Salon.com News | America the ignorant

OK.. I thought maybe I was crazy when I was a TA that the students knew nothing. Now I know that isn't really true. They did no nothing about history. Sadly most of my knowledge is historic. I remember trying to read up on foreign policy when I was younger. I poured over what I could find.. and still felt I was lacking info. US News and World Report, dropped the World Report part, Time's foreign section is gone. I became more and more frustrated. Then I went to college and gave up reading the news. I was too busy reading other things.

By the time I got out...I was lost in foreign politics, except what my friend Eric kept me apprised of. I still find the nightly news boring. Not because the content is difficult or mature but because it is so fluff ridden. What the author calls "selfish journalism". We used to make a big deal out of watching the foreign parts of C-SPAN in college... Prime Minister's Q&A was always good for some laughs. Now I know why that was Eric's favorite part of the day. It was the only good foreign news on.

Fortunately the web now brings me foreign papers. Especially the UK papers. Since I read them much faster than I read the German ones... I was watching a German news wire durring the whole WTC/Pentagon thing, mostly because it hadn't been slammed.

Do yourself and everyone else a favor. Read a bit of foreign news today, and every day.