Big Think

Question: What's the matter with media?

Shashi Tharoor: The sad thing, I think, about America’s media reality is how little it prepares Americans to live in the world. You turn on a program called World News Tonight and you get 29 minutes of . . . of American news. I find European friends saying, “That’s supposed to be world news?” And the fact is that if you go to Europe or India for that matter, you won't see a lot more of America than Americans ever see of Europe or India. And it’s . . . it’s a shame that . . . that that happens. And particularly now in our present media environment where people with specialized interests can focus just on those interests and everything else gets knocked out, the general media impact of a . . . an insular view of the world is that it will deprive people who are not sufficiently focused on other sources of information . . . it will deprive them of the opportunity to understand how the rest of the world lives.

Recorded on: 9/18/07