The 116

Via HUMNews, Juan Cole offers up this little gem.

Of 237 countries and territories in the world, the 4 largest newsgathering and distribution companies that supply the world with 90% of news do not cover 116 of them.

These 116 countries or territories contain 4 billion people over half the world.

63 of these media-ignored countries and territories are desperately poor.

All this has security implications for the United States. What do you want to bet that in the late 1990s, Afghanistan was in the 116? Hard to know an attack was being planned out there if you don't know the place exists.

What HUM does not say is that the ignoring of the 116 comes from the news corporations' profit motive, which is increasingly driving them to ignore most real news in favor of infotainment. Desperately poor 4th world countries? Not entertaining.

We definitely live in a fishbowl of athlete/celebrity scandals and missing white women, but things are actually much worse than you might imagine. You could take the FT and be better informed about extra-border issues, greatly ignore cable news to remain aloof about such things as balloon hoaxes and Michael Jackson. But this should be what the intraweb is all about - allowing you to peruse aljazeera.net and your local paper within the same 30 minute window.

I still think that anyone taking two weeks off of American television - which itself requires at minimum a trip abroad, to a remote locale - would be, upon seeing it again, so appalled by the advertising alone that they would be loathe to return to levels of former usage. But absent the fifteen days off, we're not availed to that little window of contempt our corporate overlords have for us, or we should have for them.
Damn.