ABSTRACT
One photograph showed a roadway scarred with potholes. Another showed a pristine eight-lane highway. The game: “Spot the Africa.” The contestant: Jon Stewart in a December 2014 broadcast of The Daily Show. His job-compliments of Trevor Noah, a South African comedian who now hosts the show-was to decide which photograph depicted Africa and which the United States. Round two showed young black men working on computers in a clean, well-lit classroom; the other photograph showed two black children-a young girl sleeping atop a stained mattress placed on a filthy, uneven couch and a young boy eating a snack as he rested on an empty desktop attached to an equally barren bookshelf. As most Americans probably would have, Stewart bombed the test. The nice facilities were in Africa, the pitted roadway was in New York City and the two children live in Detroit. As Noah told Stewart, “To a lot of Americans, Africa is just one giant village full of AIDS, huts and starving children, who you can save for five cents a day.”1 Of course, Africa, like the United States, is not without its problems, and round three of “Spot the Africa” showed a grim image that indeed was taken in a slum in Johannesburg. Still, the point is that because most U.S. citizens’
LEARNING OBJECTIVES
image of the world beyond the United States’ borders hinges largely on the media they consume, their answers would unlikely differ from Stewart’s.
