The Uninformed Masses

By Feliz Moreno

I'll bet that there are more students on campus that know that Beyonce is pregnant than those who know that the global population has been predicted by the UN to reach 7 billion in the next 2 weeks. I'll bet more people know about the Harbaugh versus Schwartz post-game NFL incident than about the Troy Davis execution, and I'm willing to put money on the fact that more people know about Amber Cole than about the 3,000 people who have died in Syria from protesting against their government.

There is a difference between social news and the world news that I listed, and since I have been here at Santa Clara I have noticed that serious news regarding world injustice or critical events often doesn't get heard of or discussed on campus. And there are several different facets that contribute to the general state of unawareness on campus.

First of all, I feel today's news media has a general lack of important information. I have given up watching news on television because I find it to be generally useless. Investigative reporting has reached an all time low. News stations report more on the legacy of Steve Jobs than they do on the tyrannical nature of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (if you don't know who that is, I suggest you look him up).  

And don't even get me started on the downward spiral that newspapers and news magazines are caught in. Life magazine — one of the United States' most provocative and thorough sources of social commentary in the 1960's — has become a lowly monthly newspaper insert with the slogan "America's Weekend Magazine." According to a 2009 Washington Post article by Frank Ahrens, "U.S. newspaper circulation has hit its lowest level in seven decades," leading to several citywide newspapers being forced out of business.

But let's not forget that the reason newspapers and news magazines have become so unpopular is because of a general disinterest in what is going on in the world. According to a 2009 New York Times article by Eric Alterman, "Only 19 percent of Americans between the ages of 18 and 34 claim even to look at a daily newspaper. The average age of the American newspaper reader is 55 and rising."

This means that students like us are not only generally uninformed, but that we just don't care to become informed. How is this deemed acceptable?

We can't just blame today's media; if we are going to blame somebody, we have to also realize that students like us, and people in general, are not demanding that such information be made readily available to them.

Here at Santa Clara it is so easy to reverse this trend of unawareness. Of course, if you're reading this newspaper  you're on the right track. Free copies of The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News are available every day on the first floor of the library. If you don't have time to browse through any of these there is always the online websites for all of these newspapers, including a wide array of online news magazines and journals.

I'll admit that it is easy to get caught up in studies and forget that there is still a world turning out there, but that doesn't make it acceptable. Citizens of our world, and college students even more so, are supposed to be conscientious of what is going on around them ­— or was I mistaken in my expectations?

Feliz Moreno is a sophomore English major and editor of the Opinion section.