The decline of foreign reporting in the US
As an international journalist with a stake in the news, it’s hardly surprising that I spend a scary amount of time scouring the world pages of news sites, watching Al Jazeera, and flicking through the international sections of national newspapers.
But what is more surprising (and scarier) is that this places me firmly in a box outside the realm of most Americans. As media owners and analysts are keen to point out, local stories receive much more attention in the US than world news. Even war is “a local story”, says John Maxwell Hamilton, the author of Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting. Americans care about what happens to their boys abroad, and their ability to locate Iraq on a map has little bearing on viewer numbers.
Of course this trend is not without its exceptions. The earthquake in Haiti received a torrent of media coverage, and most Americans have joined the rest of the world in watching with horror as the tragedy unfolds. But even a disaster on such a mass scale has not shaken some Americans’ insular view of the world.
One Facebook user, Jack Finnegan, had this to say about America’s aid shipments to Haitian earthquake victims:
“Why is it always us? Let China help or Japan we have enough problems. People lose their houses everyday…if we keep giving it all away we will be a lost, broke country talking about when we used to be prosperous. There is a time to help but, there is also a time to get your house in order. Guess what time it is.”
It would be unfair to leave it at that. Finnegan’s comment received an avalanche of criticism, the most noteworthy coming from New Yorker Sarah Pratt:
“So we can’t care about a natural disaster that killed 100,000 people if it not on US soil? We all care about fellow Americans safety and financial stability in these hard times. But we are all people on this earth. Borders created by ourselves shouldn’t change that.”
Democracy Now’s Amy Goodman argues that Americans are interested in foreign news, at least as much as anyone else. But knowledge of world affairs is much more limited than it should be, and the domestic media takes a fair share of the blame.
On Thursday, Al Jazeera’s Riz Khan show hosted a debate on the decline of foreign journalism in America. Speaking on the programme, Goodman pointed out that the media’s failure to report on world news has meant that “we [Americans] don’t even see the effects of our actions in other countries”. Goodman claims that greater emphasis on world affairs would impact the nation’s view on war and racial or religious intolerance. “When people learn about other countries, it’s harder to be belligerent against them,” she explains.
Today the country is facing a black hole where international coverage used to be, and it is not just viewer polls that are leading this scourge either. Publications and broadcasters are struggling to make journalism pay, and costly foreign correspondents are the first cutback. World news is shrinking fast, and the US media is leading the race to the bottom.
Two freelance journalist colleagues of mine have confirmed this dreary turn of events; American newspapers have told them they are no longer accepting freelance work on their foreign desks.
But Hamilition points outs that foreign journalism is not dead, just transformed-through online media. The internet age has seen a blossoming of foreign news reported from all corners of the globe by anyone with a mobile phone or a camera. As evidenced by the ‘twitter revolution’ following the Iranian elections, online citizen journalism is wielding unprecedented power.
This does not solve the problem for journalists per se, as most of still rely on the age old formula of payment for services rendered. But it does mean there’s a light at the end of the tunnel. If we could just start charging a road tax on it, there may be hope yet.
Tags: America, foreign correspondent, foreign media, foreign news, freelance journalist, Haiti, international news, local story, US media, war, world affairs, world news
