International News in the North American Media

Abstract

THE MEDIA ARE CAPABLE OF PERFORMING A POWERFUL and useful role in society. They can help educate the public, evaluate events that are important in our lives, mobilize public opinion, and safeguard against abuses of power in government. The messages they convey do not merely inform but also help to shape our understanding and opinion of significant events and issues, especially those in foreign countries, which are often unable to relate to our own experience. In such situations, the media become our eyes and ears on the world, enabling us to interpret the meaning of events abroad.Unprecedented technological advances in the past two decades have ushered in an era of instantaneous communication. Journalism is now practised in real-time during a 24-hour cycle. All-news channels such as CNN, the BBC World Service, CBC Newsworld, and CTV Newsnet provide round-the-clock coverage of events as they unfold. These media specialty channels offer audiences constant updates, analysis, and debate on major political and events. The daily newspaper is no longer sufficient to satisfy the demands for up-to-date news. When a major story breaks, we expect to watch it as it unfolds. The dramatic live coverage of the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 or the bombing of Baghdad during the Gulf War of 1990-1 illustrated the immediacy with which events can be broadcast into our homes.Technological advances have also made traditional overseas operations much more flexible. New techniques continue to make newsgathering more efficient. A correspondent, camera operator, sound engineer, and field producer are no longer needed to cover a story; the first two can do it alone from the field with just a camera and a portable editing machine. And their items can be sent home via a miniature satellite dish. Technology has given networks the ability to cover more - in some cases instantaneously - from all corners of the globe.Yet, despite these technological advances and the proliferation of cable, satellite television, the internet, radio, newspapers, and other outlets, the mass media have paradoxically become increasingly parochial. Rather than more foreign news, we are getting less. Coverage of international by the North American media has fallen dramatically in the last twenty years.(1) In the last decade, foreign correspondents have witnessed the closure of many bureaus and a steady diminishing of their ranks.Nowhere is this more apparent than in the United States where the lack of media interest in the rest of the world is one of the most pronounced trends in American journalism. A survey by the Joan Shorenstein Center at Harvard University found that the time devoted to foreign on network television declined from 45 per cent in the 1970s to 13.5 per cent by 1995.(2) Between 1988 and 1996, reports from the foreign bureaus of the three major television networks - ABC, CBS, and NBC - dropped fifty per cent, from 3,261 minutes to 1,596 minutes.(3) Since then, coverage of foreign has continued to decline, and ABC, NBC, and CBS have been reduced to 16 fully staffed foreign bureaus among them.The American print media has not fared any better. News from abroad was reduced from 10.2 per cent of substantive newspaper content in 1971 to six per cent in 1988. According to the president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Edward Seaton, by 1998 that figure had fallen to less than two per cent.(4) Peter Arnett, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning CNN international correspondent, lamented that: 'International coverage in most of America's mainstream papers has almost reached the vanishing point. Today, a foreign story that doesn't involve bombs, natural disasters or financial calamity has little chance of entering the American consciousness. This at a time when the United States has become the world's lone superpower and news has so many venues... that it seems inescapable. …