Motorola has just issued a travel restriction: Motorolans traveling to Mexico City must consult with the company's security services.
More people have died in what amounts to combat in Mexico in 2008 than died in Iraq. When will the media pick up on this enormously important and massive armed conflict in a neighboring country?
8 comments:
Hooray. Susan and I are going to Mexico late next week...not Mexico City though.
Yeep. What's Motorola's policy on paying your ransom should you be taken into the hills? Make sure it's good, cuz did you ever see the movie "Proof of Life?" Bethany's gonna shack up with Russel Crowe the minute he shows up on the doorstep vowing to rescue you, just like Meg Ryan did. And that will suck for you cuz they'll sort of forget to rescue you at that point.
Now, to be snarky about your media consumption, rather than your likelihood of coming home alive from your business trips. The NYTimes website lists three articles in the last week under the category "Mexican Drug War" and a handful each month going back throughout 2008. Not that it's getting equal time (or front page placement) to Iraq or Afghanistan or the bailouts or the international crisis du jour (maybe the Russian/Ukrainian natural gas dispute?), but it's out there. NPR and the BBC (where I first noticed the story) have done recent extended pieces as well.
Between this and your post on the media bias re: Israel, I'm wondering if you're experiencing the practical manifestation of the financial collapse of the newspaper industry (esp. the Tribune Co.). Maybe Chicago is really getting short shrift on original reporting, foreign bureaus, in depth coverage, etc. What are your typical news sources, papers, mags, broadcast, or net on a daily, weekly, monthly, semi-regular basis?
I've seen tons of media about the mexican problem. Most of what I have read has had more to do with Tijuana and whatever the hell city that's across the border from El Paso, rather than Cuidad de Mexico proper. But it was pretty clear that it was a semi-military situation.
Of course, I don't watch TV news nor do I read the paper for the international news. I surf the web and listen to NPR. So I'm not a typical consumer of news...
My major news source is CNN on line. I often read reuters.com as well. I almost never read the Tribune in print.
I cruise any metropolitan newspaper (on line) when a story is mentioned about that metro (via newslink.org -- greatest website ever).
I didn't precisely miss that the drug war is happening, I've been meaning to bring it up for a while, I just think it is disproportionately covered, by a lot.
For instance, ABC's This Week Without David Brinkley has a *permanent* segment showing the names of the dead soldiers killed in Iraq and Afghanistan that week. I know Mexicans are not Americans, but I don't think the drug war has been mentioned once by that show in a year.
60 minutes does a scattershot of hundreds of stories in a year and I listen to every show (iPod) and I don't think they've done a single segment on it.
I don't think Face the Nation or Meet the Press have either. And CNN would *much* rather cover one dead toddler for 100 hours a week for six months than tell me about a civil war going on across the border.
So yes, the NYT is covering it, but so little compared to other less important stuff -- like the nearly irrelevant issue of whether Illinois will have one or two votes in the senate over the next two months.
It's just very disproportionate to the importance--I mean it affects the cost of my blow, man!
Now I have a new theory. It's not that you have a paucity of news, but that you have too much of it, or that your brain isn't successfully filtering it into the "crap i don't care about" bin. I think I feel like I'm appropriately aware of the drug war in Mexico because when that item caught my attention I listened carefully to it, and when the 1,000 other items that seemed frivolous, or at least repetitive, came on I tuned them out.
I hardly ever, ever watch CNN (and NEVER FoxNews on principle). I listen to a lot of NPR, but only half-attentively sometimes; I skim the Times semi-regularly, augmented by the Newshour on PBS (which, I now recall, was actually where I saw the Mexican drug war story); I catch BBC radio or C-Span if I'm flipping channels and it sounds interesting or I'm waiting for sleep. I read features in the New Yorker or the Atlantic or the news weeklies if one comes my way. And 1-3 times a week I'll see the Daily Show or Colbert and be informed of the existence of some story that I'll then look up to actually find what I missed.
I guess what I'm saying is, you're probably right that the unfiltered mass of coverage is skewed in all kinds of undesirable ways, and that's a problem, but I think it's partly the audience's fault for not being more discriminating. If CNN is giving you crap news, then for god's sake stop wasting time on their site! And if I've seen all the news I care/need to know about a topic (will Burris be seated?!?!?!) then I tend to not even notice or not remember if there's 47 other stories that I don't read about it.
As for 60 Minutes and the Sunday shows and the 7pm network news, I loved it growing up, but I hardly even consider it now -- don't know if it's them or me that's changed. I don't think they're useless. The few times I tune in, there's usually something worthwhile during the broadcast, but I think I resist because its too unpredictable how much of the hour is going to be interesting.
You could be right. I absorb a *ton* of news. It's a *lot* political (all the sunday morning shows every week plus Left Right and Center and Washington Week).
But I do cruise headlines at least once a day at Reuters and CNN on line.
But with school starting back up, it looks like 30o pages a week for the law class will be standard, so I might scale a lot of that back.
Mexico has problems? With Drugs?
You must be mistaken.
Please, don't forget to tip your bellboy.
Pay no attention to the men with the uzis.
Post a Comment