American News: Kitten Dies
Maybe it’s Kansas City, but I’ll never get used to American news.
If you look at the online Kansas City Star, a typical American newspaper, there are 17 menu items under ‘News’ and because it’s in alphabetical order, ‘World’ comes last.
In the previous non-alphabetical version of the Star online, World News was still down the bottom of the menu, below ’sport’, ‘finance’, ‘entertainment’, ‘weather’, and ‘what famous people are eating today’. Check any Irish or British paper and you’ll find the World news up at the top, just after National news.
On television in Kansas City if world news is covered at all, it is usually in a snappy segment called ‘Around the World in Sixty Seconds’, as grudingly the wars, famines, disasters, and cultures of the rest of the world, are dashed off in seconds like a legal requirement. Often most of these ‘World’ stories are actually about New York City, or Washington D.C. as if the world is flat and ends at the coast of the US.
The United States has huge land borders with Canada and Mexico, yet sees no reason to report whatever might be happening on the other side of those borders. When I lived in Ireland I was exposed to far more news on Canada and Mexico than I am now living next door.
This evening’s Yahoo News lists 7 lead stories>. National. The nation of the USA. Main stories. Seven. They include:
• Security Council OKs Mideast peace deal
• Police eye money trail in airliner plot
• Sri Lanka faces refugee crisis amid lull in fighting
And then there, holding position number 7 in the National news of the United States of America, is the story about a kitten:
• Kitten who helped nab phony vet is killed by car
Yahoo hasn’t lost all sense of perspective however, because it does have an alternative ‘World’ set of headlines, some of which are the same as those above deemed appropriate for US Headlines, but the kitten is pushed off by “Typhoon kills 105 in China; 190 missing”
See Also:
• Irish to Americans: When Negative is Positive
• Irish Conversations in the Midwest, and elsewhere
• Dear Ireland, Kansas City is hot
• USA & Ireland: Little Differences #3 - Robins
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