Sometimes it takes a catastrophe to force cultures to undergo self-examination. Today, as American missiles target shadowy figures in the mountains of Afghanistan, many Americans, indirectly spurred by our media (and despite the flags waving on the sets of newscasts), are doing some rethinking about their country's role in the world.

The September 11th tragedy sent a shock through a society that has for many years been isolated and insulated from the rest of the world, especially the countries now in the crossfire. That estrangement has been media fed and media led, as public attention was often deliberately diverted by a TV system that Larry Gelbart of "MASH" fame labeled a "weapon of mass distraction." We lurched from one big scandal to another — O. J. to Monica to Gary Condit — as sleaze replaced substance and news was dumbed down into a diet of tabloid sensationalism. The majority of humanity began to disappear from TV view, glimpsed only through the prism of cutesy features like "the World in a Minute," short blips of footage that convey images of chaos, not people with whose problems we might feel empathetic.

Network executives defended this on grounds that they were "giving viewers what they wanted." In fact, as ratings for exploitative programs went up, the share of those watching TV news went down. News programs actually lost viewers as news biz and show biz fused. For many who hungered to understand the world, to quote myself quoting others, "the more you watched, the less you knew." As we have since discovered, ignoring the news can be fatal.

Now that more lethal weapons are being deployed in what CNN brands "America's New War," mass audiences are back, drawn by a need to know in an environment of fear, alarm and outrage. Initially, after 9/11, the spectrum of mainstream television coverage was narrow and devoid of context, as Michael Massing noted in The Nation: "As the nation prepares to go to war, the coverage on TV — the primary source of news for most Americans — has been appallingly superficial. Constantly clicking my remote in search of insight, I was stunned at the narrowness of the views offered, at the Soviet-style reliance on official and semiofficial sources."

You saw many scenes of journalists turning to maps to show where Pakistan is and trying to explain who lives in Afghanistan. On many TV outlets, there were confusing explanations of Islam, with little attention paid to the history of U.S. support for fundamentalist forces in Afghanistan or why Washington's alignments in the Middle East stir so much opposition. Few voices from the region itself were heard.

The reasons for this are found in the structure and orientation of our media system and its abandonment of international news. This has fueled two cultures, virtually segregated from one another. A small elite operates globally with "a need to know," and most people are in effect told they do not. In an age of globalization, global news has declined, and not only in the United States. It may be because, as power shifts away from governments to multinational corporations, ordinary people have a shrinking role to play in decision-making. Hence, the emphasis on consumerism over citizenship. Hence, that media mantra to the masses: "Shut up and shop." This is followed by the conventional wisdom that no one cares. When news executives say that, they really mean that they don't care.

Another shift has kept us in the dark as well. As media analyst David Shaw reported in The Los Angles Times, "Coverage of international news by the U.S. media has declined significantly in recent years in response to corporate demands for larger profits and an increasingly fragmented audience. Having decided that readers and viewers in post-Cold War America cared more about celebrities, scandals and local news, newspaper editors and television news executives have reduced the space and time devoted to foreign coverage by 70 to 80 percent during the past 15 to 20 years."

He quotes prominent journalists who say these cutbacks might have contributed to the uncertainty and confusion among many Americans about why terrorists committed so heinous an assault on September 11. "I think most Americans are clueless when it comes to the politics and ideology and religion in [the Muslim] world and, in that sense, I think we do bear some responsibility," says Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe, "in consequence, we are not only less informed about what's happening in the world but about how other see us."

A New Perspective
Now, a month after the attack, some outlets are slowly opening up to perspectives that acknowledge that the media system has failed us. It has failed to promote a sense of global citizenship even as globalization both binds us closer together and stirs a vast army of critics on the left and among the left out. Skeptical and iconoclastic writers like Michael Wolff in slick publications like New York Magazine now say, "International news, cast aside by almost every media outlet, at best a nostalgist's beat, is a life-and-death issue. Big media had clearly gotten its priorities wrong."

You can see a tremor of a trend in a flurry of stories that ask "why," as in "why would they do this to us?" and why do so many around the world "seem to hate us." Clearly, the events promoted questioning, although non-American journalists have had a field day putting down what they see as American ignorance of the world. One example: a piece in The Guardian in London titled, "Americans Just Don't Get It."

The fact is, many of us don't "get it" because most U.S. media companies won't do their job and give us a nuanced view of the world. While, thanks to the Internet, many diverse sources of information are available, mainstream media is still the main source of news and explanation for most citizens.

There are any number of crucial issues swirling around the current world situation. The problem is that these debates are still flying below the radar of most mainstream media outlets. This is a time when all views should be reported, discussed and debated. We need to deepen our global conversation. We need more investigations.

The media has a major role to play in reminding us all of the many ways in which are lives are entwined and futures interconnected worldwide. Ostriches can put their heads in the sand. People no longer can.

— Danny Schechter is the executive editor of MediaChannel.org. His latest book is "News Dissector: Passions, Pieces and Polemics, 1960-2000," from Akashic Books. A version of this article will appear in Die Zeit in Germany.

AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

The Media Channel is a not-for-profit project of OneWorld and The Global Center, and is produced by Globalvision New Media.