* In this week, we learned and discussed about international news in the US. This topic was really interesting for me because I had never watched the news with such a view point. But once I payed attention about the international news here in US, I noticed some trends. I have a lot of ideas and interesting about this topic, but I cannot tell everything here so I will focus on the question, " Why is there a difference of the amount of information depend on the regions?"
-In the class discussion, many classmates suggested the answer that relevance or potential involvement influence the difference. I really agreed with that, because generally saying, the reason why people are trying to get news informations, included both of domestic and international, is that they need to know these informations in order to avoid the danger, which is a human nature to survive. Thus, people tend to seek the informations that relate with them directly or indirectly. For the discussion, I was going through the NBC international news wed page, and counted the number of countries dealt in this page. Not only NBC, but also another main news networks' web sites have the trend that the news about Europe or Middle East are much more than other regions, such as Asia, Oceania, Africa or even Latin America.
-Why was it happened? Because the amount of relationship is really different depend on the regions. I think there are some elements to decide the quantity of relationship with US. First of all, the physical distance influences a lot. So the Europe news in US is huge and Asia and Oceania are a little. Next suggestion about the element of difference of international news is the weight difference of influence to the US. Latin America and Africa are less information, even though their physical distance are near enough. This suggestion explain the reason, I think. At first, I felt weird about the less news of latin America and Africa because these places are near to US and I guessed there is a relevant enough. But then, I listened to other's opinion and the reason why I could understand this situation was because these regions is not against US a lot, which means less danger to US people, and these countries are still developing and there are not so much influence to US. This element shows the less involvement, so it did make sense of a little information of Latin America and Africa in US. Finally, I want to inform about the reason why many news of Middle East is happened in US, even though the physical distance is big like Asia or Oceania. I researched and found the interesting suggestion. Global Connection. U.S. Foreign policy explains the reason of strong connection between Middle East and US. It says "For most of 20th century and now into the 21st, the US has had global interests and a global reach to match. In the Middle East, the US has made itself a key player by using its diplomatic, economic, and military power in support of its national interests" Following this explanation, there are a lot of proofs of historical and cultural connection. This is the final element about relationship that I want to mention in this blog. Middle East and US are connected strongly by some cultural backgrounds so naturally news about Middle East are getting bigger. In sum up, US is physically near to Europe and culturally near to Middle East, therefore the international news about these regions are relatively more than other places.
-As the proof that it isn't happen only in US, I looked up Japanese news network, NHK's international news page, and watched how different between countries. The news of US is the most followed by China, South Korea, Iran and Myanmar. Almost the Asia dominants the international news in Japan, which is because these are physically near and historically have many relations as well. The biggest number of news is about US, and this is because Japan has strong historical or cultural connection with US, such as ally of US, even though there is a long distance.
-Of course, these trends were found out from only one day's news, but I guess these trend would apply generally because at least people pay attention to the news of countries that have strong relation with own countries, just like I mentioned earlier in this blog.
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