Heribert Seifert und Stephan Russ-Mohl have a piece in the NZZ-Online about the vanishing foreign correspondents working for American newspapers (and television networks). The paradox is that everyone acknowledges that we live in a globalized world, where a terrorist attack in Mumbai impacts events in the US, yet the big media organizations devote fewer and fewer resources to covering international stories. The results of this cutback in foreign coverage is growing ignorance of the world, which could lead to more disastrous policy decisions like the Iraq invasion:
University of Southern California, spricht vom «stupid American
phenomenon». Die Medien hätten versagt. Die Amerikaner seien nicht mehr
hinreichend informiert, um Entscheidungen zu treffen. Je stärker die
Auslandberichterstattung abgebaut werde, desto weniger weise fielen die
politischen Entscheidungen in Washington aus – eine kühne Hypothese, an
der bei näherer Betrachtung aber doch eine ganze Menge dran ist:
Ranghohe Politiker erfahren bekanntlich vieles aus der Zeitung – und
nicht nur von ihren Geheimdiensten und diplomatischen Vertretungen.
Wenn in ihren Zeitungen nichts in Erfahrung zu bringen ist, entscheiden
sie womöglich nicht nur schlecht informiert, es fehlt ihnen auch jenes
kritische Korrektiv sachkompetenter und meinungsmächtiger
Kommentatoren, das in der «guten alten Zeit» öffentliche Meinung
genannt wurde, obschon es sich eigentlich um die veröffentlichte
Meinung einiger weniger handelte. Zugegeben, das war Kommunikation
unter gebildeten Eliten, die sich aber durch das Blabla
«demokratisierter» Diskurse im Internet nicht ersetzen lässt. (Philip Seib, and expert on international reporting at USC speaks of the "stupid American phenomenon". The media have failed. Americans are no longer sufficiently informed for making decisions. As more foreign coverage is cut back, the political decisions made in Washington have been unwise – a bold hypothesis that has a great deal of merit: it is a fact that senior politicians learn a great deal from newspapers – and not just from intelligence sources or diplomatic outposts. If there is nothing to learn from reading the newspapers, they are apt to make less informed decisions. They are no longer exposed to the critical corrective of knowledgeable commentators with strong opinions on topics, who, in the "good old days" formed the public opinion, even if it was only the published opinion of a few observers. Admittedly, it was communication by an educated few, but preferable to babel of the "democratic discourse" that we get on the Internet.)
Today is seems almost quaint to read the dispatches by Dorothy Thompson at the Berlin bureau of The New York Post, reporting on the rise of National Socialism to American readers. Or the work of William Shirer, who reported from Berlin for the Chicago Tribune on the start of World War II. The Chicago Tribune shut down its foreign news bureaus some time ago. I had a feeling of nostalgia recently when I read Martha Dodd's book Through Embassy Eyes about her time as the US ambassador's daugher in Berlin from 1934- 1938. The book contains vivid descriptions of the large contingent of US newspaper correspondents living in Berlin.
Jill Carroll, a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor (Carroll was kidnapped in Iraq) wrote a study for Harvard's Kennedy School on Foreign News Coverage by the US Media (pdf) where she documents the decline in foreign bureaus. Carroll estimates that the number of US foreign correspondents fell from 188 in 2002 to just 140 in 2008. In 2007 the prestige newspaper The Boston Globe, which over the years won many awards for its international news coverage, shut down its offices in Berlin, Bogota and Jerusalem and recalled all of its foreign correspondents. But Carroll also discovered that the decline in foreign news coverage does not reflect a lack of interest by the public in international stories. If anything, the demand for international news is greater than ever, but shutting down foreign bureaus is purely a financial decision by the conglomerates and private equity groups that now own most of the major US newspapers:
The declines in coverage and foreign bureaus don’t seem to be because editors or reporters don’t see the value of foreign coverage, but is rather a reflection of the priorities of the financial decision makers at media companies. Those decision makers don’t appear to factor in the non-monetary value great foreign coverage brings a paper when considering the cost of running a foreign bureau.
The private equity groups care nothing about the public mission of the newspapers: to them, it is just an asset that hopefully will throw off enough cash to cover debt service. A good example is the Chicago Tribune – the paper of the great William Shirer. The Tribune's parent company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on December 5. It's owner lists $13 billion in debt. Thus a great newspaper has been destroyed by greed.
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It will come as a surprise to the Chicago Tribune’s seven still-existing foreign bureaus (London, New Delhi, Mexico City, Moscow, Jerusalem, Johannesburg and Cairo) that the Tribune “shut down its bureaus some time ago.”
Ironically, this well-intentioned piece highlights the difference between the dying world of newspapers and the booming online world of blogs: The former has editors, and at least attempts to base its content on the hard work of original reporting; the latter is, with all respect, mostly a soapbox for opinions and purloined “facts”–just cannibalism and spew.