Because news contains information about recent events, we can use it to learn about what is currently happening around the world.

But if we want to be truly "global citizens," we need to go beyond the news we encounter in the course of our everyday lives. In spite of globalization, most of the news Americans get from TV, the radio, the Internet, magazines and newspapers is produced by US-based media companies. And lots of news in other countries is overlooked by the US media.

Why is this the case? There are many reasons. One basic reason is that the US media companies may assume that Americans don't care about events in the rest of the world unless those events impact Americans directly. To a certain extent, this makes sense -- people everywhere probably do like to read about events that are closer to them and seem more relevant to their own lives.

However, as we will see later in this module, Americans may be more interested in world events than you might think based upon how little international news is available to them. So we must look to another reason why there is little international coverage, such as...

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