Kenya Claims Upper Hand In Mall Hostage Crisis

Recently in the news there has been coverage of the Kenyan mall attack/ hostage situation.  Five gunmen including at least one woman came inside Nairobi’s Westgate Mall with multiple different guns and grenades. After the lights shut off, the gunman continued to shoot only allowing Muslims to leave. Multiple people from various nationalities were at the mall during the time of the shooting and a festival was also being held where 50 children were in attendance.

Later in the day, Kenyan officials say the attacks could have been terroristic in nature, and later that afternoon a Twitter account that is reportedly associated with al-Shabaab claimed they were the ones responsible for the attack. As of now forces continue to secure the perimeter of the mall as they close in on the shooters. Many still remain hostages.

Officials also told Embassy workers to stay home and only monitor the local media for updates. These officials who could be in danger in their own homes turn to the media for guidance. I think this has been pretty typical in the past with domestic situations. Everyone turns on the news when they hear about some breaking news, but for an American living overseas to be able to turn on the news and find out what’s going on around the corner from their foreign homes is amazing. To think about how media coverage has grown—and so quickly—is something very interesting to think about.

http://abcnews.go.com/m/story?id=20334295&ref=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2F

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=227433191

Control Room

I have been posting links to websites and things we hear on the news, but I would like to take this blog time to write about something I found to be very inspiring and useful from another class I had last semester. Like I said in my introduction paragraph, I am a Communication major. There is so much I find interesting with communication and how and why and the types of communication available, but I really enjoy news and journalism the most.

Like so many other Communication classes we go over these other types of  things, but what really tied it all together and my love for international affairs was the documentary Control Room (link below). If you ever have a chance to watch this, it is very well done.

Control Room is a documentary made in 2004 from the news organization Al Jazeera's point of view- relevant because they just opened Al Jazeera America.  Al Jazeera headquarters are based in Doha, Qatar. In 2004, America, like so many other allies, was at war in the Middle East and news coverage of the war was picked up from around the world. The documentary walks us through how news coverage in war is conducted. I thought the most interesting thing about the documentary is that it is from Al Jazeera's view point. Our cultures are similar yet so different, and seeing their point of view about war and media and other's media coverage was quite interesting.

One thing I found most interesting was the critique of American coverage of the war. Al Jazeera is known in America for their more graphic depiction of the war. While we can fight about whether the scenes with children suffering and so on is from an American strike, no matter it is still a chid in distress or people dead lined up along the street curbs. At the time Bush was president, and he went on air and demanded Al Jazeera stop displaying to captured, tortured, and dead America soldiers on their air for everyone to see. As Americans we get upset by these images. Now this is where the interesting part comes in. We get upset with Al Jazeera for showing these Americans, our own citizens, in distress, but we show these images of children, men, woman of the Middle East dead, hurt, distraught all the time without double thinking once.

They interviewed the Communication Director at the media base in the Middle East where all the media base in the coverage of war, and he had the same reaction I did. He had never thought of it that way and the cultural difference just goes to show the type of thinking that goes on between the two cultures. Now, of course any newsource you have to take with a grain of salt, because as we all know, there are biases everywhere.

What are your reactions? Have you seen this documentary before?


Link to documentary: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RmPUx7OH1T8

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/357051/al-jazeera-comes-america-clifford-d-may

How a Military Strike Might Unfold

I choose to look at this article because it deals with the crisis in Syria that has been in the news a lot lately. There has been a lot of talk about another war and debates about whether or not American interference in yet another international country dealing with a civil war should happen.

This article brings in both international politics and predictions of the mass media on strikes that could possibly be carried out in Syria.

I think international coverage of politics is very interesting. After reading this article, I realized that international predictions are so different than domestic political predictions. Internationally, there are so many countries with deep rooted histories and ties with each other and relations that these countries have goes back decades if not centuries before America was even named.

These political leaders, especially in the Middle East, are in control and very powerful. Also the media availability in most of the counties is also state run. Therefore, everyone is not privileged to freedom of media as a lot of other European countries and America are.  There is not a freedom of the media to investigate the actions of their government; therefore, more goes unknown until it is publicly carried out and too late- i.e. Syria chemical weapons attack. I do think that one of the main reasons for journalism is to be able to flush out what needs to be flushed out like in government and politics in order for the American citizens to make an informed decision for themselves, even though this usually doesn’t happen unfortunately.

http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/31/how-a-military-strike-on-syria-might-unfold/

http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2013/08/31/statement-president-syria