In the latest episode of Global Pulse, host Erin Coker looks at global media coverage of the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Watch the episode and share your thoughts below!

I remember a talk I had with Danuta Pawlowska, the Polish grandmother of a good friend of mine, in her Warsaw apartment several years ago. A member of the Warsaw resistance during the Nazi occupation, Danuta was closely monitored after the communists took over in the mid 1940s.

She recalled a long gossip-filled phone conversation with a close friend. Two hours into the conversation, a booming male voice suddenly burst through the receiver. "Would you just shut up already?" the man groaned. "How much more of this must I listen to?!"

I had laughed at the time. For a young American with roots in Warsaw, the idea of a government agent listening to a banal chat with a friend was amusing – something fit for a dime store spy thriller. In Warsaw's meticulously reconstructed Old Town, today's foreign tourists purchase T-shirts and shot glasses; bursts of bad American pop music filter out of the same fashion chain stores that line Paris' Rue de Rennes or Copenhagen's Strøget. The stylish, boisterous students crowding the bars and cafes have no memory of life in pre-1989 Warsaw. 

Yet, if you venture outside of the city center, the medieval architecture gives way to monotonous tenements, the color of diesel exhaust. Passing by some of these buildings at dusk is an unnerving, somewhat melancholy experience, and I'll admit that I glanced over my shoulder more than once. For Danuta and millions of others, that reality was life.

I was a child when the Berlin Wall came down.  I remember the now-iconic images of jubilant Berliners  rushing the wall with pickaxes, but I was too young to grasp the larger significance of the event and what it meant to Germany, Europe and the world.

I would like to say that I left Poland with a greater understanding of what day-to-day life must have been like for Europeans, such as Danuta, who had lived under the Soviet regime. Like Warsaw's younger generation, however, that second-hand knowledge can only resonate so much.  The generation gap in Poland has resulted in a new type of barrier, between those who remember and those who came of age in a different time.

In the flood of anniversary coverage this week, the most telling, perhaps, is a BBC special report.  Amidst the frenzy of anniversary festivities, Walls Around the World is a sobering reminder of the barriers, from North Korea to Botswana, that have yet to topple.

I think of Danuta and of the magnitude of what she witnessed. I wonder which other walls will come down over the course of my lifetime.

While these suggestions of how to cope with Somalian piracy on Examiner.com are interesting enough, the article commits the sin that this week's Global Pulse episode, Somalia Beyond the Pirates, is meant to address: US news coverage too often under-reports, or does not report, on the war in Somalia, while referring to that war as a convenient scapegoat for the piracy.

In most TV news stories we found, the war or more generalized "lawlessness" is to blame for the piracy, providing an easy, research-free way of ending the story or answering the viewers questions about how piracy can exist in the modern world. Another example: the pirates have been tied to the Somalian war by a Bloomberg report, explaining only that the pirates "have access to 'the perfect arms fair' -- Mogadishu, the capital of a nation wracked by civil war." Neither of these stories even have a link to a detailed description of the war.

Better: This Chicago Tribune article describes "a covert war in which the CIA has recruited gangs of unsavory warlords to hunt down and kidnap Islamic militants" in Somalia. New and interesting information.

Best: The Christian Science Monitor, probably the best newspaper in the US (now exclusively online) shows how its done, seamlessly weaving the war and the pirates into a truly engaging and informative story.

If you find examples of reporting that ties Somalian piracy to the Somalian civil war, let us know!

As Global Pulse first reported last month, initial reaction to piracy off the East African coast has at times tended towards the comedic.

But visions of Hollywood epics are crumbling with this week's audacious hijacking of a Saudi oil tanker. The latest Global Pulse examines global media response and finds a more bewildered tone. Why is this happening? And what can recent events in Somalia tell us about the future of this highly lucrative enterprise? Watch the episode here.