Text 3210, 99 rader
Skriven 2006-12-05 15:34:16 av Alan Hess
Ärende: foreign coverage
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Is the loss of foreign newspaper columnists a problem, or merely evolution of
the way news is gathered?
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/oped/bal-op.rubin05dec05,0,6473329.st
ory?coll=bal-pe-opinion

From the Baltimore Sun
Another casualty: newspapers' foreign coverage


By Trudy Rubin

December 5, 2006

PHILADELPHIA -- One group of Americans who can be proud of their work in Iraq
are the print media correspondents based in Baghdad.

They were maligned by the White House and Pentagon as lazy, biased or worse,
but their gutsy reporting turned out to be on the mark. Unlike U.S. officials,
these journalists lived outside the protected Green Zone and risked their lives
daily. Even as the media were being browbeaten by Defense Secretary Donald H.
Rumsfeld, print reporters got the trends right.

In a sign of the times, I'm no longer getting reader e-mail asking me to write
the "good news" about Iraq.

This gives me no cheer. It just makes me wish President Bush read newspapers.
The president might have learned years ago that we had too few troops, no
counterinsurgency strategy and no grasp of Iraqi social dynamics. (He would
have learned little of this from TV networks, which have closed most of their
foreign bureaus, or even from CNN, which focuses on breaking news.)

At a time when the country is obsessed with Iraq, an obsession that drove the
recent elections, foreign correspondents are an endangered species. There may
soon be few left to sound the alarm if future U.S. foreign ventures turn sour.

It's expensive to maintain foreign bureaus that produce serious coverage,
especially in a war zone. As newspapers suffer declines in circulation and
advertising, and as they search for synergy with the Web, foreign coverage is
the first casualty.

Midsize papers such as The Sun, Newsday and The Boston Globe are shutting down
foreign bureaus. The Philadelphia Inquirer has one bureau left, in Jerusalem.
More and more papers now take their foreign news from wire services.

Some papers may send reporters on occasional foreign trips, especially to
pursue local angles. But parachutists who drop briefly into a big overseas
story lack foreign experience and often get the story wrong. You could see the
results of inexperience when a horde of reporters rushed to cover Israel's
recent mini-war with Lebanon's Hezbollah.

The new mantra in the media industry is that midsize papers must go local,
local, local to grow circulation. Readers who want more foreign news can go to
the Web. As The Inquirer's publisher, Brian Tierney, told Washington Post media
critic Howard Kurtz: "I can get what's going on in Iraq online. What I can't
get is what's happening in this region."

But how long will readers be able to get substantive foreign news online?
Content on the Web doesn't drop from heaven. So far, there are no Web zines
that maintain correspondents abroad. If you want in-depth foreign reporting,
you probably go to the Web site of one of the so-called national papers that
still maintain foreign bureaus, such as The Washington Post, The New York
Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Chicago Tribune.

Yet the same economic pressures driving midsize papers to close foreign bureaus
are also squeezing big papers. The Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune may
soon be sold. Who knows how long these papers will maintain all their foreign
outposts?

Get your news from blogs? Those that comment on foreign affairs also depend on
mainstream media for their information. With more newspapers closing foreign
bureaus, will we soon depend on a shrinking pool of foreign correspondents to
inform the whole country? Or will most Americans come to view the world through
the prism of partisan bloggers who don't feel the need for facts?

Perhaps I'm being alarmist. Maybe the last Americans who want foreign news will
keep The New York Times afloat, or pay some Web site to open foreign bureaus.
But look back at the coverage of the Iraq story, and you'll see that some of
the bravest, most informative analysis was done by correspondents from midsize
papers. Far from operating as a pack, correspondents complemented one another,
often searching out stories overlooked by their colleagues. With fewer
correspondents, readers will get a narrower perspective. Would you have wanted
all your Iraq WMD stories to come from then-New York Times reporter Judith
Miller?

As this coverage shrinks, Americans' ability to assess government actions
abroad will also shrink. As the pool of experienced foreign correspondents
disappears, Web aggregators will lose their key source. I can't believe that's
what the public wants.

Trudy Rubin is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Her column appears
Tuesdays and Fridays in The Sun. Her e-mail is trubin@phillynews.com.

Copyright + 2006, The Baltimore Sun | Get Sun home delivery

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