Americans live in a bubble. They receive very little news from the outside world and most of it is well censored for their protection. During the Afghani and Iraqi wars Americans were inundated daily with the attacks and counterattacks, the taking of Fallujah and the retaking of Fallujah without ever really understanding where we lost Fallujah in between those dates, and the strain and horror of American and foreign casualties less, of course the blood and gore of the gruesome details. For the details, Americans needed to view just about any other world report on the same story where the horrors of war were all too apparent.
In Jim Lewis's Slate story on the Iraq War from April 5, 2004, "Front Page Horror, Should newspapers show us violent images from Iraq?" he talks about the taboos that are inherent in American journalism. He comes straight out and says, "A newspaper could not have published similar pictures [burnt contractors on a bridge in Fallujah] of American soldiers, because there remains a taboo on showing explicit images of our own military dead. And it would not have published similar pictures of dead Iraqis, because there remains a disinclination to show detailed images of the effects of our own military campaign."
Yet those same military images were readily available in almost every other country on the planet. The world didn't have a problem seeing the horrors of Americans at war, only Americans did.
Further back in our history we freely participated in the overthrow of democratically elected governments. Did we state this at the time? Never. We paid Honduran mercenaries to overthrow democratically elected Guatemalan President Jacobo Arbenz because the United Fruit Company didn't like losing some of its unused land to give peasants a helping hand and then we sent in Vice President Nixon to congratulate the US puppet dictator replacement, Carlos Armas. The US was treated to a smiling Nixon congratulating a dictator who eventually killed hundreds of peasants for the pleasure of his master, the US. The world heard the whole story of how the US took down an elected official while Americans only heard the lies about Arbenz's ties with the Soviet Union which never existed.
Today both left and right news agencies are lamenting the fact that Russia's Putin is meddling in Ukraine and aiding the separatists. Neither side is very worried about the fact that NATO and the IMF caused the problem in the first place when they helped overthrow democratically elected president Victor Yanukovch in 2013 and 2014. To hear American press today, the Ukrainians have been living a peaceful life until Putin started interfering. There is no mention at all of the riots instigated by the West that forced the elected president to flee for his life, nor of the introduction of NATO and American aid in clear violation of agreements between Russia and NATO after the collapse of the Soviet Union in the 1990s.
Even news about stories inside the US is cleansed for proper consumption so that Americans aren't too alarmed at what is really going on. Consider the worst avian flu crisis in US history. All the major news outlets have reported on it, but if you ask 99.9% of Americans if they are aware of it, they will tell you no.
Here is Fox News's May 7 th quote on the disaster, "Virulent H5 avian influenza strains have spread to 14 states in five months and affected about 26 million birds in the worst outbreak of the disease in U.S. history, according to the USDA." And here is the title of that same article, "Despite US efforts, bird flu thought to spread between farms." Can you feel the fear from the title? Me neither.
No mention anywhere, yet this crisis could cripple chicken, egg, turkey and other poultry production across the US. The world knows all about it, but ask any American and you'll get the same answer, "Huh? Can't be serious, I haven't heard of it."
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