It's worth reminding ourselves every so often that the Internet and Twitter and so-called citizen journalists haven't changed everything in our world.

In spite of its manifold and manifest problems, the United States still rules most of the globe. Its Middle-Aged-Middle-Class-White-Western-Male-thinking (if not all its skin) still stands astride the earth like a colossus — sword in one hand and the mainstream media clenched tight in the other. As if nothing has changed. Or can change. Ever.
 
Through television, radio, movies, newsmagazines, newspapers and the wire services (and now much of the Internet), the United States has a virtual monopoly of mainstream international information. It dominates the international media just as  — for now  —it still dominates the world.
 
For instance, America’s endless attacks on other countries (Viet Nam, Cambodia, Laos, Nicaragua, Panama, Grenada, Dominican Republic, Libya, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan to name only the most obvious and public in the past few years) are justified, time after, time by Western journalists who see them as the reasonable actions of “our side” against "the dark side."
 
It’s not surprising. American “official statements” and American reportage of those statements pour into the world’s newsrooms day after day, night after night, in an endless stream of doublespeak, bafflegab and misplaced patriotism.
 
There’s no getting away from it. You watch the Berlin Wall come down on American TV in Helsinki. You see a lone man stand bravely in front of the tanks of Tiananmen Square on American TV in Mauritius. You read about America’s invasion of Iraq in Time Magazine in Johannesburg. You hear about the English princeling's peculiar version of love-talk on American radio while on a beach in Jamaica. You hear the latest horror story from Pakistan through CNN or Fox (more entertainment than journalism) in Canada.
 
After years of this constant battering, journalists everywhere see the world — even their own world — though American eyes, American-think, American Middle-Aged-Middle-Class-White-Western-Male-culture. 

You can’t run.  And there’s nowhere left to hide.
 
Not even Canada.


Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)
 

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