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Canada perceived as a ‘black hole’ for news

Following news two weeks ago that there would soon be no US newspaper with a staff reporter in Canada, Edward Wasserman writes in the Miami Herald that America is “an oddly incurious place”.

So why should you care? After all, if Canada were brimming with news US readers would naturally demand to know what was happening there, and metro papers here would oblige. But by conventional US standards of newsworthiness Canada is a nullity. If it’s true, as Churchill remarked of the Balkans, that some places produce more history than they consume, Canada would be the opposite, a black hole that imports trends, culture, politics, histories from elsewhere — from Scotland, England, France, the United States and, lately, the West Indies and South Asia — and emits no perceptible light.

At least that would be the explanation a budget-minded US news executive might offer. The problem with that is that it says more about the wafer-thin imagination of our journalists than the realities of contemporary Canada. And I think it also says something about the weirdly selective way in which our media deem certain parts of the world worthy of notice.

Wasserman, a US journalism professor, says the US media should demand that Americans “pay attention to people abroad even when they’re neither disaster victims nor terrorists.

“Instead, by their inattention, the media perpetuate the dangerous belief that our divine right is to speak and be heeded, never to listen.”