Think globally, read locally

One of the most common targets of popular anger is the media. The minds behind the airwaves, headlines and satellite broadcasts are constantly lambasted for their biases, ignorance and verbal injustices.

But the media's real influence isn't found in the positions they advocate; rather, it's the issues they choose to discuss.

The ability to rewrite the popular agenda is the real power of the media giants -- they make sure that everyone's talking about the same thing.

A brief scan of headlines and opinion sections from across the world will quickly turn tiring in its lack of variety: the Arab-Israeli conflict, Indo-Pakistani nuclear terror, the war on terrorism, the sexual exploits of Catholic bishops. Imagine: a whole nation thinking about the same issues.

The problem with all this is that there is little truth to the commonly held belief that "what's going on in the world" really matters to our daily lives.

So while debates about who's right and who's wrong are largely successful in getting people riled up, they also serve to obscure other important issues that are intimately connected with our community.

All this isn't to say that our lives are disconnected from the rest of the world; instead, the point is that what gets discussed are issues that we have little or no influence over. What needs to be examined is how our lives can affect change.

Which is why local media have an important role to play in bringing issues closer to home. But even this role is tough. One need not look farther than the pages of The Daily to find this out.

Issues like the Arab-Israeli conflict, climate change and Bush's national agenda have all found a home here. And the result has been fiery articles that vilify the other side.

But opponents in these small battles of the press have failed to realize that their grumblings don't go far in affecting change. This highlights one of the major characteristics of global issues - citizens have little influence over them.

Global issues - the kind that repeatedly show up in the media - can be defined by their political distance from the citizen. Their outcomes are decided behind closed doors, local opinions aren't sought, and media debates serve largely to generalize, stereotype and eliminate individuality.

Local issues, by contrast, are issues where our voices matter, where opinions can be debated by those who make decisions and those who are affected. Good examples are the debates on tuition control, graduate-student unionization and the ASUW elections. Talking about local issues puts the power back in our hands.

Local issues do have global dimensions, and through discussing these we can affect global change. But to do so we must reexamine our own lives in relation to the world. Issues like our consumption, the origins of our clothes, the quality of our food and the rights of community immigrants are all local issues that are intimately connected with the rest of the world. And addressing them can certainly affect global change.

To address a national audience, the complexities of an issue have to be smoothed out, the critiques have to be simplified and our links with them have to be ignored. Approached this way, we will certainly be exposed to the stereotypes and generalizations that come with them. And when we finally do turn to our communities, we may not do so with minds of our own.