like, and I began wondering – as I always do – what he thought perceptions of Americans where in Paris and everywhere else he’d been in France. He didn’t seem to have much to say at first, except a nod to the good tourism money that Americans help bring in, but then he admitted that what the French, and other foreigners, see in the mass media can paint us as overwhelmingly ignorant and naive.
He told me that it seems like a lot of Americans probably wouldn’t even know where Paris is, and if it existed, he said, which got me to thinking just how much our jingoistic and often false-picture-painting mass news services like FOX News, CNN and MSNBC give an unfair impression of self-involved Americans to the rest of the world, and there’s not much we can do about it.
In this age of globalization, in my opinion, it goes beyond the duty of the press – even our god-awful mass press – to deliver the truth and breaking news, but to paint an accurate picture of Americans. Now, this is as difficult in America as an any nation, because of our massive land space, and endless demographics. But the outspoken religious right and the like that we see on FOX News can’t help but implant an image of Americans in the minds of Europeans, Asians, and everyone else.
Point is, most people I’ve met over here have an open mind to every person and every nationality, but our own news conglomerates (and even those like the BBC) can do us a huge favor and work on finding accurate Americans to talk to and host shows. Like I said, it is the age of globalization, and we’re in a period of image recovery. We have to stop shooting ourselves in the foot.
Well said. Which is, well, the point of the story!