Ниже представлен мой текст о том, какое влияние оказывают мировые новости на читателя. Наш преподаватель по курсу «Сбор международных новостей» неоднократно призывал нас не просто писать, а рассказывать историю. Что я и попытался сделать…

Here is my text about the impact which the global news have on the reader. Our teacher in International News Gathering insisted that we should not only write, but also tell the story. I tried to do it in this text…

by Alexander Smotrov
aleksmot@yandex.ru



Do you like fish? I hope that you do, else it will be a little bit difficult for you to imagine the picture which I want to paint in your mind. But in any case let’s begin.

So, maybe you remember the fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen about Kay and Gerda, and that scene when an old Lapp woman gave a smoked fish to Gerda. And the girl brought it to an old Finnish woman who read the message written on the fish.

Let’s imagine that the fish in the far sea is an event that happens overseas. And one day a journalist whose name is Fisherman catches this fish. He goes home and cooks his trophy for the breakfast. He fries it, puts on the plate, decorates with a touch of lemon, parsley and mayonnaise to make a morning surprise to his girl-friend. And if he is alone, he sells his fish to a big freezing company which sends it to other countries.

So does every journalist. A reader can’t eat raw fish from the freezer, like very few people want to read "raw", though and fresh, news from the news agencies. A reader needs a person who, first, catches an event from the Information Sea and, second, cooks it into an edible meal, or makes a readable story of it.

A consumer doesn’t concern where does the fish on his table come from – from Norway, Russia or Argentina. The main thing for him is that the fish should be fresh and delicious. A common reader in any country want to read something which can be fresh and well-written and it doesn’t matter what it is about. He can consume news about royal wedding in Norway, salvage of the Russian sunken submarine "Kursk" or financial crisis in Argentina.

But how the global news can impact the daily life of an ordinary reader? Let’s move ourselves to a little town in the central Russia where our heroes, Ivan Ivanovich and Petr Petrovich, live. Both of them work in the same company which now produces hardware goods instead of tanks which it made in the Soviet times. Both of them like to read, to listen to the radio and to watch TV.

But Ivan Ivanovich prefers to read books, especially science fiction and detective stories, and he changes channel of radio or TV when the news-presenter says "Good evening, it is today’s news…" And Petr Petrovich is not so simple. He wants to know everything because he knows that even an event which seems to be insignificant can influence him personally. There are a lot indirect links between things and events which can’t be obvious from the first view. And he knows very well about it.

For example, Petr Petrovich was well prepared to the 1998 financial collapse in Russia. He heard from the news items about the crisis in South-East Asia, read in the newspaper a commentary by a famous economist from Moscow and exchanged all his rouble savings into dollars. Then the exchange rate was 6 roubles for one dollar. After a month a little number of lucky beggars could buy dollars for 20 roubles each. The others had only to bite their elbows. And Ivan Ivanovich lost very much money which he had saved to buy new furniture for his flat.

When Ivan Ivanovich and Petr Petrovich walk home from work, they often accompanied by their friend Nikolay Nikolaevich who is always surprised by that Petr Petrovich has so much to tell during their way home. He can tell about new exhibition of the letters from "Titanic" in Copenhagen or about the elections in Byelorussia where Nikolay Nikolaevich’s parents live. At that time Ivan Ivanovich usually keeps silence trying to remember a final scene from the detective story he read three days ago.

If Petr Petrovich switches on the TV and hears about the severe frosts in Brazil, he can guess that prices on coffee will raise soon and asks his wife to buy two extra jars of instant coffee not to pay more in the future. When our hero watches footage from Chechnya where new clashes between rebels and the federal forces began, he expects that in few weeks he might meet his new neighbours – refugees from the mutinous republic.

Petr Petrovich recognizes that new American president intension to violate the 1972 ABM Treaty and to create controversial missile defense shield can make Russia increase its military budget to be possible to give an adequate response. But at the same time the budget social spendings can be cut down and the taxes raised. And Ivan Ivanovich will abuse Putin, Chubais and his own city mayor for it.

So, we can see that the events in one hemisphere have the impact on ordinary person in the other one. Of course, we can’t forget about the life of our own country and our home place, but the whole world is a single organism, one part of which is not able to live without another. And we, as readers, watchers and listeners, should remember about it while we are reading our morning newspaper and eating our fish during the breakfast.