by Jessica Desvarieux

“If the United States can sell Coca Cola, why can't it sell itself?” asked Fahd Husain, a 34-year-old Pakistani graduate student who attends the Columbia School of Journalism and was a panelist at the annual Alfred Dupont Media forum on January 16th. Husain was joined by some of his classmates who discussed their views of American media. This panel discussion followed the main forum that featured renowned broadcast media journalists as panelists who analyzed whether American journalists had morphed into government lapdogs rather than serving as watchdogs with their coverage of the war on terrorism.

Finding a brand image, like Coca Cola, that puts our best foot forward as a country is an idea that is perplexing many people in our government. Certainly it is something that we have to work on so that foreigners around the world won’t hate us for unknown reasons. As Australian graduate school student Sarah Gilbert put it, people in her country think that the typical American is “Arrogant, culturally insensitive and ignorant about the rest of the world.” As a graduate student at Columbia, Gilbert was caught in a rare moment on September 11th asked to report on the events of terrorism for her homeland. That opportunity provided her with a new perspective of who we are as Americans. She learned a lot about the spirit of the American people and now admits that the preconceived stereotypes didn’t tell the full story, although they do contain some truth.

People in the United States are viewed as being American-centered. This is because many Americans are not knowledgeable about cultures outside of their own. “This is a big mistake,” said 25-year-old Portugal graduate student Mariana van Zeller. “Other countries know everything about the United States, but the United States knows nothing about us. We’re bombarded by American culture, your movies, your music, the need to speak your language, but you are not bombarded by us,” she said.

As Americans, we are Hollywood’s creation - we seem to be the people the world sees in our music videos and in our movies. Husain, who is fascinated with the depth of American society, admitted that this is a shame. “There are so many great things in American society,” he said. “For example, tolerance, social work and American’s hunger for knowledge. The irony is,” he said, “that all of these aspects about American culture aren’t known abroad.”

September 11th woke us up to many things, perhaps none more important than the need to understand other cultures besides our own. Van Zeller suggests that education about other cultures around the world is a good starting point. “If people know about other people’s history, they will learn to appreciate another country’s culture,” she said. “If people were knowledgeable about international events from the get go, we wouldn’t have to ask ourselves questions like ‘why they hate us so much.’ Americans need to become more in touch with the reality that though we may seem like an isolated country, we are, in fact a part of a larger global community.This may help to resolve many of the unanswered questions that we have about ourselves.”