The Informed Masses

For the last three days I have been sifting through various news sources looking for a potential topic or just searching for a story that would inspire me to write a blog. What I realized after three days of reading article after article is that Canadian citizens really can't be all that informed of global issues if they rely primarily on the big news sources. Our major Canadian news sources focus on internal issues, which makes sense, as well as international news. It is the international news that I have an issue with.

The international news sections consistently contain stories of war, disaster, political upheaval and death. These events are obviously important but there are so many other issues that are happening continuously and only appear once in a blue moon. Instead of relying on these conventional news sources I looked up international development news and came across various small scale new sources that focus on these different issues, the news that is consistently changing and effecting the lives of thousands of people.

One source that I found to be particularly interesting was the Guardian in the UK. It has articles on food security, climate change, commodity prices and population growth. Of course the Guardian also covers it's own internal news but somehow manages to do justice to international issues as well.


Maybe it's a commentary on North America in general. Hundreds of North Americans donate money to various causes to help the 'poor black children', but how many are fully aware of the issues behind this poverty? I am willing to bet that not many do, even within my own family there are many misconstrued notions of global issues that exist. Unless you going looking for these global issues they probably wouldn't even be a blip on the radar of many North Americans, which is a crime in itself. I think its time we took a step outside of our North American bubble and really looked at the world around us.