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>Is it really that hard to believe that journalists are better informed about a faraway country then ordinary people? From the average person yes. From ordinar
by coldtea 3y ago
>Is it really that hard to believe that journalists are better informed about a faraway country then ordinary people?
From the average person yes. From ordinary people in general (even not including academics and such), not necessarily, and not as an aggregate group.
Journalists follow rote narratives about faraway countries - either those of the establishment, or of their peer circle.
Or they are too superficial. Or their understanding of the foreign country is the pals they spoke too that tell them what they wanted to hear (or belong to their political persuassion/peer group/class in the first place, and are hardly representative of the country, as in "I spoke to my fellow Ivy League school educated Nigerians about the situation in the country, and they confirmed what I believed was the case").
Most of them are also notoriously ignorant about foreign relations, the history of different countries, and so on, even at the basic level (but still write nonetheless).
The journalists that specialize on a country, and have deep knowledge of it beyond the surface level and beyond their local same-ideology opinions, are few and far between.
The layman Indian immigrant for example would more often than not know more about India and what's going on, than the average journalist writing about some latest development there (or merely rewriting a Reuters or AP report).
- rrr_oh_man 3y ago> From the average person yes. From ordinary people […] not necessarily. That does not make any sense.
- shotnothing 2y agojournalists are knowledgeable -> average person says yes ordinary people are knowledgeable -> average person says not necessarily
- coldtea 2y agoThe first is about the statistical notion of average. If knowledge about X country's affairs goes from 1 to 10, the average score of journalists covering it will be quite higher than the average score of the general population (who usually can't even pinpoint the country on a map). So that journalists writing about X country will have better knowledge on those matters than the average person's knowledge is true. The second is about whether a journalist writing about country X is expected to know better than any ordinary person (who isn't a journalist). This is not necessary true. There are laymen that have vast more/better knowledge of country X (history/global affairs enthusiasts, expats that lived and worked there, and especially immigrants from X) than many such journalists. In other worlds, journalists are not like scholarly experts on a subject, where their knowledge by definition trumps both the average person's knowledge (an aggregate figure), and aany layman. They're more like knowledgable in those matters, but whose knowledge can easily be trumped by many better informed laymen, especially laymen with ties to the country that understand the situation on the ground and the background much better.