Why Excluded Headlines?
The “third world” or majority world of poorer countries make up 85.33% of the global population, but just a tiny percentage of news content. And its not that nothing happens in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, but that lives and events here are considered less important. When the mainstream media does deign to mention the majority world, it is usually in relation to something happening in wealthier countries, or seriously lacking in context and local perspectives.
The English-language mainstream media creates a distorted picture of the world, where it seems like only white men in Europe and the US are even doing anything, and poorer regions are wastelands of boring violence and tedious poverty.
Readers and viewers subconsciously understand that quantity of news items and their length are an indicator of importance. If there are ten consecutive articles on various aspects of a non-lethal building fire in New York, US on a global news sight, but just one short story about a massacre in Sudan, readers get the sense that the event in New York is somehow of greater significance. The impact of this, over days and then years, is that richer countries and the people in them are perceived as much more important than poorer countries.
By excluding people and regions from the headlines, they are being excluded from mattering, from being heard, from obtaining justice. For many readers, they simply stop existing, and that makes it even harder for poorer, exploited and economically colonised regions to achieve justice and to be understood.
For readers, the news contributes to our identity; to our sense of place in the world, and just what our world is. Is our world limited to our country or state, or do we see ourselves as part of a thriving, creative, and hurting planet of people.
Excluded Headlines aims to raise awareness of really important things happening in excluded regions and to shift how we see the world.
Click on home to see the most recent newsletters.
About the author:
Tamara Pearson has been a journalist and activist for 22 years, writing from Australia, then Venezuela, and now Mexico, as well as various other countries. She has worked as an international news editor for four different media outlets, has two degrees, and is the author of two books. Her life-time goal as a journalist is to tell the other side of the story, to question the status quo, to investigate crimes by corporations and elites, to provide a voice and visibility to those who are oppressed and powerless and to highlight the ruthless impact of global inequality.
List of published articles, blog, novel, Twitter (DMs open), Facebook.
