From 1978 to 1982, Jim Upshaw was a foreign correspondent based in Tokyo for NBC News, covering some of the biggest international stories of the time.
Among them were the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, a root cause of terrorism’s deep roots there today, and the Iranian hostage crisis, the first time raw Islamic fundamentalism slapped the U.S. in the face.
But after he came home, NBC and the other TV networks – as well as newspapers – began shrinking their coverage of foreign news. The trend grew in the late 1980s and increased rapidly in the 1990s after the Cold War ended.
“I thought it was crazy,” said Upshaw, who now teaches journalism at the University of Oregon. “It was obvious to me that you weren’t going to be able to get information on the ground in places where they didn’t speak English” unless reporters were there.
Upshaw and other journalists, including myself, believe the nation has paid a price for the cutbacks in that the lack of coverage left Americans unaware of the seething hatred building against us and the true threat that terrorism posed.
Instead, news organizations frittered away their focus on tabloid scandals, leaving the public in the dark as the world moved into an era of globalization and rising danger.
“Were audiences ill served by that? You bet,” said Tom Rosentiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, D.C. “News doesn’t tell people what to think, it tells people what to think about.”
Some numbers bring this into sharp relief:
- A 1997 study by Harvard University showed the amount of time TV devoted to international news shrank from 45 percent in the 1970s to 13.5 percent in 1995.
- In 1998, a University of California at San Diego survey found that only 2 percent of newspaper coverage focused on the world, down from 10 percent in 1983.
- Last year, the Project on the State of the American Newspaper found there were only 282 foreign correspondents for the nation’s nearly 1,500 daily newspapers, with most working for a few large papers such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times
While the end of the Cold War made news organizations feel people no longer cared about international stories, another factor came into play, Upshaw and Rosentiel said.
Money
The TV networks were purchased by major corporations such as Disney and General Electric, which felt staffing expensive foreign bureaus was a waste. So the ax fell hard.
TV executives “weren’t looking at big geopolitical issues” but rather “ways to maximize profits,” Upshaw said.
Meantime, the recession of the late 1980s and early 1990s, coupled with the pressure by Wall Street for big profit margins, forced newspaper companies to make deep newsroom cuts. And one of the easiest things to eliminate was the foreign desk.
“The whole news business turned around,” Rosentiel said, with papers devoting far less space to global coverage.
Rosentiel believes that if there had been more reporting on terrorism and Osama bin Laden’s network, it may have forced the government and public to pay attention and be prepared to fight a menace that neither took seriously.
Now, he is somewhat hopeful the press will not totally retrench in the months ahead, considering the enormous impact of Sept. 11.
“Given what’s happened in the last two weeks, that the World Trade Center gave way to American airstrikes, and the airstrikes are matched by the evolving new terrorism attack in the form of anthrax, there is no letup,” Rosentiel said.
“In many ways, the profundity and complexity of the story has grown. . .Viewership is up, readership is up, for the first time in two decades.”
But Upshaw is more doubtful. He says while the networks will have to “sharpen their listening posts around the world” and focus on nations where U.S. interests are at stake, in the end the accountants may again prove more powerful than the pull of world events.
“Do I think it’s going to last? No, not beyond a point where the ratings show it doesn’t need to,” he said.
