ANA MARIE: Ready when you are.

MEGAN: I am personally ready to go back to bed, pull my covers over my head and stay there for several hours, but I'm happy to write this first.

ANA MARIE: Yeah I'm in the same mood. But what's on your mind?

MEGAN: You mean, other than the fact that hardly anyone still cares about politics enough to read about it?

The most pronounced declines were in traffic at popular news Web sites, which saw a steady increase for months. The tide crested as Americans went to the polls; MSNBC.com, which has been the most popular news site for several months, had 25.1 million unique visitors during the week of the election (it also reported 471 million page views on Election Day — a record for the site). Since then, millions of visitors have gone elsewhere, according to Nielsen Online.

MEGAN: Well, I know how I'm doing in terms of traffic, and it comes down to "Where my bitches at?" But, really, are the latest polls and Electoral College speculations news either? Sarah Palin's manhandling of the English language? Tucker Bounds' endless enthusiasm for getting his ass handed to him on national TV?

ANA MARIE: Well that was a story with a definitive ending. Twists and turns and some fake outs, but there was going to be an end, and people wanted to see how it'd turn out. The Obama story is just getting started. We don't have a sense of who the characters are (where is the damn fucking PUPPY?), who the villains are, what the great struggles will be...

MEGAN: Whether the puppy is house trained...

ANA MARIE: WHAT PAPER WILL IT POOP ON????? THAT, my friend, is the way we solve business model for the MSM. What paper will have the honor of being the First Puppy's training pad.

MEGAN: What is an environmentally responsible way to clean up dog shit on the White House lawn... and will the girls have to do it?

ANA MARIE: I sort of hope the girls have to do it. It's good practice for dating (I.e., discovering cute things can make horrible messes).

MEGAN: Wow, and suddenly I have a reason to blame my sister's allergies for the whole of my adult life. Okay, so, the other thing is I guess there's a good reason Obama will be giving up his Blackberry and it's not even just to avoid the Freedom Of Information Act — or it's not going to be now.

ANA MARIE: I wonder if you can really call it "hacking" if they were employees who likely just snooped where they shouldn't have. I mean, that sort of elevates "being a dick" to something that sounds technologically sophisticated. I am offended on the part of hackers.

MEGAN: True that, it wasn't really "hacking" as much as it was using their privileges for unauthorized purposes. The Paris Hilton Sidekick hackers are totally offended.

ANA MARIE: It's also true that by that logic, no one in the White House or, really, anywhere in government should have a cell phone. Unauthorized searches, they're not just for the Bush Administration anymore! This is what happens when you gives telcoms immunity! They get cocky!

MEGAN: Yes, and half of the Ohio government too, it seems, since they were all furiously digging into Joe The Motherfucking Plumber, and not in a sexytime way.

ANA MARIE: That's the thing about having a job with access to sensitive information — at some point, you probably are going to be in a position where your curiosity gets the better of you. I actually don't know if I have a problem with employees LOOKING UP that info. Because how do you restrict people who normally have a reason to be looking up random people's dirty secrets? The issue here might have been, you know, telling the media.

MEGAN: Yes, that part. I mean, I have a problem if someone at my cell phone provider goes, ooh, look, she wrote something online I didn't like, let's go learn about her life! But I have less of a problem if someone wants to dig through my state records and find an unpaid parking ticket. I have a bigger problem if they then tell people about it. I mean, this was the State Department scandal last year — and it turns out that it was actually easy to restrict access, it's just nobody did so.

ANA MARIE: That's probably as good a segue as any to my favorite aspect of the Clinton SecState pick-or-no-pick: How much of it is simply fucking with other possible appointees? Al Kamen examines the "whither Richardson" part of it here. But of course the real loser in a Hillary as SecState situation is Kerry. He is a loser generally.

MEGAN: Well, Obama's team is confirming they're serious, finally. I don't think it's fucking with Richardson, Kerry, Hagel or Nunn, I think it's just going, um, Kerry, no, Hagel, no, Nunn, definitely not, and Richardson should have thought about his political career instead of his dick for a while now.

ANA MARIE: I do no believe a word I read on Politico, but apparently the WSJ has similar confirmation.

MEGAN: I don't necessarily believe a word I read anywhere, but it seems like if it wasn't serious than, like Pritzker, they would have cut it off at the knees more than a week ago.

ANA MARIE: I think this is a more complicated situation than Pritzker. Also, Obama has nothing to lose here, if the situation is that he wants to offer it to her. The only bad play is if it turns out he was never serious. Then he looks like a dick. But weeks of speculation, followed by an offer? She turns him down=she will be more powerful in the Senate and gets to be her own woman. He looks magnamious. She accepts=he looks wise, she probably does an okay job AND she's off the radar for 2012.

MEGAN: And a huge dick at that, and I just don't think that Axelrod or Gibbs would have been letting this go on if it wasn't serious consideration. I love, by the way, that every time I hear a story about liberals being upset about this, she's called "pro-war." Like, guys, really? Hillary Clinton is really not particularly hawkish and you're making yourselves look stupid.

ANA MARIE: Well, she was very much pro the particular war that was fucking us up for awhile.

MEGAN: She was very pro-Afghanistan, but who other than Barbara Lee wasn't in September 2001? Anyway, we should probably also talk about Mukasey collapsing, even though he's reportedly okay. Mukasey should be careful when giving speeches defending all the extra-legal shit this Administration has done, it takes a man with steel balls, an icy heart and a strong stomach to lie like Gonzales did for so long.

ANA MARIE: Which is why Dick Cheney will probably live forever.

MEGAN: Dick Cheney will only live as long as he has a fresh supply of innocent blood on which to feast. Speaking of, did you see Palin and the turkeys?

ANA MARIE: Ugh. I haven't eaten yet so I supposed if I look at all I should look now but ...

MEGAN: I am not squeamish about my omnivory, but if you get squicked, don't watch,

ANA MARIE: But I don't doubt that lady likes blood.

MEGAN: Basically, two turkeys get slaughtered and are bled out behind her as she talks — surprisingly well — about issues facing Alaska.

ANA MARIE: Well, she's not bad when she's on subjects that she knows something about. It's just that there are surprisingly few of those.

MEGAN: I think, strictly speaking, her lack of preparation speaks well for whomever are the candidates in 2012 (or, at least the one who has to pick a VP) to not play this stupid game of chicken to try to one-up the other side. If he had picked her in, like, June, then I think she wouldn't have been so terrible.

ANA MARIE: "How the Palin nomination would not have been so terrible" could be a very long book. A sad one, ultimately, and probably not one anyone would read. Speaking of which: I wonder what this downturn in interest in politics means for the kajillion Obama books that will be coming out!

MEGAN: I think once most Americans have their commemorative coins and plates, that will be about it.

ANA MARIE: Did Richard Wolffe let Obama beat him in basketball for nothing? "I sucked up to Obama for a year and a half and all I got was this lousy book contract."

MEGAN: Well, he might just want to wait until the Administration fucks something up and then do it as a tell-all of hubris and overconfidence or something.

ANA MARIE: Smart.

ANNA: A few weeks ago a reader wrote in to me complaining about the items we've
done on women in, specifically, India, saying that she was sick of the fact that we link to the more horrific stories regarding women and girls on the Indian sub-Continent...rape, murder, abuse, etc. The blog post she was upset about regarded a piece in a British paper we linked to about pre-teens selling their virginity to adult men in India in order to financially help their families. The reader referred to our — and by "our" I mean the editors and the commenters — "smug First World selves" and railed against our collective "ignorance" and "condescension". I responded to her saying that I understood where she was coming from but that in terms of stories about women and India, we were strapped: 99% of the stories that concern women that we find coming out of that area of the world are negative and/or upsetting, and we don't even post 90% of THOSE. I added that we work with what we can find, which, in the English language media, is coming either from American news sources, British news sources, or news sources in India that are available in English. We want to acknowledge the problems and horrors faced by women in other countries, but we often get attacked for doing so. What are some tactics that we — and other American, Western media properties — can approach these with more sensitivity?

LATOYA: Ha. I completely understand where she is coming from. Often times, western media tends to promote the things that are sensationalist like teen girls selling their virginity to feed their families or what Ebony magazine termed "disaster pornography" - things like famine, starvation, and suffering that tend to get people to wince and then open their wallets. I can't specifically speak to India, but since I notice this a lot with stories about the African continent. For example, take the elections in Kenya that happened late last year. If you were paying attention, you would know that there was a lot of tension leading up to those elections - so an allegation came in that someone won unfairly and riots broke out. However, when this news was reported, the headline was "Tribal Warfare Breaks Out in Kenya!"

Sensationalist stories grab our attention a lot faster than regular, day in the life stories. It's like the piece with Malawi I posted on last year - the article about how badly the World Bank and donor nations (US) screwed Malawi over in terms of offering them aid money with conditions attached that would keep them dependent on foreign aid dollars. Since people in Malawi were starving, the government made an executive decision to risk losing the money - and we are talking hundreds of millions of dollars - and to instead try to save their people from starvation. And they did it! That article got no play, whatsoever. Buried in the world section of the NY Times.

Late last month I read that profile of Madonna in Vanity Fair and saw all of these assertions about Malawi - and by extension Africa - and they rang false to me because of articles and books I had read earlier. And the article Madonna/Vanity Fair had all kinds of biased reporting - saying Africa when it really meant one specific country, asserting that Africans practice witchcraft when most Africans are Christian or Muslim, saying AIDS is killing the continent but never discussing how things like cuts to international family planning funds, the global gag rule, and allowing faith based programs to use development dollars to take their "abstinence only" ideas overseas. But, as many of my readers pointed out, they would have never made the connections from one thing to the other; since we have all been fed the idea that Africa is poor just because, we never question things like asking WHY African nations are so indebted or WHY AIDS is still spreading at alarming rates. We would just rather fill in our assumptions and keep reading about Madge's new album.

So part of the battle is asking the question "Why?" You'd be surprised at where that will lead you.

It's important that we begin to familiarize ourselves with international policy and politics. Keep in mind, when we read newspapers and other forms of media, there are subconsciously things that we skip - things that don't really pertain to our lives and don't make sense to us. Keep in mind, I read most of the same news sources you do. But the things I read make more sense to me because I acquired some background knowledge on some of the more intimidating topics.

Finally, realize that things aren't always death, destruction and horror - those are just the discussions that jump out at us the most. Over the last month, I've read articles about the development going on in African nations that revolve around technology. The NYT Magazine did a great article on Jan Chipchase who studies human behavior for Nokia and goes into developing nations to figure out how to sell them cell phones. Fast Company just published a piece on how Google is moving to create an internet presence in Africa, even though only 5% of people have access to internet. They feel it will be a huge growth project. Another business magazine talked about how the internet played a huge role in the rise of India's development - by mastering English, the population has been able to take advantage of the lucrative outsourcing market. And they also discussed the rise of cities and changes in traditional culture, as well as how "call center culture" has launched chick-lit novels and movies and the new prototype of the young urban Indian professional. So there is tons of information out there in mainstream media sources - we just tend to overlook it.

ANNA: I hear you on this. I think what I keep coming back to is 1. Issues of
time (we don't have the luxury of time to educate ourselves as broadly and quickly as we'd
like - blogging is quick business!) and 2. Women-specific issues (most of the stories we find regarding women are negative in nature because women around the world are, for the most part, not treated very well.). But here are some other questions: Is it "disaster pornography" to pick up on the stories written by actual, mainstream media outlets about the plight(s) of women around the world? Do we have to ALWAYS ALWAYS question them, at least those that seem pretty clear-cut? Why can't 12-year-old girls selling their virginity in India just be what it is, which is — to many cultures — horrific? Why CAN'T people put value judgments on such things sometimes without being accused of being colonialist, paternalistic, patronizing...even racist? And lastly, what do you think the inherent problems are with Westerners reporting back from non-Western countries, particularly on women's issues? Can a white, European woman living and working the Mideast never tell the full "truth" of her adopted society because of her background? Can an Asian-American woman in, say, South Africa not do the same? And lastly, because so many areas of the world (particularly the female populations in those areas) are in need of support, both financially and politically, what is so wrong with getting people to wince and open their wallets, particularly in an era in which superficial shit like celebrity adulation is so rampant that we have pageant contestants calling Iraq "the Iraq" and a decline in newspaper and book readership?

LATOYA: Anna, you have to understand that those excuses are just that - excuses. Here's why I say that - you all are great (seriously, fucking great) at calling out sexist assumptions about women in the media. You read an article and can instantly pick up on all the bullshit buzzwords and baseless assumptions that someone has concocted to prove their points about women being weaker/less intelligent/more emotional, etc. It's second nature to you, right? But I bet it wasn't always that way. You have to educate yourself about these issues in order to have that framework in your mind to challenge them. So the same way you learned to critically dissect the lies that women's magazines use to sell issues - it's the same thing. No one wakes up with a working knowledge of sexism, power dynamics in sexual relationships, eloquent critiques of impossible beauty ideals and a deep understanding about how strict adherence to gender roles in society causes tons of issues. You had to learn that.

So, in this case, the answer is learn. You aren't going to be able to fully comprehend everything about everything out of the box. Like I said in one of my posts on Racialicious, it took me about three months to stop fighting against the mass media programming that poorer nations are just a bunch of whiny complainers who want to be like America. So it will take a while.

Women are treated like shit around the world, this is very true. Women are also treated like shit in beacon of freedom America, particularly when you start considering issues like race, class, and immigration. But, just like there are kick ass things American women do every day, there are kick ass things that women around the world are doing too.

But to specifically answer your questions:

1. Yes, we always have to question because if we don't, we contribute to that whole narrative that the US is this great paragon of equality and every place else is some kind of human cesspool. Again, back to the Madonna/Malawi example - you could post on "starving babies in Malawi" and people go "oh no!" because that's what they are conditioned to do and we go buy a $24.00 bracelet that sends a dollar overseas, we mention about the horrendous situation there with our friends over cocktails and then roll right back into whatever stuff is affecting us right this minute. And no one talks about the World Bank, which is the leading reason why kids in Malawi are starving to death, and business moves as usual.

I am not saying that every other nation has no problems and nothing bad ever happens. But, it is kind of strange when we can post about the horrible shit that goes on in say, Italy (like your post on how 70% of Italian gynos refuse to perform abortions, even though they are legal) and have counterposts talking about cool/interesting things like how the Italian police department petitioned for more fashionable uniforms or the issues with modern dating in Italy. It provides a balanced view of the country. But that kind of balanced view never manages to make it over to African or South East Asian countries. So while we can read the literature and watch the movies coming out of those countries - there has to be SOMETHING else going on, some kind of larger social/cultural scene that is creating these works of art and lit - for some reason, our news reporting pretends that the only time they are worthy of our notice is when someone is suffering or something horrendous goes down. The answer is not to stop reporting on these events completely - just to be aware that these events do not exist in a vaccuum.

2. Value judgments are a tricky thing. In general, there is a problem with people conflating two separate issues and making them one. So, for example, let's take the treatment of women in Saudi Arabia. I think we can all generally agree that it is fucked up when some citizens are entitled to more rights than others based solely on gender, and that's what Saudi Arabia does. However, the problems come in when people start sticking blanket value judgments that don't necessarily apply to that situation - like saying Islam is responsible for the situation in Saudi Arabia. Umm, no. Some fuckheads in power got together and said this is how it's going down and we're going to justify it using Islam. There are 52 nations that are Muslim Majority countries and that's not how they roll. Look at Turkey - it is a nation that is 99% Muslim. 99%! And they have a very secular government system. Malaysia, Ethiopia, Morocco, Indonesia, Bangledesh - plenty of nations are Muslim and they have different systems set up. But people tend to stick one issue in because that's what they think that is what is happening and miss the bigger picture.

Fatemeh, the publisher of the Muslimah Media Watch blog also points out how condescending it is to want to "help" women in a foreign country without listening to them. We tend to infantilize them (example here) and act as those these poor poor women don't have minds of their own and can't speak for themselves, never realizing that they are actively engaging in these issues - just not necessarily where we can see. From the little I know about Muslimah feminism, people who still actively adhere to Islamic principles tend to work within those guidelines while fighting for equality. Our idea of equality may not be the same as what they want. So, for western people, it's a really big fucking deal if Muslim women take off their veils and wear lipstick. To them, it's kind of whatever, they want to focus on employment options and pay equality.

3. In terms of wincing and wallets, let me just say that there is nothing wrong with being informed. The problem is that we respond, crack the wallet, and we aren't informed. So who knows where the money is going and what it is being used for? Think about it this way - we give out billions of dollars in foreign food aid per year - so why haven't we solved world hunger yet? We waste enough food in America to feed quite a few nations, so the issue is more complicated than just food. We need to critically look at where this money is going and who is benefiting. There are also great ways to get involved that don't involve much money and make a longer lasting impact. Want to end hunger? Start lobbying congress, volunteering with NGOs, raise awareness about how the IMF is "the Typhoid Mary" of international development. (Yes, Jeffrey Sachs' said that — read this sitting down.) Or, looking at how governmental organizations and non governmental organizations have tons of money but can't seem to get it together do fix actual problems, even when said problems could be fixed for about $10,000 (see here). So, there are steps to take that would be more helpful in the long run but people just don't ask questions.

By the way, westerners can report on non-western issues, as can expats living in other countries. The issue is not that they are not entitled to have an opinion, it is just that many times that opinion may be ill-informed and may not have the whole story. So, I think western journalists in particular have an obligation to tread lightly in areas that are not directly our own - after all, since we shape of lot of world policy, our words may have serious consequences.

Related: Meet The Neo-Colonialists: Madonna And Vanity Fair [Racialicious]