The View from Down Under   

International news isn't necessarily foreign.

IHAD THE GOOD FORTUNE this summer to make my first visit to Australia. Once you get there, you find the country's beauty and the Aussie friendliness transcend even your considerable expectations. Little wonder we Yanks envy it so. Any place whose unofficial motto is "No worries" is all right by us.
Of course, you do have to get there first, which is no mean feat. Somewhere over the Pacific there comes a point‹I'd say it was between tedium and delirium--when you realize you're not on a 747 but the Flying Dutchman, and that you won't be landing at all but instead are doomed to roam above the earth in a cramped aluminum tube with recirculating air. That flight was so long that it's the first time I was able to memorize every song on every channel of the audio program. I have to say I got rather fond of a country and western number called "He Drinks Tequila (and She Talks Dirty in Spanish)," but I guess I'm still trying to figure out how those clean-cut people at Qantas knew about it in the first place.
Courtesy of the Foundation for Development Cooperation, an Aussie think tank whose aim is to foster a better world for the people of Southeast Asia and the South Pacific, journalists and educators from Melbourne to Malaysia came to Brisbane to talk about the globalization of the news media and its impact on foreign news coverage in that part of the world. My job was to kick it off with an overview of the issue and a report on what was happening to international journalism in the American media.
I had to tell them the news on that front wasn't good. The confluence of the fall of communism, the recession in the early '90s and new conglomerate ownership that tends to regard news departments as pesky cost centers have combined to devastate foreign news in the mainstream U.S. media. The situation is most conspicuously bad on the Big Three broadcast networks. The Tyndall Report measures the coverage of international news in three ways, and between 1989 and 2000 the graph lines look like Niagara Falls: a 65 percent drop in the use of the networks' overseas bureaus; a 40 percent drop in stories devoted to U.S. foreign policy; and a nearly 60 percent drop in stories about events abroad not tied to our foreign policy--in other words, good old-fashioned foreign news. If American consumers expected their newspapers to pick up the slack, they were sadly disappointed, as we showed in several installments of the State of the American Newspaper series in AJR. It's not uncommon for U.S. dailies to devote more space to comics than to news of the world. And what few stories do appear are buried, there almost out of obligation rather than the sense that anyone might actually want to read them.
Many news directors and editors insist people "don't care" about international events. They do care, as independent surveys repeatedly bear out. But if deprived of it long enough, they'll cease to. In other words, we are creating a dreadful self-fulfilling prophecy.
We simply cannot be complicit in this intellectual isolationism, aggressive ignorance, not-so-benign neglect--call it what you will. Indeed, in a world where uncertainty in South Asian markets one day can rock Wall Street the next, increasingly the cost of tuning out the world is a financial one. In the age of MTV and CNN, would anyone deny that the fall of communism had at least as much to do with the desire for Levis, Nikes and McDonald's as it did the desire for democracy? Tip O'Neill told us that all politics is local. Surely today all news is local, too, if you care enough to make the connection.
The Australians intuitively seem to understand this, as one might expect of a country which, because of its unique location and history, has one foot firmly planted in the west and the other in the east. I spent a week reading Aussie papers, from Rupert Murdoch's more down-market sheets to his excellent Australian, which proves he can sponsor good journalism when he chooses to. Throughout, I was struck by how many "foreign" stories resonated so strongly back on the mainland: The general unrest in Indonesia and specifically in East Timor; the India-Pakistan summit; Australia's involvement in the grassroots movement against economic globalization. Aussie companies helped bankroll Beijing's successful bid for the 2008 Olympic Games. A price war among Japanese fast-food chains is providing a windfall for Aussie cattle farmers. And Brisbane was about to host the Goodwill Games.
It's a small world, all right, but not nearly as small as the American media would have us believe.