Are we ‘shallow dolts?’
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Dan Gillmor, with whom I'm to share space on a blogging panel in MPR's UBS Forum soon, says today "American Media Treats Americans Like Shallow Dolts." He concludes this by comparing the covers of Time Magazine this week.
Gillmor writes the Center for Citizen Media blog and, as such, he has exhibited a general distaste for mainstream media as apparently required by the standards of blogging. He says Americans won't buy magazines with thoughtful articles on Hong Kong, preferring instead to delve into the complications of romance.
Here's the covers of this week's Time.
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| U.S. edition | International edition |
Gillmor believes an article on how we love is less important than an article on Hong Kong. But is it?
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Do we have an inferiority complex they haven't told us about?
Update 2:30 p.m. Looking back at the beginning of December, I find another case of a different cover for an international edition.
In the U.S., it was about what makes us good or evil. But in Europe, the cover focused on a much more important topic in today's world: the death of French culture.
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| U.S. edition | European edition |
Perhaps the conclusion in these two cases isn't that we're dolts. Perhaps in the United States, we're more interested in exploring what makes us tick.
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