Kate Kahle-Why Some Wars get More Attention Than Others

Some wars, like Syria's, are given more press, especially in America, than others, like Yemen's. This is partially due to the death toll numbers being higher, but the issue is way more complex than that. American ideology is ver self centered. American news spends an amount of time discussing the entire rest of the world, that is comparable to how much time other countries news stations spend covering just America. This could be because of our ideals as a nation, thinking we don't need to care about the rest of the world, the vast size causing us to border with very few countries, or more esoteric reasons. Whatever the reason may be this makes getting the american press that foreign wars need to push them towards a resolution is desperately difficult to get. Americans select the things they cover based on direct relevance to americans, and whether there is a clearly defined 'good' and a clearly defined 'bad' side of the war. While the war in Syria is quite clearly being fought against an 'evil' in the form of Al Quaeda and ISIS, the war in Yemen is getting less coverage because it isn't so black and white in nature, and so few things in this world are.

I think that America's unofficial policies on what information corporations make readily available to citizens are ludicrous. So few things in this world are a crisp black and white of morality, with polar 'good' and 'evil' forces. The world I live in, at least, is colored entirely in shades of grey.  It's a little patronizing for major news sources not to trust americans to form their own opinions without them coming prepackaged down to the last inflection of the newscaster. The way to fix this problem, in my mind, is to seek alternative news sources to stay informed about EVERYTHING that's happening in the vast and ceaselessly interesting world that we live in, and not what the TV news and magazines have simplified and processed into tiny digestible morsels of half truth. I think that vilifying a group of people just because they don't follow our national ideals is dangerous and leads to bigotry and hate, like the McCarthyist communist witch hunts in the 1950s. They feared what they didn't know without knowing the whole story, which led the american public to act cruelly out of fear. It is so important for us to care about what is happening in our world and to take the effort to know all sides of a story, even if it takes more time and thinking than being spoon fed information by the cable news. We need to show the major american news sources that we care about the rest of the world, and don't want a prepackaged story where one side is vilified while another is lionized. We can make those decisions for ourselves, and we can decide what to care about ourselves, and it doesn't all have to be the same thing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/02/world/why-some-wars-like-syrias-get-more-attention-than-others-like-yemens.html?ref=world&_r=1