Rediscovering the World   

September 11 showed all too clearly what a terrible mistake it was for America’s news media to largely ignore foreign news.

In April 1992, on a warm spring evening in Kabul, I picked up the handset of a trunk-sized satellite telephone and carefully dialed New York. Sunlight was fading over the capital. The night sky soon would be filled with tracer bullets fired by mujaheddin--"muj" fighters to reporters--still celebrating the fall of the Soviet-installed government a few days earlier. Nobody yet had counted the bodies or fathomed the meaning of the warfare just beginning in the country. Nobody ever would count the people maimed or killed that night by spent bullets hurling silently back to earth.

After hearing clicks and buzzes, and pausing for the long satellite connection, I caught a voice through the receiver saying, "AP Foreign Desk." The conversation went something like this:

TG: "Hi, this is Ginsberg in Kabul. I have to dictate, can somebody take it?"

AP: "Hi. Sure, but you should keep it short. It probably won't make the budget."

TG: "Why? We've got the muj trying to form a government."

AP: "There's a big riot in Los Angeles. Not sure anybody will have room for Afghanistan."

The rioting over the beating of Rodney King was a huge story, justifiably trumping Afghanistan. But something else was going on. And it eventually became clear. From the early 1990s until September 11, 2001, the U.S. news media had subtly turned foreign news into a niche subject. No longer feeling seriously threatened after the Cold War, many Americans didn't seem to care as much about the world; at least that was the common wisdom. And many U.S. editors, producers and news executives, their own eyes glazing over, had abetted Americans' retreat into a cocoon.

Today, a price is being paid for that retreat. More foreign news coverage certainly would not have prevented the September 11 attacks. But perhaps closer attention to the world would have given Americans a clearer warning sign or two. Keeping more correspondents abroad might have meant better reporting today. And without a doubt, more resonant and compelling foreign coverage would have shortened the distance the nation now has to travel to understand why it was attacked.

I was a foreign correspondent for the AP from 1990 to 1996, covering upheaval from Moscow to Kabul to Sarajevo. I later reported from Southeast Asia and Panama for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Seeing U.S. networks, newspapers and magazines scramble in September to send reporters overseas, I found myself recalling the words of the AP's legendary, sometimes irascible foreign editor, the late Nate Polowetzky.

One day in 1988, we were walking out of the AP newsroom in New York. It was a year before the end of the Cold War and long before anybody could imagine the United States going to battle against terrorism on its own soil. I muttered something to the effect that I would never really be a foreign correspondent until I had covered a war. Polowetzky squawked:

"Ha. You think covering war is hard? Try covering peace."

I had no idea how right he was. Covering war, I found out, taxes your stamina, emotional fortitude, resourcefulness, guts and--most of all--luck. For a long time I figured Polowetzky had meant covering peace is harder because it demands more brains and creativity to spot truly vital, meaningful stories without the blatant drama of war. (And after a few scares, I believed I had more luck than brains.)

But as the years went on, I learned the hardest part is often something else entirely. It is grabbing and holding Americans' attention to some faraway place when they don't feel directly threatened or affected by it. That particularly includes American editors, producers and news executives. With their attention, even the nastiest war can be covered. Without it, covering any foreign event is exasperatingly difficult.

Many correspondents kept trying anyway (which probably says something about us, good and bad). At the wires and organizations like CNN International and Newsweek International, foreign stories increasingly got more attention abroad than in the United States. While I was still reporting overseas--I'm now based in Philadelphia--I often found myself agonizing over how to make my stories compelling to Americans, too. I wondered whether their disinterest was my fault, or theirs, or both.

Finding answers is important now, because the media's interest in the world will wane again, perhaps sooner than we expect. Before then, journalists, just as they scrutinize U.S. government actions against terrorists, should examine their own culpability in Americans' ignorance about the world. John Owen, director of the recently shuttered London office of the Freedom Forum, put it bluntly during the scramble to explain September 11: "I think these are the chickens coming home to roost. I don't think American readers and viewers have any context for what happened," he told me. "The networks and news managers are guilty as charged."

In late 1993, I was back in the United States after covering a half-dozen conflicts across the former Soviet Union. I happened to flip on a local TV newscast just as the cheery anchorman was wrapping up a local story. Then he said: "Now for 'The World in a Minute!' " A game-show-style clock popped up beside him as he raced through sundry war stories, before handing off to the weather reporter. I was speechless--it seemed like a rerun of "Saturday Night Live." No wonder Americans weren't taking the world seriously.

The United States has a long history of turning inward in peacetime. Television coverage just illustrates the latest trend. In 1991, the percentage of network stories about foreign affairs aired by CBS, ABC and NBC peaked at 51 percent, almost half of it concerning the Persian Gulf War. By 1997 the share fell to 20 percent and stabilized there until September 11, according to the Center for Media and Public Affairs. Airtime devoted to foreign and diplomatic news fell by more than half between 1990 and 2000, according to the Tyndall Report, which monitors the networks' nightly news.

Newspapers aren't in a position to gloat. A Newspaper Advertising Bureau survey in 1971 put the percentage of news inches dedicated to foreign news at about 10 percent. By the late 1990s, it had fallen to 2 percent, according to the American Society of Newspaper Editors.

Foreign news also vanished from the covers of the U.S. editions of the newsweeklies. In 1977, a third of the covers of Time and Newsweek featured a political or international figure. In 1997, only about a tenth did, according to the Committee of Concerned Journalists.

Reader interest in foreign news is difficult to measure. In a variety of polls in the 1990s, readers put international news in fifth place among most-interesting topics, usually below local news but above sports, according to an ASNE review in 1998. But what readers say isn't necessarily what they mean. The Pew Research Center For The People & The Press found that the only foreign stories most respondents follow closely involve U.S. military actions.

Meanwhile, news organizations hacked their rosters of foreign correspondents. ABC News closed 10 of its 17 bureaus between the mid-1980s and 2000. Time magazine pulled back nine of 33 foreign correspondents it deployed in 1989. Knight Ridder reduced its lineup of correspondents from 21 to 15 over two decades.

By the end of the '90s, with cable TV and the Internet splintering audiences, and media conglomerates demanding news divisions make more money, broadcasters and some publications gradually changed formats to cover more scandal, lifestyle, personalities. There simply were fewer shows and pages where hard news, much less foreign news, could find a home.

There were holdouts, including TV programs like "Nightline" and "60 Minutes" and the large national and regional dailies, led by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Bloomberg Business News became a new source of foreign news. AP created a global video service called APTN (which enabled U.S. networks to close bureaus) and Reuters expanded its video service.

The Internet also created a medium for delivering international news and background information, perhaps mitigating some of the loss of traditional foreign coverage. And U.S. cable TV brought new sources such as BBC News, foreign-language news shows, even National Geographic TV.

But for the most part those outlets reached specialized audiences. The world faded away for the vast majority of U.S. readers and viewers.

Mark Bauman, a former ABC producer based in Moscow, recalls that he was sent to Rwanda in the mid-1990s "when the movement of Tutsis was so large it was seen by satellite. While I was there, they asked me to tell the South African [crew] that basically ABC was going to close the bureau and put them all on retainer.... I remember it was really, really depressing. You're in a grim place, looking at churches piled floor-to-ceiling with human skeletons, telling the African crews that their continent isn't important enough for the evening news broadcast, isn't economically viable for the evening news, to keep the bureau open."

Joseph Angotti, an NBC News vice president in the early 1990s and now a journalism professor at Northwestern University, says that the closing of TV's foreign bureaus "was a pure issue of reducing the budget and reducing the head count.... We just kind of made a decision that we would be protected visually at least by these video organizations.... It's not like we sat around and said foreign news wasn't important anymore. But we did say, do we close Paris or Chicago? That was the decision-making process. It wasn't a disinterest in international news or a feeling that the public was becoming disinterested."

But media people ought to know: The best way to kill the message is to kill the messenger. Any story pushed by a staff correspondent and editor has a better chance of getting attention at a news meeting and seeing the light of day. Still, the closing and downsizing of bureaus was a symptom as much as a cause of dwindling media interest in the world.

Tom Nagorski, foreign editor at ABC's "World News Tonight" since the early 1990s, says before September 11, a foreign story had to be very good indeed to earn significant airtime. "We would keep reading the surveys and studies about more people traveling abroad and studying abroad," he recalls. Nevertheless, he adds, "we had to fight for every story."

Given the realities of the media business today, a turnaround in coverage may hinge not just on bureaus but on parachutists, an admittedly daunting proposition in situations where experience and preparation may count above all.

Andrea Mitchell, NBC's chief foreign affairs correspondent, who has traveled extensively overseas from her base in Washington, told me she cut back on official State Department trips in the 1990s because the network could get more bang for the buck on assignments of its own design. "Inevitably, we missed some stories by not traveling with the secretary of state, but I think we did better by trying to do original reporting outside the official trip.... It was a more efficient use of money, with an admittedly limited budget.... When you're there with the secretary of state, there's no time to do interviews and develop sources on the ground."

David Zucchino, a Pulitzer-winning foreign correspondent and former foreign editor at the Philadelphia Inquirer, compares the 1990s with earlier periods. "What changed was that you had to know, you had to be pretty assured, before you went somewhere, that you were going to get what you were going after," says Zucchino, now reporting for the Los Angeles Times. "You had to hone and refine the story and take fewer chances.... It did save money, but it also meant there's less of a chance that you go over and come up with a truly good story."

I asked Leslie H. Gelb, president of the Council on Foreign Relations, what big foreign stories the media had missed, and he answered without hesitation.

"About a year-and-a-half ago, [then-Defense Secretary William] Cohen wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post, and the last line said there's going to be a serious terrorist attack in the United States. I turned on the network news that night and nobody mentioned it. Nobody, not even the Washington Post the next day, which had printed the piece. Imagine that! The secretary of defense saying there was going to be a whole bunch of attacks and nobody even asked him, 'What are you going to do about it?'... It was the trees falling in the foreign-policy forest, and the press not caring."

David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker and a former Washington Post Moscow correspondent, says "it goes without saying that people are less informed than they would've been.... You're seeing a lot of hustling now to understand everything from fundamentalism and terrorism to blowback and Islamic history."

But far from the foreign-policy elite, some take a different view. Douglas C. Clifton, former editor of the Miami Herald and now editor of Cleveland's Plain Dealer, is a proponent of occasional packages to spotlight a faraway region in addition to daily foreign stories. He describes the reams of stories about Yugoslavia in the 1990s as "white noise." Says Clifton, "My sense is that people are as shocked and stunned about the [September 11 attacks] in Great Britain as they are here, and in Britain they get as robust a foreign report as anyone."

He adds: "My view is that foreign coverage in the majority of American newspapers is not very good. We don't present it in much abundance or in much insight.... All of that said, I think people, readers in general, don't get interested in a subject until they have a need to know. The cliché about Afghanistan is sadly true. Not until we think about scrambling jets do people pay attention."

Those people would include editors and producers. So what have they learned from September 11? Walter Isaacson, the chairman of CNN, told the New York Times two weeks after the attacks: "I think this has been a wake-up call to the public and to all of us in the news business that there are certain things that really matter more than the latest trivial thing that can cause a ratings boost."

Martin Baron, editor of the Boston Globe, told the Los Angeles Times: "I think most Americans are clueless when it comes to the politics and ideology and religion in the [Muslim] world and, in that sense, I think we do bear some responsibility."

During the 1990s, journalists struggled to find ways to combat the marginalization of world news, beyond citing why-we-should-care statistics about globalization. One recipe for increasing foreign coverage was leveraging attention focused on a major event by pumping out as much background as possible; such was the case with India and Pakistan's nuclear standoff in the late 1990s. The drawback is that by waiting for a crisis, the context comes too late.

Another popular prescription was "localizing" the world, which came to mean giving people explicit reasons why they should care about a place by pegging the story directly to the local economy, local business, local culture, local immigrants. This has been a particularly effective way for regional and local print and broadcast news organizations to flesh out angles relevant to their readers, by sending their own staffers overseas. (This is good for building expertise and staff morale as well.) There have been many excellent stories from staffers both overseas and at home, from the Richmond Times-Dispatch's report on competition from Brazilian tobacco farmers to Knight Ridder's investigation of slave labor in African cocoa production for U.S. chocolate companies.

This tactic has pitfalls, though. There are important, compelling foreign stories that have no obvious local or domestic pegs. For example, this approach probably would not have produced much more coverage of Osama bin Laden for much of the decade. And there's a risk attached to trying to hang foreign news on a domestic link: It could feed easily into the media's established tendency to follow the White House's lead on foreign affairs.

Some editors advocate replacing a steady stream of incremental foreign news stories, particularly the standard coups-and-earthquakes coverage, with less frequent but more detailed takeouts explaining why a far-off place is relevant, interesting or important. And some strive to find the emotional hooks, the universal curiosities, that make a story compelling whether it's from Iowa or Indonesia, such as coverage of China's mass relocation of people to make way for its Three Gorges Dam, or the Detroit Free Press' reporting on the rising belief in witchcraft in Zimbabwe. The downside is that those angles may be few and far between, and the stories are tough to pull off consistently.

For television, some have hoped that new technology will make foreign reporting easier and more affordable. One breakthrough is the small videophones now being used in Pakistan and Afghanistan (see "The Videophone War," November). Small digital video cameras and satellite phones might make TV reporting almost as easy, and cheap, as print reporting. But it's important to keep the promise in perspective: The dwindling coverage of the 1990s came amid a dramatic improvement in communications technology. In fact, new gadgets may have made it easier to justify downsizing foreign bureaus.

Some have opted to veer from commercial broadcasting altogether. ABC has negotiated a deal with the BBC to rebroadcast reports from its correspondents. NPR and PBS stood out during the past decade with their foreign coverage on programs like "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer" and "Frontline." Public broadcasting, however, will not unseat the dominant commercial broadcasters.

So that left some people, including prominent journalists, to make raw appeals to publishers and networks to look beyond profits and put more foreign headlines on front pages and covers, and more foreign stories in prime time. "It's time the cost-cutters, the money-managers and the advertisers...gave us room to operate in a way that's meaningful," said CNN chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour last year in a speech to the Radio-Television News Directors Association. "Otherwise, we will soon be folding our tents and slinking off into the sunset."

Neither, likely, will happen. The financial pressures of the news business and the adventurous zeal of aspiring correspondents both may be sharpened by the current crisis.

Ultimately it will take some combination of all approaches. When this war subsides and Americans' interest in foreign news inevitably wanes, the lessons of September 11 should be clear. For media executives who think all news is local, it should force them once and for all to broaden their definition of local. For journalists who believe in foreign coverage, it proves the need for compelling and relevant coverage that spells out why Americans should care.

With any luck, Americans might stay a little better informed about the world. It will not be easy. After all, covering peace is harder than covering war.