Unbelievable displays of ignorance like this make me wonder if those who accuse the US media’s post-Soviet reporting of bias are just giving it way too much credit.
Here is Kyra Phillips, anchor of CNN’s afternoon newscast, on Kyrgyzstan, via Gawker:
Kyra Phillips: Kyrgyzstan, impossible to spell, hard to say, good luck finding it on the map, so why should we care that its government is now gone, swept away by armed protesters? Well, we’ll tell you.
PHILLIPS: You know I remember when the war first broke out, and we all said to each other, OK, we have to learn the “stans.” You know? It’s not just Kyrgyzstan, but you’ve got all the other stans in that area.
LEVS: All the one — that’s right.
PHILLIPS: Yes, why “stan” at the end of the names?
LEVS: Yes. This is actually really interesting about that suffix. There’s two different reasons for that going on in the same place. And it has a lot to do with what’s going on there. I was looking at this from About.com. In Persian, the suffix “stan” means place of. And in Russian, it meant “settlement.”
And all this after she had FIVE years to learn how to pronounce it! That’s right, in 2005, Ms Phillips had similarly enlightened us about the Tulip Revolution:
Miles O’Brien: Well, it looks like we’re talking about another revolution in a country some of us can’t pronounce. We’re not mentioning any names, of course. It’s kind of like Kyra-stan, but it really isn’t. We’re calling it ‘The Tulip Revolution’: People power in the ‘stans, coming up.
Kyra Phillips: I love tulips… Hey, Miles, is that a new portable PlayStation?
Making light of an impoverished country in turmoil and mourning? Hilarious! Or, if you are a normal person: sad, callous and scary.
As Gawker commenter Chainaya Lozhka so correctly puts it:
This woman is everything wrong with American media. Xenophobia should not be tolerated on a national news network. There are millions of people over there and the majority are struggling and you sit there and make fun of their culture and country.
Who has it worse: Russians forced to live with state propaganda or Americans condemned to rely on such sheer, mind-blowing stupidity for their international news?
Any wonder then that so many can be so ill-informed about the outside world, with no help from any government censorship?
