The Snowpocalypse, the Media, and the Need for Global Learning

[Chad Anderson]

Last month, an avalanche devastated a mountain pass in Afghanistan, killing over an estimated 167 people. If you live in the Washington, DC area, you may not have heard much—if anything—about this event. Instead, our local news stations were very much focused on the record-breaking blizzard, aka “snowpocalypse” that hit the area and halted most work and most schools for almost a week. Reporters in the DC area were measuring snow drifts, covering snowball fights in Dupont Circle, and overdramatizing a trip to the hardware store. Meanwhile, there were some voices arguing that the snowpocalypse was evidence that global warming isn’t really happening. All the while, a real snowpocalypse was occurring halfway around the world.

This is not to belittle the damage or the inconveniences—major or minor—that the blizzard caused, but the sheer magnitude of the avalanche and the loss of life surely merited more attention than it received. I only learned about the Afghanistan avalanche because a friend of mine had a brother in the military who was involved in the rescue effort. For lack of a better phrase, something seemed “off.”

How does this relate to global learning? First, it demonstrates how insular Americans can be, how little attention our media pays to international events. Those of us in higher education must consider how we can develop global awareness and empathy not just in the next generation of journalists and policymakers, but in the next generation of citizens. To simply blame our media is an easy scapegoat. The media wouldn’t spend hours covering the minutest details of “snowmagedden” if we the people weren’t tuning in with interest. If today’s students don’t think of events that happen “over there” as relevant, how can tomorrow’s interconnected global society be truly healthy, productive, and just? As I mentioned in a previous post, we need begin to see the rest of the world as local. I am not saying that local news—what happens geographically close to us—is not important, nor am I saying that every news source should cover every tragedy happening in the world on any given day. Unfortunately, there are too many to cover. Nevertheless, educating students to see themselves within a larger global picture will allow us to think more deeply about such topics such as privilege (we have snow plows, no matter how long they take to plow our street), power (we could dig ourselves out—we did not have to depend on a foreign government’s military), and geography and climate (how climate and landscape impact culture, and vice versa). And the fact that some people saw the blizzard as evidence against global warming only supports our call for stronger scientific literacy—for example, an understanding that weather patterns and climate change are complex, and that a couple storms do not undermine or disprove environmental changes that have been gradually occurring for centuries.

In fact, studying how and what the media reports is a rich opportunity to introduce global learning into the classroom. For instance, take the differences in coverage of the earthquakes in Haiti and Chile (Haitians "loot" while Chileans "collect supplies"). The media’s approach to the two countries opens up interesting questions about our national perceptions of race and ethnicity, which in turn, echo similar trends during Hurricane Katrina. Even coverage of events in our own country demonstrates a need for the deep, interdisciplinary education that global learning offers, such as the deliberate plane crash into the IRS building in Austin, Texas a few weeks ago. Such an event, which certainly must raise complex questions about politics, the economy, and domestic terrorism, seemed to be ancient history to the media the next day. Why?

How might we educate people to think more deeply and critically about today’s news, to consider how an event may relate to something else, and what does it mean in a larger (inter)national context? How do we get people to think both more deeply and broadly about current events rather than moving from one headline to another or scraping for angles on stories that don’t necessarily justify sustained coverage, such as blizzards in February?