Undoubtedly, people have been showing great interests in
learning about a country other than their own for centuries. Today,
there are so many methods to learn about a foreign country that people could
choose from. Some people think that the best way to learn about a foreign
country is to read newspapers and magazines from there. However, I disagree
with this opinion with following reasons.
To begin with, reading newspapers
and magazines is not the best way to learn about a foreign country because
readers can obtain biased information. Newspapers and magazines are prone to
censorship by the government so it is difficult to tell if they are conveying the
exact information about a country. For example, a famous Japanese newspaper tried to mislead the
people by downsizing the scale of the catastrophic nuclear radiation leakage
that happened in many major nuclear power plants in Fukushima. The newspaper also tried to hide
the fact that there has been an increase in number of thyroid cancer patients
who continued to consume farm products of Fukushima after being reassured by
the newspaper that there was no hazard in eating the products. Owing to this misleading
information, many people around the world travel to Japan willingly to spend
their holidays without knowing the fact that many Japanese residents are very
worried and trying to leave the city. This implies that people do not get an
accurate source of information on a country through reading newspapers or
magazines.
In addition, because of taking
form in a printed material, informations on the newspapers and magazines
will always be outdated by the time they reach out to other countries’ readers.
Even^though today’s machines are able to print
out newspapers and magazines in a short period of time, delivering the printed
media to another country is not very convenient and swift. For instance, my
sister has a subscription to The New York Times to learn about U.S.A., but she
always complains that she feels outdated when she is reading the newspaper that are 6
days old and that the important issues and events are replaced by new ones by
the time she has caught up with the old article. This is because it takes a long time, at least
more than three business days to over a week to get a newspaper delivered to
one’s home via international airmail therefore not being able to convey the
most current news.
All things considered, I strongly believe that newspapers and magazines are not
the best way to learn about a country for the reasons I have mentioned above.
Newspapers and magazines can miss out on the important aspects of being the
best method for learning about a foreign country some of them being accuracy
and time.