In other words, America is so un-corrupt and perfect, let's create a spectacle out of every similar story that takes place around the world so that Americans don't question the legitimacy of American institutions.
The implicit storyline is American exceptionalism, which is most valuable when it can be used to justify wars and military action that would otherwise be considered inappropriate or morally questionable.
When you consider what percentage of so-called "world news" is stuff like this, newspapers start to seem like they are all state run propaganda operations. I realize that part of it is just the entertainment value people derive from feeling superior to others, even when the others are presented as victims, but an objective, critical media would simply ignore most stories like this in favor of less juicy but more impactful stories about local/national issues.
It's propaganda designed to create a mental state in the reader, namely that the US is great. We don't print the text of national hymns in our newspapers, we just print nearly every silly or bad thing that happens in any other country, even in the midst of much more significant/abhorrent conduct by our own government.
It's propaganda and nothing more. It's useful both for distraction and dehumanization.
And I suppose if we only printed things about our own country you'd probably castigate the US for arrogantly ignoring the rest of the world. Or that if other countries report on American corruption and social problems, it's not equally an attempt at deflecting from their own issues? Maybe we should only print positive news about others and negative news about ourselves?
I think your definition of "news" is basically this kind of story...
As a thought experiment, imagine if American readers of the "world news" section routinely were led to think things like "Hmm, I wonder what would happen if our policymakers tried that idea" or "wow, maybe the people in country x are just like me and deserve my profound respect, even though my country is launching missiles into their neighborhoods".
Illegal immigrants are dehumanized in the American press too, as are sex workers. The point of creating psychological/empathic distance between the reader and the subject is to permit the reader to suppress the basic reflex of valuing human life. Imagine the news story about an illegal immigrant sex worker who was found murdered.
Why so we can launch missile strikes to help free them from the oppressive regime run by a mentally deranged leader?
Note the similarity with the backstory behind all of our recent military aggression.
The standard American exceptionalist narrative is that much of the rest of the world consists of people who are victims of illegitimate regimes. We should pity them (emphasis on humanitarian sentiment) but then we should feel morally superior and allow our indignation to lead to military strikes intended to help them.
Bottom line: Military strikes, the projection of power into remote corners of the world, are simply acts of aggression no matter how they are spun. They are designed to threaten and intimidate the rest of the world in a way that aids American interests, not to help people.
Why so we can launch missile strikes to help free them from the oppressive regime run by a mentally deranged leader?
- No. So we aren't guilty of taking important events within a country and to a country as of little importance except in how we contextualize them through our own American lens. You know, the stuff of foreign policy hawks always interested in meddling in other nations.
Much of it is just not news. Obviously 3rd world countries are going to have weaker institutions and certain kinds of social problems that first world nations won't have.
Thus there is an endless stream of possible "appalling" stories but many more deeply interesting, geopolitically relevant, culturally relevant stories that never get written. Some are just not sensational/sexy enough, but the larger problem is that our media actively drives the narrative of American exceptionalism mostly through the world news section.
I didn't get that at all. In fact, there's a lot of this same talk about American elections, that e-voting makes it easier to rig an election. There's stories every election year about hacks on electronic voting machines, stories about votes being flipped in the computer, etc. It makes big news (CNN, Fox, BBC, etc) every four years at least.
This article says nothing about America. The multitudes of articles that DO mention America and electronic voting, especially regarding Diebold voting machines, all sound pretty similar.
My point is more general. Look at the "world news" section of a major newspaper for a few days in a row. Most of the stories make no sense as actual news.
We are strongly encouraged by our newspapers to be irate about random human rights abuses on other continents. Recall the dehumanization propaganda used by the Nazis. Casting inhabitants of foreign countries as hapless victims is simply a softer version of the same propaganda technique.
Once we view them as sufficiently dehumanized (they mistreat their women, they lack voting rights, they have ballot corruption, they utilize child labor, have beliefs based solely on religious dogma, etc. etc.) it becomes significantly easier to launch missiles at them. This propaganda strategy is broadly applied to entire swaths of the world.
Your point being that making a spectacle out of election fraud in a different country should only seek to hide the fact that the American system is flawed in other ways? I'd agree with you, but then we'd both be wrong.
It is possible to question the integrity of one's own government whilst also highlighting atrocities committed in other countries. Countries that also contribute to the global economy.
The implicit storyline is American exceptionalism, which is most valuable when it can be used to justify wars and military action that would otherwise be considered inappropriate or morally questionable.
When you consider what percentage of so-called "world news" is stuff like this, newspapers start to seem like they are all state run propaganda operations. I realize that part of it is just the entertainment value people derive from feeling superior to others, even when the others are presented as victims, but an objective, critical media would simply ignore most stories like this in favor of less juicy but more impactful stories about local/national issues.