{"id":202,"date":"2010-01-11T11:20:13","date_gmt":"2010-01-11T15:20:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/?p=202"},"modified":"2010-01-11T11:20:29","modified_gmt":"2010-01-11T15:20:29","slug":"the-education-of-western-media-consumer","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/2010\/01\/11\/the-education-of-western-media-consumer\/","title":{"rendered":"The Education of a Western Media Consumer"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have a problem. I’ve been trying to be a good Westerner and keep up with international news when it breaks, but I have a really hard time finding a set of good, diverse sources covering those issues. Let’s take the events a few weeks ago<\/a> in the Philippines. I must have first heard about this story on NPR or read it in the New York Times. It piqued my interest and I wanted to know more, but I have zero context for the political situation in the Philippines so I went to Global Voices<\/a> hoping one of their fantastic regional editors was providing a primer and found nothing about the massacre. There are a couple posts up now about blogger reaction to the events<\/a> and coverage of remembrance events<\/a>, but those went up weeks after the initial events. Don’t get me wrong, Global Voices does great work, they just don’t do the type of work I was looking for at the time, which was coverage of a breaking event from a non-western perspective that didn’t assume so much pre-existing knowledge that I couldn’t follow along. I really don’t want to have to depend on NPR and The New York Times for all my news. There are a couple things I can think of that might help:<\/p>\n

*Google News searches: though there’s no editor here so this really doesn’t help with my context problem, and I spend a lot of time trying to figure out what’s crap and what’s not, which publication has a slant and what that slant is, etc.<\/p>\n

*Wikipedia: I can’t remember where I saw this, but there was talk after some event in 2009 that Wikipedia was the best source for information on it (was it some shooting or something? I can’t remember). That’s actually a very intriguing idea, especially because of the external links Wikipedia provides, but in the most recent instance when I was looking for news–information about the health of the Nigerian president–Wikipedia’s Nigeria page had no info.
\nI’m sure there are existing sources\/sites that are completely obvious that I’m missing. I look forward to my friends who are entrenched in this stuff schooling me!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I have a problem. I’ve been trying to be a good Westerner and keep up with international news when it breaks, but I have a really hard time finding a set of good, diverse sources covering those issues. Let’s take the events a few weeks ago in the Philippines. I must have first heard about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2061,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2061"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":204,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions\/204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/cbracy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}