"Evil Empire" Dies, What Next? As references to the "Evil Empire" on American television recede into memory, sublime images of Africa as a dark continent nevertheless remain an enduring presence. This, despite the debate in foreign policy and media circles about the need to redefine now the role of the press in coverage of global affairs. No doubt, the media, television especially, have provided compelling images of the changing world order: Tiananmen Square, the Persian Gulf and the Middle East, Somalia, Bosnia, the Soviet coup and the Berlin Wall. To most Americans, vivid memories of these events are in all likelihood shaped by images gleaned from CNN or one of the three networks. Indeed, most Americans get their news from the 22-minute evening broadcasts of these networks and CNN. Never mind that television tends to concentrate on the "big story" for days at a time, or that most Americans think television only does stories about foreign countries when there is a war or some other violent crisis going on.' If the concern shown by the Freedom Forum (formerly a Gannett News Corporation Foundation) is any indication, then the established media in the United States may finally be giving some deserved attention to improving coverage of the world in the news. Whether or not such attention leads to changes in orientation is, however, a different matter. But the call by the Freedom Forum for new ways to make sense of the world is, in itself, a major shift in orientation from the contentious debate over the New World Information and Communication Order (NWICO) debate of the 1970s and 1980s.2 Now the Freedom Forum says much emphasis was placed in the past on reporting international conflicts with destabilizing influences-and on the bizarre, the exotic, and random occurrences, including natural disasters.3 The Foundation blames this kind of foreign news coverage on the tendency of western media in the past to report the news from an "ethnocentric perspective," using parochial standards to determine news.