These are just some thoughts I have on the perspectives that North american people have on foreign countries, specifically those that are Islamic,African and even Asian. These perspectives are sometimes really prejudiced, like when people automatically associate Islam with terrorism after 9/11, and when people think Africa consists of hopeless savage people who're incapable of . In all this, do people ever think carefully about the other side, about why so much hatred exists towards America from a lot of the international community? No, and I'm not blaming ordinary people themselves, I think the mainstream media has a lot to do with enforcing our rather negative and patronising opinions of those foriegn, troubled countries.
If I was an American
What I think on our cocoon of our comfortable society
Living in North America and being middle class, people really enjoy/get accustomed to a relatively comfortable life. Having a nice,big,air-conditioned house or apartment to live in, driving a car, being able to get loans freely, having a tv in each room of the 5 bedroom house, a car for each person, spending freely on clothes,food and electronics,DVDs with multiple easily-obtainable credit cards,watching the latest reality tv-shows, and listening to similar, formulaic pop music. All this may be wonderful and even I've benefited from a few of these amenities but at the same time do you ever think life may be too (perfect), too scripted, that life is defined by a set of rules and formulas that once broken makes one an outcast or weirdo?
We live our lives convinced that ours is the best life, and that our culture is the best. Everything we learn and pick-up drums into us that our way of life is superior, is the God-given righteous way. From school where we're taught about democracy, patriotism, honour, tolerance, about who won WW2 and who the evil enemies were, about the hard-fought ideals our nation stands for,about the great British empire and the primitive, ignorant, backwards nations and kingdoms it helped modernise as if invading, conquering and exploiting a people is a favor to these people.
The media, or should I say mainstream media, that we obtain news and information and facts from, that's supposed to educate/inform us on events and states of affairs around us, gives us content that creates a biased view of the world, a view that says we (the Western world) are much more civilised than the rest of the world, that we have a superior society, where peace and justice and democracy and human rights and respect reigns, that everywhere in the world we intervene we are doing good things, bringing our democracy and justice and equality to those less privileged, and that when locals get angry and attack, it is only because they don't want and can't accept what's good for them, that they prefer tyranny, fundamentalism and their primitive ways. All of this was sadly exposed during our reasons for and subsequent invasion of Iraq, with all the bold assertions of hidden weapons of mass-destruction, collusion with al-Qaeda, giving the Iraqi people our kind of freedom and democracy that they and the rest of the Arab world lack but really need, confirming the hollow ignorance, narrow-mindedness and stupid prejudices of our feelings towards foreigners.
And the sad thing is, this succeeds, all this one-sided media coverage and succeeds in making us feel superior towards others, feel pity for those who don't live our lifestyle, causes us to want to help others live our lives, (and if our names happen to be D. Rumsfeld or GW Bush or D. Cheney) causes us to want to enforce our 'standards' and 'democracy' on them.
The mainstream (large,corporate media organisations) media easily dominates public attention, with many people turning to CNN and FOX and reading the NYTimes and Time for their regular news.
Many alternative media do exist, with the Internet being the best source of it with independant media sites like Zmag, and personal blogs that link to a wide range of relevant news and articles. A growing number of people are turning to these alternative sources of information and hopefully soon the alternative/independant media will be seen by general public to be as dependable and accurate/reliable if not more than mainstream media [is considered]. In addition foreign media like BBC (which is mainstream but considered more unbiased than American media) and Al-jazeera are also good sources of news and can offer a more worldly perspective and view on events that local pro-american ones can't.