Cultural Differences In News

Image by Leonhard Niederwimmer from Pixabay

Since I watch both American news and Asian news, I have to say not noticing the cultural differences is impossible. However most of the differences are quite mundane. And I don’t have enough skills to describe them in an interesting way. That has been one of the biggest problems for me–how to cut an interesting angle, how to make an interesting point on a trivial topic, how to captivate attention without resorting to exaggeration or dramatization? Well… whenever I have language issues, I always pick my favorite scapegoat–I am a non-native speaker and this is an impossible barrier to overcome. Yet part of me just doesn’t want to accept this easy pointing of fingers. I’ve learned this life lesson in many occasions that sometimes the obvious reason is wrong. Still suspecting it is wrong doesn’t mean I understand why it is wrong and how I can correct the wrong. So without a way to deal with this problem, I just keep trying and hoping for the best–now I am taking another stab at describing several cultural differences I noticed.

Numbers

Asian news is more interested in describing numbers and curves. For example, recently there are droughts all over the world. And California, after years of droughts, finally had a lot of rain in December and January, which resulted in flooding. And the weather forecast kept saying that California still has drought conditions (to a lesser degree) after historical amount of rain, which is quite puzzling. I just can’t understand why so much rain still cannot wipe out the drought condition. I really want to know some figures, like how much rain is needed, what kind of weather pattern can distribute the rain better, how much snow in Sierra Nevada is considered good and how slow should the snow melt to benefit the region. However the news only provided very perfunctory figures. When scientists were interviewed, the camera often cut the scientists off before the scientists could give a nerdy statement about some precise numbers.

Asian news is a little different. Figures and numbers are adored and admired for some reason. The more bar diagrams, curves, comparisons, the better. And the reporters seem to be very proud of their figures. They can dwell on figures of rain (or the lack of rain) in the past fifty years, the different rain patterns, the level of water in each of the reservoirs with low watermark and high watermark prominently printed on the screen. Also they give you the information as to the water allocation to different townships and different industries. I guess most viewers don’t really need all these information, or don’t even care, but there seems to be an inexplicable general agreement that these numbers should be focused on in a piece of news.

Court Cases

American news is very good with court cases. Not only that, one can get more in-depth analyses from various podcasts on YouTube or other places. And social media also provides a lot of worthy information. For example, the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard trial was quite fascinating to me. I didn’t follow their previous court case in London, but I followed a little when they fought each other in court in Virginia. A lot of laws were explained very clearly, and many back and forth arguments were dwelled on with the evaluation of people’s characters, the general expectation people have of those jury members, and the personality and behavior patterns of the two people involved. And even the judge’s political leaning and preferences are analyzed. For example, a liberal judge or a conservative judge can sway the case in different ways.

Actually one of my friends was addicted to TV channel called Court TV and he really watched it. At the time we were all quite astonished that he could really absorb himself in those boring court battles. He wanted to talk to us about different cases, but at the time we refused to listen to him. Now I guess I understand him a little bit more why he’s interested.

Anyway, Asian news tries not to report any detail of court cases no matter how big a news the case has made. Sometimes a case can be so interesting that it is made into a movie, but the focus is always on the story outside of the courtroom. I guess it is because of Asian people’s deep rooted suspicion of the justice system and government officials, so much so that a courtroom is considered a necessary evil without entertainment values.

(To Be Continued Here)