A crowd outside the Fábrica de Arte, a cultural centre that is managed by singer X-Alfonso and self-financed through its ticket sales, although a large part of the initial investment came from Cuba’s Ministry of Sports. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

By Ivet González
HAVANA, Apr 23 2014 (IPS)

Standing in line for a concert at the Centro Cultural Fábrica de Arte, a cultural centre in the Cuban capital, Alexis Cruz anxiously checks his billfold, where he has the price of the ticket – 50 Cuban pesos (two dollars) – and three CUCs (equivalent to one dollar each) to buy something to drink.

“I can rarely attend these things, because they cost one-quarter of my monthly salary of 450 pesos [19 dollars],” the 26-year-old lawyer tells IPS. “But all prices are this high or higher, and at least here I can hear good music.”

The shortage of attractive, affordable entertainment and cultural events is becoming a problem in Cuba, where 20 dollars is the average monthly salary paid by the state – which still employs about 80 percent of the workforce, despite efforts to pare down the government payroll.

As family budgets have shrunk in a crisis that has dragged on for over two decades, it is nearly impossible for most to afford the steep entrance price at the new discotheques and clubs that have begun to liven up Cuba’s nightlife since economic reforms began to be introduced in 2008, opening up more space for private enterprise.

Since then, differences in socioeconomic levels have become more pronounced.

While Havana’s emerging elite are entertained in the glamorous private bars of upscale neighbourhoods like Vedado, Miramar and Playa, there are few options for the rest of society.

Although Cuba has nearly 300 cinemas, 361 theatres, 267 museums and 118 art galleries where programming is financed by the state and ticket prices are subsidised, the installations are increasingly run-down, the quality is irregular, the schedules are inflexible and the publicity is inadequate.

“If I want to go out and dance at a nice place, I save up for a month or two, which I am able to do thanks to my mom, who brings in almost all of the income in our household from cooking sweets for a private cafeteria,” says Jorge Mario Rodríguez, 24, who lives in the poor suburb of El Palmar.

Like other young people, Rodríguez, who works as a bill collector for the state-run Empresa Eléctrica power company, likes reggaeton, pop and salsa. But he does not frequently go to concerts, the theatre or the movies.

“Those places are downtown, and transportation is really bad,” he says. “When there isn’t a party at some friend’s house, I try to stay home watching series or movies on DVDs.”

Besides the programming of the five government TV channels, there is an informal alternative network that offers the latest international series and movies.

The network includes shops where people can rent and copy movies, TV series and music, and stalls that sell pirate copies of albums – businesses that have been legal since 2010, when the government expanded the number of areas where private enterprise is allowed.

Very popular is what is known as “the package of the week”, which weighs one terabyte and includes the latest series, soap operas, movies, documentaries, cartoons, videoclips, reality shows, music, software, antivirus updates, language courses, magazines and many other things – all for 50 pesos (two dollars).

Every Tuesday, Laudelina Rodríguez’s living room is packed with people copying portions of the “package” onto USB drives. Paying between five and 20 Cuban pesos, customers take home up to eight gigabytes of widely varying content.

Rodríguez, an officially registered “cuentapropista” or self-employed worker, distributes some 600 gigabytes and three or four complete “packages” a week to her roughly 300 clients in the Cerro neighbourhood. She says 65 percent of her customers are under 30 years of age.

“Most in demand are the ‘narconovelas’ [soap operas about the world of drug trafficking] and Mexican ‘telenovelas’ [soap operas], followed by series from the United States and reality talent shows like ‘La Voz Kids’ and ‘Nuestra Belleza Latina’,” Rodríguez tells IPS.

“They also like Cuban films and comedy shows. But national programming is almost never included, maybe because no one wants to have copyright problems,” she says.

Intellectuals are scandalised by this kind of cultural consumption in Cuba, whose socialist government has tried for 50 years to build “the new man”, guided by values that differ from those of Western capitalism.

The Apr. 11-12 congress of the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists (UNEAC) called for efforts to combat the increasingly banal tastes of the population.

Havana’s International Book Fair is one of the most popular, and lucrative, cultural events in Cuba. Credit: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

“We have to analyse the ‘package’ so people will understand that they are being cheated,” writer Abel Prieto, a former culture minister, said at one of the televised sessions of the UNEAC congress.

In an interview in the online magazine OnCuba, Prieto, who is now a presidential adviser, acknowledged the state’s responsibility with respect to what he considered the deformation of popular tastes.

He added that the production of entertaining national cultural programming was urgently needed – content that could draw in young people but wasn’t “empty of meaning.”

Those meeting at the congress also called for an easing of longstanding tensions between art and the market, in this socialist country where mass access to culture has been subsidised for decades.

The economic reforms, which reached the world of culture in 2010, eliminated the subsidies, and now artists and institutions have to find ways to become self-financing.

In 2013, the budget for culture, art and sports was reduced by 172 million dollars with respect to the 2012 budget. And only one percent of public spending went to that sector, according to official statistics.

The UNEAC congress proposed evaluating non-state management of cultural projects, such as cooperatives.

But the government tends to react to independent initiatives by adopting restrictions, as illustrated by the closure of privately run film parlours on Nov. 2, on the argument that they had never been authorised.

Although they cost more than the state-run cinemas, in just over a year the film salons had become increasingly popular, offering a broader menu of options in suburban areas.

Ulises Aquino, director of the Ópera de la Calle, which brings together 120 artistes, tried to make the company self-financing with shows in his private restaurant El Cabildo. But the government closed down his restaurant in 2012 over alleged management irregularities.

“We covered our personal expenses and financed our artistic productions,” Aquino tells IPS. “But [the authorities] got scared when international media outlets said I had built an ‘empire’ by improving the living standards of our artistes.”

Without the restaurant, Ópera de la Calle now depends on the budget assigned by the National Council for Performing Arts, which does not cover reparations of equipment, or musical instruments or costumes, and does not cover the cost of lunches and community work.

“Subsidised creations and creators must continue to exist – not due to tradition or name, but because they truly contribute to the spiritual and cultural welfare of the nation,” wrote Elena Estévez in the interactive section of the IPS Cuba website.

Economist Tania García, an expert on culture, tells IPS that subsidising ticket prices to cultural events is an investment in human growth.

In the last five years, the arts accounted for between 4.3 and 4.7 percent of GDP. But to that must be added, according to García, the value of cultural exports as well as taxes on the personal incomes of artists.

A young black street vendor selling "acarajé", a traditional type of fritter, in Salvador, Bahia in Brazil’s Northeast. Credit: Fabiana Frayssinet/IPS

By Walter García and Fabiana Frayssinet
RIO DE JANEIRO, Oct 21 2013 (IPS)

Carla Vilas Boas is of mixed-race descent – African, European and indigenous – like a majority of the population of Brazil. But she spends hours straightening her hair, trying to look more like the blond, blue-eyed women she sees in the mirror of television.

The 32-year-old domestic worker acknowledges that Brazil’s popular telenovelas have started to include characters like her – people from the country’s favelas or shantytowns, who work long workdays for low wages.

But among the actors and the models shown in ads, “there are only a few darker-skinned people among all the blue-eyed blonds. And you wonder: if I buy that shampoo and go to the hairdresser, can I look like that?” she remarked to IPS.

But her hair “never looks that way,” even with the new shampoo or the visit to the hairstylist, and Vilas Boas said that makes her feel “really bad.”

More than half of the women in this country of 200 million people – where over 50 percent of the population identified themselves as black or “mulatto” in the last census – do not identify with the images they see on TV.

Experts say that because of the prejudices reflected in the choice of actors and models, advertisers potentially lose a large segment of consumers.

A survey by the Data Popular polling firm and the Patrícia Galvão Institute (IPG), a women’s rights organisation, interviewed 1,501 women and men over the age of 18 in 100 towns and cities spread across every region of the country.

In the study “Representations of women in TV advertising”, 56 percent of those surveyed said ads did not show “real” Brazilian women.

For 65 percent of the respondents, the model of beauty in TV ads has little to do with the way Brazilian women really look, and 60 percent said they think women get frustrated when they do not feel reflected on TV.

Most ads show “young, white, thin, blond, straight-haired upper-class women,” the study says.

At the age of 17, Karina Lopes feels insecure as a woman. Her body has changed, but not into the shape she sees in the ads offering her clothes, make-up and low-cal yogurt.

“Even if I eat that yogurt every day, I’ll never be thin like that woman selling it,” she told IPS. “You feel bad because that image is so different from the way you look. Normal women aren’t shown on TV.”

Mara Vidal, assistant director of IPG, said “women come in all colours and shapes. We aren’t stereotypes. That’s what the public is saying – it’s not something that women’s organisations or academic studies came up with.

“It’s the public who are saying ‘we want to be better represented in society, not just by one single, universal type’,” Vidal told IPS.

She said she also suffered in the past. As a girl, she didn’t want to go to school because other kids called her “black girl with broom-bristle hair” because of her brown skin and red hair.

“I didn’t start liking my hair till I got to university, when I stopped straightening it,” she said. “My generation wasn’t as aware as people are today. The concept of someone who was ‘good-looking’ didn’t include people with our hair and colouring.”

In the study, 51 percent of those surveyed said they would like to see more black women in ads, and 64 percent said they would like to see more women from lower-income sectors.

Brazilian TV and the country’s world-famous telenovelas have gradually started to overcome prejudice and today black or brown-skinned characters are less limited to the traditional discriminatory roles of domestics, family drivers, or criminals. Some have even cast darker-skinned women as central characters.

But advertising, unless it specifically targets that segment of the population, still does not represent blacks.

“In an ad for margarine we don’t see black women or happy black families. But in the area of cosmetics we’re starting to see a change,” Vidal said.

For example, there are now lines of products specifically designed for darker-skinned women and shampoos for “curly” or “dark-coloured” hair.

Meanwhile, advertising by the government and public enterprises has become increasingly “politically correct,” reflecting the country’s ethnic diversity.

But that is not happening yet “as much as we would like,” said Vidal. “Brazil, because of its tradition of excluding blacks, has not yet dared to fully show that reality.”

Renato Meirelles, director of Data Popular, said that exclusion is now hurting advertisers. According to the polling firm, women in Brazil represent 500 billion dollars a year in income and are the ones who decide on 85 percent of what families consume.

Women are not just a “niche market but the main consumer market, and advertisers don’t know how to reach out to them,” Meirelles told IPS.

The idea that “Brazilian women want to be like Europeans is old,” he said. “Now women are proud of their new identity.”

Factors that have helped boost this newfound self-esteem include laws aimed at fighting racial discrimination that have been adopted in recent years and the fact that some 30 million people have left poverty behind and have moved up into the middle class.

According to Meirelles, “the big problem of advertisers and advertising agencies is that they belong to the elite and their decisions emerge from an elite mind-set. That’s why they fail to understand that a new consumer market has emerged.

“Their fear is that white women won’t buy a product if the girl in the ad is black. Few of them worry that black women won’t buy products because the model in the ad is white,” he said.

“Aspiration has given way to inspiration, where the model represents successful black women. Companies should understand this process of achievement that we have experienced,” he said.

By Lydia Lim
UNITED NATIONS, Jul 12 2013 (IPS)

Apart from being an actress, film producer and writer, Geena Davis is a leading advocate of equal gender portrayal in the entertainment media.

Courtesy of Geena Davis

In 2007, Davis launched the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, which has sponsored the largest research project to date on gender in children’s entertainment. Now, the Geena Davis Institute has partnered with UN Women, with support from the Rockefeller Foundation, to undertake its first-ever global study to analyse the depiction of female characters in family films.

Davis believes that the media industry remains discriminatory in its portrayal of women simply because these stereotypes have remained the status quo for a very long time. After playing a power role as the first female U.S. president in “Commander in Chief” and seeing enthusiastic public reactions to the TV series, Davis is convinced that media’s limited portrayal of women can and must change.

IPS correspondent Lydia Lim spoke to Davis about the gender disparity in media images, as well as the entertainment media’s potential to better depict women’s empowerment.

Q: Women and girls are often depicted negatively on-screen due to gender stereotypes in the media. We’re now in the 21^st century: why is the media industry so behind on portraying gender equality?

A: My non-profit has looked at television and family films made in the United States, covering a 20-year span, and unfortunately, the percentage of female characters only went up 0.7 percent during those 20 years. That would mean we’d achieve [gender] parity in around 700 years.

So clearly, we need to become very proactive about improving the quantity and quality of female characters, especially in what children see. I had assumed that in the 21^st century, surely we were showing kids boys and girls sharing the sandbox equally.

My theory is that since the ratio of male to female characters has been exactly the same since 1946, pretty much everyone was raised seeing fictitious worlds with far fewer female characters than male characters, so much that it started to look normal. I think that’s probably why universally, people seem not to notice that there are far fewer female characters unless you point it out.

Q: What kind of effect does this negative depiction of women on-screen have on young girls?

A: We’re training children to see girls and women as not taking up half the space in the world, if this is the image that is reflected to them. And also, with the limited and negative portrayals of the female characters that are there, we’re teaching them that women and girls are not as important as men and boys.

They don’t do the important things; they don’t hold the important jobs; and very often, they’re not integral to the plot. We also found that the function of a female character in a film or a children’s television show is to serve as eye-candy, rather than having an occupation or aspiration.

Q: Does this gender disparity have to do with few women holding positions of power behind the scenes, such as in the roles of directors and screenwriters?

A: Definitely. Currently, female directors are at about seven percent, writers at about 13 percent and producers, 20 percent – which are all very low numbers. And we know from our research that if there’s a woman director, producer or writer, the percentage of female characters on screen goes up. So another way we can attack the problem is to increase the number of women behind the camera as well.

Q: In “Commander in Chief” (a U.S. television series in 2005), you portrayed the first female president of the United States. Were you satisfied that your character depicted women’s empowerment?

A: I was thrilled to do it. My first thought when I was offered the job was, what could be more iconic than that? And I had already been fortunate to play some parts that really resonated with women, so I relished the opportunity.

Unfortunately, my administration was very short – we only had one season of the show – but a group called Kaplan Thaler did a study after the show was on the air and found that people were 68 percent more likely to say they’d vote for a female candidate for president if they were familiar with the show.

Just by seeing my character behind the desk 19 times, it was enough to profoundly change a lot of people’s minds about the possibility of a female president.

Q: Are you confident that this global study under the partnership with UN Women will change the way people around the world perceive women?

A: I’m very excited about this first-ever global study of the depictions of female characters around the world. [By examining] the 10 top box-office grossing countries, we’ll look at character representations, what role they’re playing, and their physical depictions.

And we’re able to do this broad-reaching study because of the participation of UN Women and the Rockefeller Foundation. We think it will be very impactful, and I think this will be very valuable information for everyone and also critical to any NGOs conducting global programmes because of the profound influence media images and messages have on civic, cultural beliefs and behaviours.

Excerpt:

‘Chal Parha’, a popular TV show hosted by Pakistani singer Shehzad Roy, takes viewers on a virtual tour of the country’s education system. Credit: KT/IPS

By Zofeen Ebrahim
KARACHI, Mar 28 2013 (IPS)

Mounted on a Harley Davidson, Shehzad Roy, a popular Pakistani singer, is on a mission: to expose the country’s 176 million residents to the good, the bad and the ugly side of Pakistan’s education system.

Stopping by small villages dotting the mountainous terrain, or traversing miles of sandy desert and green valleys and plains, Roy takes viewers on a virtual road-trip for the popular television show ‘Chal Parha’ (meaning ‘Come, Teach’), aired on the private channel ‘Geo’ every Saturday and Sunday night.

The 23-part programme – part of the channel’s initiative to promote public awareness on education and literacy – highlights everything from the dog-eared national curriculum and ancient textbooks to dilapidated school buildings without water, latrines and electricity.

In his hallmark tongue-in-cheek style, Roy ends every episode by assigning the government “homework” – policy recommendations to correct the system.

The show has no shortage of scenes to cover: Roy has already shown his viewers everything from beautiful buildings devoid of teachers to three-roomed schools where a multitude of classes are taught simultaneously by one teacher.

Some episodes have covered children studying in makeshift schools comprised of nothing more than tents, after school buildings were destroyed in the 2005 earthquake. The money earmarked for reconstruction was misplaced, officials say.

For students in rural areas, studying under a tree is all they know. Many classrooms are taken over by village notables as storerooms for animals and fodder.

Things are no better in the big cities, where children can be seen cleverly sidestepping streams of sewage or covering their noses to avoid the foul smell on their way to school, while uniformed students are often crammed into classes with no electricity or ventilation, forced to learn by rote.

The programme quickly became a hit, perhaps because a “picture is always much more effective than words, especially a real one with real stories”, Baela Raza Jamil, head of the Islamabad-based NGO Idare-e-Taleem-o Agehi (Centre for Education and Consciousness), told IPS.

“I have asked my team to consider it compulsory viewing,” she added.

Pakistan lags on education targets

In April 2010, education was made a fundamental right for all up to the age of 16, after the insertion of Article 25-A into Pakistan’s constitution.

Yet, according to Roy, almost seven million children between the ages of five and nine do not go to school and those that do drop out after just a few years of schooling.

Some believe the root of the problem dates back to Pakistan’s inception. According to Haris Gazdar, a senior researcher at Karachi’s Collective for Social Science Research, “The dominant strand in Pakistani nationalism is divisive and has not presented a viable cultural model for nation-building.”

He believes that education, which in “virtually all other countries is regarded by the nationalist elite as a vehicle for nation-building, has no real value for Pakistan’s divided elites”.

Though many families “will invest in their children’s education to the best of their capacity, interest and knowledge, nowhere in the world has universal schooling been achieved through private demand alone”, he told IPS.

“There is no collective demand for education in Pakistan because there is no collective agreement on the cultural model for nation-building.“

Jamil agreed, stating that good-quality early childhood education in Pakistan was accessible to “fewer than ten percent of Pakistani children”.

Currently leading the Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) for Pakistan with several partners and volunteers, she was quick to support her statement with dismal figures: “Seventy percent of government-run primary schools have only one or two rooms for five classes,” she told IPS. “More than 40 percent of schools are without latrines; 66 percent do not have electricity; and children in 37 percent of schools lack drinking water facilities.

“Pre-primary classes in Pakistan seldom have an exclusive teacher or teaching-learning aids, which are required by the national curriculum,” she said.

The gross enrolment rate, including under- and over-age children, at the primary level is 86 percent, out of which 33 percent drop out. Meanwhile, only 18 percent of those who complete primary school are eligible for mid-level education.

Of those who make it to the 10^th grade, only 30 percent successfully complete high school and only three percent make it to the tertiary level.

This pattern has brought the national literacy rate to 58 percent, far below the United Nations Millennium Development Goal (MDG) target of 88 percent.

Enlightening and painful

Sprinkled with candid interviews with schoolchildren, and discussions with parents, teachers, government officials, clerics and psychologists in over 200 schools, the show has been an interesting yet painful experience, according to Roy.

Others, like professor A.H. Nayyar, a prominent physicist and peace activist, laud the programme as “riveting” and a much-needed step towards achieving the MDG education target in the absence of government action or proper resource allocation.

“The national education policy of 2008-9, promised a higher allocation for education, but that promise was never met,” he told IPS. According to official data, Pakistan spends just two percent of its national GDP on education.

The travelling TV show also offers glimpses into other reasons youth stay away from school, such as poverty, child labour and early marriage.

The use of corporal punishment is also a strong deterrent. Roy recently exposed the story of eight-year-old Malaika, whose teacher threw a pen at her eye, damaging her cornea and leading to the detachment of her retina. The teacher claims Malaika was “not paying attention”.

That episode prompted three provincial assemblies to pass a resolution scrapping Section 89 of Pakistan’s penal code, which allows “guardians” to punish children in “good faith”.

Additionally, a bill on corporal punishment that had been languishing in the National Assembly (NA) gained fresh impetus after the show was aired. Tabled by legislator Attiya Inayatullah back in 2010, it was unanimously passed in the assembly on Mar. 13, which, she told IPS, was quite “historic”.

When the bill officially becomes a law, individuals involved in abusing children will be sentenced to one year in prison, a 500-dollar fine, or both.

Another episode traced the life of a young girl with no hands who, despite learning how to write using only her feet, had been pushed out of school due to poverty. A few days after the show aired, Fehmida Mirza, the speaker for the NA, presented the young girl with a check for 5,000 dollars in order for her to continue her studies.

In 2012, top TV news stories included elections, violence and extreme weather events in the United States, with little attention paid to most international events. Credit: scott*eric/CC by 2.0

By Jim Lobe
WASHINGTON, Jan 17 2013 (IPS)

The presidential election topped news coverage in 2012 from the three major U.S. television networks, closely followed by violence in the United States and Middle East, and extreme weather events in the United States, according to the latest annual review by the authoritative Tyndall Report.

Britain also received a significant amount of airtime on the three most-watched evening news programmes, with the London Olympics and British royal family garnering more attention than any other foreign country or news story except Syria’s civil war, according to the Report.

Syria, the top foreign news story of the year, claimed 461 minutes of network evening news time, or roughly three percent of the total amount of “news” presented by the networks’ weekday evening news programmes, which for most of the public are the most important source of news information.

The Olympics and the British royals together received almost as much attention as Syria – a total of 377 minutes, which was more than the two next biggest foreign stories combined: the December killing in Benghazi of the U.S. ambassador to Libya and three of his staff (163 minutes); and the fighting in Afghanistan (158 minutes).

Apart from those stories, the outside world received minimal or no attention, according to the Report, which for over 20 years has tallied the number of minutes that each weekday evening network news programme allocates to news events.

Despite the controversy surrounding immigration and drug-related issues, Mexico received a total of only 44 minutes of coverage by all three network news programmes in 2012, according to Tyndall’s tally. But that was far more than the rest of Latin America.

“Haiti, [Venezuelan President Hugo] Chavez’s illness and election hardly got anything. Nothing on Colombia, except the Secret Service prostitution scandal there,” noted Andrew Tyndall, the Report’s founder and publisher.

The scandal, in which a team of U.S. Secret Service officers was discovered cavorting with prostitutes, claimed 54 minutes of the networks’ time, or ten minutes more than all Mexico-related coverage.

Similarly, sub-Saharan Africa, led by stories about newly independent South Sudan and the “Kony 2012” viral video against the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), received less than 30 minutes’ coverage during 2012, he said.

The vaunted U.S. “pivot” to Asia and rising tensions in the region also received minimal attention.

The Eurozone crisis, which has had a serious impact on and poses still greater risks to the U.S. economy, received a total of 87 minutes of coverage – or about 40 percent less than the British royals.

“Here we are in this globalising economy and culture,” noted Robert Entman, a communications and international affairs professor at George Washington University. “This shows how the ability of Americans to understand this global interdependence is really hindered by the superficial and glancing coverage to what’s going on in the world.”

While Fox News, CNN and MSNBC are widely recognised as important sources of news, the evening news programmes of ABC, NBC, and CBS enjoy roughly seven times the viewership of the cable channels. Together, they have an average nightly news audience of more than 20 million people.

The Report reviews the three evening news programmes, which present an average of about 22 minutes of news each and together nearly 15,000 minutes throughout the year.

As in previous election years, the 2012 presidential race led 2012 coverage with 2,016 minutes – or about 15 percent of total news coverage. The increase in domestic political news during election years has normally come at the expense of international or foreign policy news, and 2012 was no exception, according to Tyndall.

At 461 minutes, the violence in Syria ranked second as a discrete news story, followed by Hurricane Sandy (352 mins); the Summer Olympics (246 mins), and partisan wrangling over the federal deficit (206 mins). The Libya crisis ranked eighth; Afghanistan, tenth; and the British Royals, sixteenth out of the top 20 stories, both foreign and domestic.

In addition to Hurricane Sandy, the top 20 included four other major weather stories: the slew of tornados that hit various parts of the country; the summer’s western wildfires; extreme winter weather early in the year; and Hurricane Isaac, which caused severe damage in the Caribbean and the U.S. Gulf Coast last August.

These five weather events claimed nearly 1,000 minutes of coverage on the three networks, or about seven percent of the year’s total. Yet until Sandy none of the programmes explored the question of their possible relationship to climate change.

“Only one story in the first week of Sandy addressed rising sea levels being possibly related to global warming,” Tyndall told IPS. “That was an angle of the weather stories that was woefully undercovered.”

Extreme weather events in other parts of the world, such as Europe’s harshly cold winter, major flooding in Australia, Brazil, China and the Philippines, and drought in the Sahel, received at most only peripheral coverage on the three networks.

News of ice melting more quickly than anticipated in the Arctic Ocean and Greenland received a total of nine minutes on the three programmes, according to Tyndall.

“It’s been the same for many years now,” said Dan Hallin, a communications professor at the University of California at San Diego about the lack of coverage of climate change. “Sandy produced the beginnings of some discussion of that, but in general, the issue has been glaringly absent.”

On stories with a purely international focus – that is, those that did not include an explicit U.S. foreign-policy angle – Syria ranked at the top, followed by the two British stories, and the political upheaval in Egypt (93 min), which in 2011 received over five times as much coverage.

The sixth-ranked international story last year was the foundering of an Italian cruise liner, followed by the Israel-Palestinian conflict (76 minutes focused mostly on Israel’s Gaza offensive); the aftermath of Japan’s 2011 earthquake and tsunami (45 mins), Greek anti-austerity protests (38 mins); Iran’s nuclear programme (37 mins); and the schools-for-girls campaign in Pakistan (34 mins).

“Outside our borders, it looks either like the froth of the Olympic Games and the royals or violence,” noted Entman. “I think it’s legitimate to take note of both, but there are a lot more important substantive things.”

“The world that is presented on U.S. newscasts is an extraordinarily narrow one,” noted Peter Hart, an analyst at Fairness in Accuracy and Reporting (FAIR), a progressive press watchdog group. “The substantial attention given the British royal family last year is a pretty clear demonstration of what U.S. corporate media think of as important news from abroad.”