Are Americans Indifferent to Europe?

Are Americans indifferent to what is happening in Europe unless there is some direct effect on them? If so, the news media would simply be catering to their tastes in focusing on other matters. One could ask whether such journalists have a social responsibility to provide the news that is intrinsically newsworthy even if customers do not think they need it.  Physicians, for example, do not prescribe what their patients need based on what the latter think they need. Two events in Europe can be cited as being newsworthy yet they went virtually uncovered in the American news media.

Horst Köhler resigned at the end of May, 2010 amid a barrage of criticism for remarks he made during a visit to Afghanistan. It was the first time in four decades that a German president has quit the post, the nation’s highest even though it is largely ceremonial. According to The New York Times, "Mr. Köhler set off the criticism when he said in an interview with Deutschland Radio, the public broadcasting company, that German soldiers serving in Afghanistan or with other peacekeeping missions were deployed to protect German economic interests." Although the newspapers covered the story, no mention was made on the major U.S. broadcast news media.  Americans could have learned something by viewing a president whose office it is to preside without taking partisan positions.  Although they are not to be ceremonial, American heads of government, including the governors and the U.S. president, could have learned from the story how taking a partisan position undercuts the presiding role, which is a part of their own offices.  Even aside from such utility, moreover, the story was inherently newsworthy because Germany is a large state in Europe. Its president resigning was thus a big deal, even if the office was ceremonial.  Were Queen Elizabeth II to abruptly resign after getting complaints from having made a controversial statement about the British military, CNN, Foxs News and MSNBC would be all over that story. The "news blackout" in the American states can thus be taken as indicative of something deeper going on in the editors' decisions. Is there really still some "Anglo-American" axis as many people on the continent of Europe still believe?  Are Americans marginalizing continental Europe? If so, is it out of some vestage historical attachment?  The US today is formed by states whose land had been part of France, Spain, Sweden and the Netherlands as well as Britian. A cultural attachment to one of these would thus be reductionistic. Yet the continent feels very far away from the attention of American broadcasters and perhaps even the American people themselves.

The other major European story occurring at the time of the German president's resignation was the Eurovision show, which is the European equivalent of the American Idol. The Rachel Maddow Show on MSBNC made a brief mention of it on June 1, 2010. Lena Meyer-Landrut, the winner, had become the superstar across Europe with her song Satellite, yet virtually no mention of her was made in America. Particularly considering the difficulty with which many Germans have had in feeling pride in their state given the Nazi atrocities in the last century, Lena's unabashed patriotism was itself newsworthy (and healthy for the Europeans). It is odd, given the tremendous popularity of American Idol (and Lena in Europe), that neither the Eurovision contest nor Lena received arny attention from American broadcasters. Political indifference or ignorance cannot explain a cultural snub on a type of pop icon that Americans would have valued.

Evidently, European news must clearly affect Americans for it to be covered in the United States. For instance, there was plenty of coverage of the Greece debt crisis, undoubtedly because Wall Street was being affected. Yet in spite of the relevance to the EU's bailout of states overwhelmed by their public debt, there was virtually no broadcast coverage in early 2011 of Germany's objection to the EU having a pooled emergency rescue fund. Nor was there coverage of the Franco-German proposal to give the EU government a role in seeing that the states having the euro have fiscal policies in sync.  The E.U. itself is only rarely mentioned other on the news networks. That is probably due in part to the fact that most Americans have no idea what the EU is, let alone that it exists. One could thus point to the social responsibility of the newscasters to bring the public up to date.

I suspect that Europeans pay more attention to what is going on domestically in the U.S. than vice versa. ON visits to Europe, I have been stunned by the attention being paid by ordinary people there to American politics. During Bill Clinton's fiasco with Monaca Lowinski, the story was front news and much discussed by Europeans in their leisure. The typical American does not follow stories such as Villipan's juridical vindication against Sarkosy, for example, or Berlesconi's hiring of a young prostitute. To be sure, the concentration of power in the U.S. Government makes for a tall edifice that is visible even across an ocean. Were there one president of the E.U. with power roughly equivalent to the American president (i.e., the European states transfering most of their sovereignty to the EU), perhaps that would galvanize American attention (and journalistic newsworthiness).  Even so, there is more than enough scandal in the EU that would undoubtedly be of interest to Americans. For some reason, the broadcast news editors are efffectively gate-keeping as concerns news from Europe.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/01/world/europe/01germany.html