Ethnocentrism in the News

All newspapers, regardless of where they are published, have an ethnocentric viewpoint.  That is because newspapers cater to their readers and what they want to read, and readers most often wish to read about what directly affects their own lives. …. Although the idea of ethnocentricity might be natural, what ought to be questioned is the nature of the ethnocentricity underlying the phenomenon.  In other words, what kinds of affiliations does the focus on us – on our loyalties and interests in a particular place – reveal about ourselves, about how and where we choose to place ourselves in the world?

Segall, A. and Schmidt, S.  Reading the Newspaper as a Social Text.  The Social Studies, May/June 2006.

Of all the things I did wrong (ok,  could have done better) in my student teaching/long-term sub placement, my biggest regret is not incorporating current events and media more effectively in the AP Human Geography class.  We did use current events and news stories in class, of course.  I regularly brought in news articles that illustrated some concept we were studying – outsourcing, genetically modified foods, migration, suburbanization, deindustrialization – and had the students identify and apply the geographic concepts.  Sometimes we pushed further and had excellent critical or evaluative discussions about the topic.  But while I was using media in the classroom, I wasn’t teaching media in the classroom, which is the focus of Segall and Schmidt’s excellent article.

Most of our Methods class discussion on this articled centered on the authors’ main point, that newspapers (and other media, by extension) are social constructs that present someone else’s choices about who and what is “news.”  The danger for readers lies in accepting these choices as objective truth, not subjective choice.  The task for readers (and for us, as teachers) is to challenge those choices and the reasons behind them, and to ask, whose voices and stories aren’t we hearing and why?

But as I was re-reading the article this week, as well as focusing more on the Geography class that I am still teaching, I was intrigued by the spatial aspect of their argument.  Geographers have terms and models that explain the natural ethnocentrism that the authors refer to:  the gravity model posits that the larger and closer something is to us, the greater its pull and attraction on our attention and actions; the idea of distance decay says that the farther away we are from something, the less we care about it and the less we are affected by it.  (Human Geography is not rocket science.)  But geography can’t answer the second part of the question – what does this say about how we place ourselves in the world?  How does that ethnocentrism translate into how we spend our time, energy, and resources? Who we value and who we do not?  Should we try to fight against distance decay and care more about far-away places, and if so, what criteria should we use to replace distance and familiarity?  Can we care about everything?

Lots of questions here, and unfortunately, I asked my students to contemplate very few of them this semester.  In the spirit of reflection and improvement, however, I did find a great and engaging tool to begin the exploration that could inform some of those conversations.  The site is called Newsmap, out of Palo Alto CA (and my AP HUG class could, in fact, explain why so many high-tech firms are located there).  The link is http://newsmap.jp/ 

From the Newsmap site:

Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.

A treemap visualization algorithm helps display the enormous amount of information gathered by the aggregator. Treemaps are traditionally space-constrained visualizations of information. Newsmap's objective takes that goal a step further and provides a tool to divide information into quickly recognizable bands which, when presented together, reveal underlying patterns in news reporting across cultures and within news segments in constant change around the globe.

Newsmap's objective is to simply demonstrate visually the relationships between data and the unseen patterns in news media.

Google News automatically groups news tories with similar content and places them based on algorithmic results into clusters. In Newsmap, the size of each cell is determined by the amount of related articles that exist inside each news cluster that the Google News Aggregator presents. In that way users can quickly identify which news stories have been given the most coverage, viewing the map by region, topic or time. Through that process it still accentuates the importance of a given article.

Newsmap also allows to compare the news landscape among several countries, making it possible to differentiate which countries give more coverage to, for example, more national news than international or sports rather than business.

Enjoy.