The generation that learned about the world through World War II had a canonical set of media to rely on that responded to a hierarchical structure. That structure has been blown apart over the last few years. We need to think hard about the answers that are implicit in news coverage. Yet when crises are extensively covered, as in Somalia, the story creates its own momentum. We are living in an era where the forces that rule our lives are more internationalized than ever.
News travels around the world in a matter of moments.
Most Americans don't understand these phenomena, and they need to. We are inhabiting a strange moment in which the story selection process of a group of CNN editors in Atlanta has a remarkable degree of influence on the world's primary peacekeeping force. The United Nations, paralyzed for decades by the superpower deadlock in the Security Council, must respond to an international agenda that seems arbitrary and episodic. Governments from around the world are looking to the United Nations for leadership, yet our own political process has not sorted out the most basic questions of whether foreign policy should be conducted as an elite or a public concern. Either way, we owe it to the world that the decision is an informed one.