I quit the New York Times

Today I spent a good amount of time searching the internet for international newspapers. After all, how can one expect to learn about communication in the global village without actually venturing into the global village?

My search began at onlinenewspapers.com, a website with a fairly comprehensive list of newspapers from around the globe. You can search by country and then sort of weed through papers by regions of the country.

Being so globally minded, I of course started picking out the ones that said "English" in parenthesis. Most of these foreign-newspaper-in-English websites featured a number of global stories, focusing on nuclear sanctions and the Iraq war.

I decided to read something more specialized, so I went to the Moscow news, offered in both English and Russian. I read the front page in English, which featured the typical international stories.

I then went to the Russian-language only version, where I came face to face with the picture of a dead man, hanging in a city square, surrounded by a mob. The picture was dated, but how much so I couldn't tell. This picture was, however, missing from the English version of the online newspaper.

The same thing happened when I visited the Al-jazeera website. Al-jazeera, the infamous Iraqi news network, has two versions of its website. The English was comparable to the Moscow news, offering top headlines from around the world. It seemed an objective and credible news outlet. However, when switching to Arabic, it became clear from the gruesome pictures that the top stories were different.

I find myself wondering if this is a common practice. It would not be practical for me to examine each version of every newspaper from every country around the world. However, I am curious to know why a news organization is willing to subject its readers to horrifying images. Of course, the editors and staff want to present a polished image to rest of the world, so they present the “foreigners” with a clean publication. For its own people, however, the horrors of war and death are printed for all to see.

The picture on the Moscow news belonged to a story that wasn’t in the English version, so far as I could tell. Are graphic pictures of crime in Russia, or of the war printed in Arabic language papers, used to stir anger in their citizens, as a type of propaganda? Or have I stumbled onto a fundamental difference between American, Russian, and Iraqi culture--one in which conflict-ridden countries like Russia and Iraq have become accustomed to the sights of war, crime and death--so accustomed, that its just another day in news?