(Reprinted with permission from Columbia Journalism Review, January/February 2002.)
The future of foreign coverage
By Michael Parks
American newspapers have carried more stories about Afghanistan on page one in the four months since the September 11 attacks than in the previous four decades. Network news programs that examined, almost nightly, a California congressman's relationship with a missing female intern were now offering hour-long specials on Osama bin Laden. Newsmagazines that for years had hesitated to put a foreign story on the cover, knowing that it would likely mean a drop of 25 percent or more in newsstand sales, ran cover stories week after week on the attacks, the hunt for bin Laden, the threat of biological terrorism, and the U.S. counterattack in Afghanistan. What had seemed foreign and far away was suddenly frightening, and of intense interest to readers.
Much of the coverage of the terrorist attacks and the U.S. response has been American journalism at its best. But many news organizations were playing catch-up. The terrorist threat from radical Islamic fundamentalists had been clear for years — attacks on the World Trade Center in 1993, on apartments housing U.S. Air Force personnel in Saudi Arabia in 1996, on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and on the U.S.S. Cole in the Yemeni port of Aden in 2000. Coverage of these attacks was largely episodic with limited investigative reporting and few follow-up stories even when participants were brought to trial.
The failure was sweeping. "We did not examine the country's anti-terrorism efforts adequately, our intelligence capabilities, our immigration policies, or the reasons for anti-Americanism," says Edward Seaton, editor-in-chief of the Manhattan (Kansas) Mercury, former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and an ardent advocate of more international coverage. "While we can debate whether this failure played a role in our national lack of preparedness, there is no question that we failed our readers."
Bill Wheatley, vice president of NBC News, is also self-critical. "We all have done a good job since September 11," he says, "but I and a lot of others wish we had done more to help the public understand the intensity of feelings, the anger, among the radical Islamic fundamentalists."
News executives were significantly out of touch with their communities. Most Americans, even before the attacks, had concluded that global terrorism was the country's greatest international concern. In a 2001 study by the Pew Research Center and the Council on Foreign Relations conducted before September 11, the public ranked protecting the United States from terrorist attacks as the country's top foreign policy priority. In 1999, a similar survey by The Gallup Organization for the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations found that more Americans (53 percent to 40 percent) thought that the twenty-first century would be even bloodier than the twentieth. When the U.S. Commission on National Security, chaired by former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman, reported last January that international terrorism threatened the United States directly and that "Americans will likely die on American soil, possibly in large numbers," few news organizations covered it (cjr, November/December 2001).
Even with the surge of coverage over the past four months, many stories have remained thinly reported. "Few of us understand, for example," says Robert Rivard, editor of the San Antonio Express-News, "how it is that our intelligence agencies have maintained ties with Pakistani intelligence agencies at the same time those same Pakistani agencies helped the Taliban consolidate power and build an alliance with Al Qaeda."
Levels of interest
Simply put, most news organizations failed to cover what a substantial number of their readers and viewers believed was vitally important — the danger posed to the United States by global terrorism. News organizations were guilty of the same lack of judgment and neglect of duty for which editorial writers have rebuked the Central Intelligence Agency and other government institutions.
The question now is whether the news organizations will change, whether they will respond to what the Mercury's Seaton describes as "a wake-up call" or revert to the patterns of localism and cost-cutting that came in the decade after the gulf war in 1991 and left much of the world uncovered by U.S. media.
"The test is not what we or The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or the Los Angeles Times does," says Leonard Downie, executive editor of The Washington Post. "We are committed to national and foreign coverage and will remain so. The big question is what the large ownerships will do — the networks and the chains — and I'm skeptical they will change. They put foreign news at the bottom of their priorities. They thought it turned audiences off and drove readers away. Will they now put public service ahead of profits?"
The first measurements of this commitment are newshole and airtime. For most U.S. newspapers, the issue is not sending correspondents overseas but committing space to international news and hiring editors knowledgeable about the world to pull together packages from news services. For most television stations, the question will be giving up a crime story or two on the evening news to make room for a longer foreign story. For the networks, it is committing correspondents, producers, crews, and time on their main news programs.
"We will be covering this story for a considerable period of time," NBC's Wheatley says. "Will there, for example, be another terrorist attack in the U.S.? We've been told this war will be long, not just against the Taliban, but against terrorists wherever they are. That will take sizable resources."
The huge costs of covering the conflict will continue, but the real financial problem for most news organizations is the decline in advertising revenues resulting from the economic downturn. "It's a tough time, but this is what we do," says Eason Jordan, chief news executive of the CNN News Group. "Our new leadership [at AOL Time Warner] fully understands and supports world coverage. We have been told we will have all the resources we need."
Paul Friedman, executive vice president of ABC News, argues that the larger issue is one of audience interest. "Coverage will in time sink down to the previous levels — as little or as much as before," he says. "I don't share the cockeyed optimism that we have all learned our lesson and will now rededicate ourselves to foreign news. The interest simply isn't there, and when the impact subsides so will the interest. It's the nature of the beast."
Many news executives see the question of the public's level of interest as a test of the journalistic craft, of persuading readers and viewers to read and watch what they need to know and understand. "This is about telling important stories in interesting ways, about why the world matters," Jordan says. "It's not fair to put the onus on the people. News organizations have to take responsibility for coverage."
Local vs. Global
But study after study has shown declining space and airtime devoted to international news. One recent analysis by the Newspaper Advertising Bureau estimated that, before September 11, foreign stories accounted for 2 percent or less of the average daily paper's newshole, down from 10 percent in 1971 during the Vietnam War; another estimated that the proportion of international news in the major newsweeklies had declined to 13 percent from 22 percent between 1985 and 1995. Before September 11, network newscasts on some nights had no international stories at all, though a generation ago foreign reports constituted an average of 45 percent of the newscasts.
The reduction in international coverage has brought complaints from policy analysts, who argue that the decline fueled a new isolationism in the United States and that, as a result, the country might fail to exercise appropriate leadership in the world. Celinda Lake, a Democratic pollster, told a 1997 conference on the issue: "The media cover violence, conflict, and instability abroad and little else, and have made international involvement look very undesirable." Those who described themselves to Gallup as "hardly interested" in international affairs jumped from 3 percent to 22 percent, between the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations studies in 1990 and 1998.
Ever since the collapse of the Soviet Union and with it, the cold war, Americans have felt safe within their borders. "For fifty years, Americans had been on the edge, worried about nuclear confrontation," says Kevin Klose, the chief executive of National Public Radio. "Suddenly, we felt blessed with peace. We are being very rough on ourselves when we say we just lost interest in international news."
Foreign coverage was easier during the cold war, says NBC's Wheatley, "because there were good guys and bad guys and if the bad guys got out of control there would be nuclear holocaust. Then, it got a lot more complex, and the public was less certain where American interest lay in, say, Bosnia. We did hundreds of stories on Bosnia, but few Americans are able to find it on a map or tell you what went on there."
While some news organizations were doing a commendable job reporting on global terrorism, Islamic fundamentalism, and the dangers of biological warfare, others were trimming the staffs that reported and produced such stories. After covering the cold war for half a century, the emphasis was on local news, life-style stories — and on higher rates of return for shareholders in capital markets made fiercely competitive by high-tech companies and dot-com start-ups.
"You can almost hear the discussion between the business side and the news department," says Klose. "'The cold war's over,' the business side was saying. 'Why do you need a bureau in Moscow? Why can't we centralize European coverage in London? Wouldn't you like to trade a Moscow correspondent for five more local reporters?'"
Even news organizations where the commitment to international coverage is strong were caught by the September attacks. CNN was in the midst of laying off 400 staffers, Reuters was cutting more than 1,500 positions worldwide, The Boston Globe was going through a round of buyouts, and departing Knight Ridder executives were sharply criticizing cutbacks at the San Jose Mercury News, Philadelphia Inquirer, and other papers in the chain.
Over the years, newspaper executives had seized on market surveys to put new emphasis on local coverage and, they hoped, to halt declining readership, particularly among youth. The same surveys that indicate deep concern about international terrorism as a foreign policy issue also show twice as many people (generally about 60 percent) interested in local news as in foreign coverage.
There is a conundrum here, according to the Mercury's Seaton: If the media don't provide readers and viewers with sound international reporting, how many will know what they are missing? "I don't doubt that some publishers justify smaller newsholes for foreign stories with market surveys, and thus cut their costs," he says. "But the research we looked at showed a greater appetite for international news than editors were offering." He cites a Pew study that indicated that Americans follow international news almost as closely — just a percentage point less — as they do Washington stories. "Local has to be the priority," says Seaton, "but editors fail readers if they don't expand the readers' horizons." Seaton, whose paper has a circulation of 12,000, tries to practice what he preaches with a world news page each day, a focus page on international issues at least twice a week, and frequent op-ed articles. But editors like Seaton have often been accused of "Afghanistanism," an ironically derisory term that in American journalism goes back more than fifty years to argue that newspapers emphasizing foreign coverage were often guilty of ignoring problems at home. Until recently, The New York Times was chided for having more reporters in Moscow than in Queens.
For Peter Bhatia, executive editor of the Portland Oregonian, there is a compelling social mission in this kind of journalism. "We need to explain how an issue that is important somewhere, even rather distant from us, is important everywhere," he says. "I hope the notion of explanation and education is catching on."
Building an appetite
There is, in fact, evidence of a demand for serious coverage of the world: NPR's Morning Edition and All Things Considered have a growing audience; The Economist's U.S. circulation increased 11 percent in the last year, and 66 percent over the last decade; the BBC's international radio and television newscasts are carried by an increasing number of public broadcasting stations and their Web sites.
Pew surveys show a mounting public interest in such global issues as the degradation of the environment, health and disease, food shortages, and child labor. Andrew Kohut, Pew's director, says, "Public interest is high and unmet, but that interest is less in politics and the stuff of governments than it is in, say, global warming, or hoof-and-mouth disease, or the status of women."
Amanda Bennett, editor of the Lexington (Kentucky) Herald-Leader, feels that the September 11 attacks and the U.S. response give the lie to the notion that Americans don't want international news. "Now, we see how we are connected, and have the readers' attention," she says. "The challenge to us, and we are a small paper, is, 'What is our value-added?' Our added value must be the intelligence we apply to sorting, interpreting, and displaying the news." The paper published packages on the military, political, diplomatic, and ethical implications of President Bush's declaration that he wanted bin Laden "dead or alive." It did the same with biological terrorism after the anthrax outbreaks. "We take a topic and lay out a page so we're ready when space opens," Bennett said. "News is not just reporting what happened yesterday."
Larger newspapers like the Oregonian, which has a circulation of 360,000, about three times that of the Herald-Leader, have been able to devote more resources — sending reporters to Canada, Mexico, and Asia on stories of importance to its readers. "If coverage is tied back to the lives of our readers — if we show why it matters — there is very much a place for it," executive editor Bhatia says. He cites the Oregonian's Pulitzer Prize-winning articles that followed the path of potatoes from Oregon, as frozen french fries, to fast-food restaurants in Asia.
At the television networks, new technology — digital video, smaller and cheaper cameras, satellite video-phones — could bring increased coverage at lower cost. "We have relatively lightweight equipment with which we can broadcast from almost anywhere in the world as long as we can hit a satellite," says NBC's Wheatley. "The video-phone picture isn't perfect, but it's passable, and we've been doing the war in Afghanistan live. We may be able to send in a single, knowledgeable, well-trained correspondent to some stories, letting us go to more places."
For all that, argues ABC's Friedman, news organizations may never be able to do enough. "We're the people [at ABC] who originally went and interviewed bin Laden and put him on the air so Americans could see what he was about," he says. "But we can't put him on night after night, nor would we want to, though that is probably the only way he and his followers could be understood, and Americans forewarned about Al Qaeda. What we are dealing with is people's ignorance of world affairs, of geopolitics, of different cultures. We are teachers, but not the nation's primary teachers, and that's the problem."
Other editors and news directors argue that it's up to journalists to persuade people of the importance of international news. "The trick in the months and years ahead will be for U.S. newspapers to rediscover our role in bringing the world home to our readers before the next global crisis dominates the front page," says the Express-News's Rivard. "We have to find a way to make foreign news not only relevant to our readers but something they eagerly look for and can't get anywhere else."
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Michael Parks, former editor of the Los Angeles Times, is the interim director of the School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. He was a foreign correspondent for twenty-five years, and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1987.
