Mosul, Iraq, a city in the midst of war and terror, is facing a large scale invasion by the Iraqi army after months of planning. The Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) currently controls the city of Mosul, the second largest in Iraq, where more than one million Iraqi citizens have been living in terror under the control of ISIL.
The Iraqi military is currently fighting in small skirmishes around the border of Mosul; however, its soldiers will soon move closer to the heart of the city in an attempt to reclaim it. The outcome of this battle will be decisive in a war that has affected millions of lives across the globe.
With all this being said, it is odd how little Americans and M-A students know about the situation. When asked to try to define Mosul, sophomore Gabby Adler jokingly remarked, “Ya duh, Mosul is a type of Cambodian food.” When informed that Mosul was in fact the site of a monumental battle, Adler admitted she had no idea what was going on there.
Though Adler does not go out of her way to read or watch the news, she does claim to encounter current events through social media and students’ discussions on campus. She hears news related to the debate far more than anything else.
Claims like these are not hard to find. Junior Sandy Han commented, “Lately, its been mostly U.S. news, what with the election… We haven’t actually gotten a whole lot of world news lately, except for obviously the refugee crisis in Syria… but a lot of that factors into U.S. news and election news.”
Finn Bjerknes, another junior at M-A, had the same thought as Han about the news coverage of the election, saying that the last news story he’d heard was about “Trump… [He doesn’t] know what it is, but it was Trump.”
All joking aside, the media coverage of this election has most certainly been impressive to say the least. Trump and Clinton dominate most major news corporations with 41.14 percent or more of front page stories relating heavily to the election.
That amount includes non-American based news sources as well as American ones. When only counting American news sources, that percentage jumps up to 49.19 percent.
There is a reason that news sites continue to write articles about the election: it’s a popular subject. Of the 54 stories on the trending pages of six main American newspapers and websites, 33 of them directly related to the election. This number amounts to 61 percent.
That’s a lot of stories covering one
event. And while it’s obvious that this is an unusual election cycle, coverage of it should not overshadow what is happening around the world. Our obsession with the latest thing Trump said, or the winner of the last debate, is taking away from our awareness of the world around us.
In a country where a significant amount of people believe that the answer to all of our problems is to shut out the world around us, perhaps what people need the most is more awareness of what is happening in the world. The closed-mindedness that leads to calls for building a wall or bans on muslim immigrants may simply be caused by the ignorance of the serious situations and events happening in the world.
As the election approaches, news sources will only cover it more, and our awareness of what goes on in the outside world will only get smaller. Just remember to try to look at a little more than the front page of news; it may not have the full story.
