America the ignorant
After Sept. 11, Americans have rushed to educate themselves about Islam, the Middle East and foreign affairs. But how did we get so benighted in the first place?
By Laura Miller
Sept. 27, 2001 | Almost as soon as rescue workers began sifting through the rubble at the sites of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, many Americans launched another search -- not quite as desperate, perhaps, but crucial nonetheless. Citizens scrambled for information about the places the killers came from and the ideas and beliefs that could drive men to lay down their lives for the chance to massacre ordinary American office workers. Foreign correspondents with expertise in the Middle East say their phones have been ringing off the hook, and virtually every newspaper in every town across the nation has run a variation on two basic stories: "What is Islam?" and "Why Do They Hate Us?" Adding to the shock of thousands of violent deaths was the bewildering information that the people who so passionately want us dead belong to nations and groups that many Americans had never even heard of.
Why are Americans so ignorant of what's going on in the world outside our borders, even when our own government is playing a key role in those events? That's a question that dogged Anne Kelleher, a professor of political science at Pacific Lutheran University in Washington state, while she was lecturing in Ankara, Turkey, last year on a Fulbright scholarship. "I tried to explain to the teachers and students there why, during the U.S. presidential election, foreign policy wasn't front and center. For them, it's unfathomable that the most militarily powerful, the most politically influential country, with the most impact on the global economy, plus a culture that's transformed the world via its media -- how a country with that kind of far-flung influence can choose its leader with no attention to the issues that it faces worldwide." Kelleher cited a January 2000 Gallup poll in which Americans asked to rank the importance of issues in the presidential campaign relegated the U.S. role in world affairs to 20th place.
Ignorance of history, as well as of current events, can have dire consequences. President George W. Bush's use of the word "crusade" in describing his planned war on terrorism was a stunning misstep at a time when the U.S. badly needs to reassure the Muslim world that we aren't on the verge of a new holy war. If that's not disturbing enough, only a year ago the president's national security advisor, Condoleezza Rice, was talking nonsense to the New York Times and USA Today about Iran trying to spread Islamic fundamentalism to the Taliban and "doing all kinds of things with Pakistan"; Iran, a Shiite Muslim nation, is a foe of the Sunni Muslim governments of both Afghanistan and Pakistan. On Sunday, the Times reported that the "outline" of the U.S.'s war plan "often emerges from the private conversations" between Bush and Rice.
Eric Ransdell, a foreign correspondent for nine years in Africa and Asia and currently a documentary filmmaker living in Shanghai, China, blames the American education system for producing know-nothing citizens, people who in turn are unlikely to protest the decline in news coverage of foreign affairs. Recent surveys by such institutions as Harvard and the University of Maryland show that reporting on world events has dramatically shrunk in both the print and broadcast news media.
"For decades we've been reading about how American schoolchildren can't find Mexico or Canada on a map, and yet nothing seems to change," says Ransdell. "These people who don't know the difference between Switzerland and Swaziland then become the main consumers of news. And in poll after poll they tell us that they want less foreign news and more of what I call 'selfish journalism' -- which stocks to buy, sex and beauty tips, 10 steps to a healthier colon and so on. It becomes this horrible feedback loop where people are sent out of our schools in a state of complete ignorance of the rest of the world and then, maybe because they're embarrassed, clamor for even less information on something they know almost nothing about."
Orville Schell, dean of the journalism school at the University of California at Berkeley, says that while "Americans are ever more involved in the world and ever less knowledgeable about it," it's the bosses at U.S. media companies who deserve the blame. "The broadcast media has decided to cut back on foreign news coverage in its infinitely craven efforts to pander to the largest and the lowest common denominator. This last week we've seen what the broadcast media is capable of when they're let out of the constraints of ratings and the bottom line mentality. I'm hearing journalists saying 'Wow, this past two weeks we felt dignified again. We're able to do what we want to do and know how to do. We had the time and the resources and the suits were off our backs.'"
Next page: The tangled roots of global cluelessness