As the film will show, there are specific reasons as to why most Americans have had little or no knowledge about East Timor, and yet almost everyone has some knowledge about the atrocities that were committed in Cambodia.
Information accessed via the Media is therefore always a translation of what actually occurred.
And this process of translation is a highly nebulous area, prone to conscious and unconscious manipulation in order to serve a particular purpose and package the information according to and in order to achieve a desired or prescribed affect. Not just in America, but globally. Of course subaltern and countercultural forms of media exist. The Media is one of the primary sources of mass cultural production in the modern world. Therefore, a study of the Media provides important raw material for cultural anthropologists since we re attempting to understand culture, how it operates, and how it reproduces and reinvents itself.