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International News Coverage: A Vanishing Species?

I’ve been hanging out with some great apes recently.

In 2011, I was in Indonesia and in Rwanda, on trips organized by the International Reporting Project (IRP), the Washington D.C.-based journalism nonprofit group I founded in 1998. In both countries, I got to spend some quality time with endangered apes: orangutans on the Indonesian part of Borneo and mountain gorillas in Virunga National Park in Rwanda.

On a personal level, spending an hour in a Rwandan jungle clearing with a group of 20 mountain gorillas is a profoundly spiritual experience—a meditation on the nature of life and the extent to which we humans have responsibilities for the other denizens of the earth.

But the experience also provided us journalists with a chance to do some rare on-the-ground reporting on such issues as the relationship between environmental protection and political stability, the conflict between development and preservation—topics that proved to be fascinating stories for National Public Radio, the Boston Globe, Triplepundit.com, and other news organizations represented on our trip.

Similarly in Borneo, when we visited orphaned orangutans rescued from their bulldozed forest homes, our band of journalists learned first-hand how Indonesia, the world’s fourth most populous country, was attempting to reconcile the conflict between local citizens’ need for jobs with the need to preserve land for the country’s 60,000 remaining orangutans, the only great apes outside of Africa.

These kinds of issues—planetary health, the consequences of development, the role of good governance—affect all of us, Americans included. Yet journalists rarely send back stories that capture such vivid scenes far from home. Reporting from overseas in the U.S. media is now vanishing at a rate that forced many of us on that cool Rwandan hilltop to ask ourselves the following question:

Who’s more endangered: the orangutans and apes or the foreign correspondents?

International news in the U.S. media has been decreasing for some time now. A clear paradox has arisen: new technology has given us more access to information about the world than ever before. Yet international news is reaching fewer consumers of media, most of whom still rely on the mass-market news organizations that have traditionally provided us with most of the news we think we need to know.

An increasing ignorance of the world is not a healthy trend, neither for us as individuals nor for us as a nation. At a time when more Americans are living, working and studying overseas than ever before, our mass media are providing less in-depth news about the rest of the world than at any time in the past three decades. Can we find what we need to know in niche media or on specialized web sites? You bet. But most of us don’t visit niche sites every day, and if we do, we don’t have time to go to enough of them to constitute an informed citizenry.

And now 2012 finds us in the midst of another U.S. presidential campaign year. As happens every four years, a great deal of international news in our media is pushed aside by the massive amounts of horse race-style political coverage, convention hoopla and polls. I have one friend, a prize-winning veteran foreign correspondent for one of the country’s best news organizations, who says he doesn’t even bother filing non-crises stories from overseas during the U.S. political conventions because he knows that those stories are just going to be killed by the editors for lack of space.

Not that political coverage isn’t important, of course. America’s selection of a president is a critical decision for all U.S. citizens and for residents in every country in the world. But to shortchange, or to ignore, what is happening in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America or the Middle East while we focus so obsessively on the bumps and slumps of the latest political poll is to court disaster. A public that is uninformed, or under-informed, on global issues is an open invitation to the government to make missteps in foreign policy that can cost lives and dollars.

There is no shortage of huge international stories. This spring I have been helping to judge the Overseas Press Club awards for best international stories of the year. As I review the entries, I am continually impressed with the work of so many talented journalists who in 2011 reported brilliantly and bravely on the Japanese tsunami and nuclear disaster, the Arab Spring and the fall of Egyptian leader Hosni Mubarak, the war in Libya, the European financial crisis, the killing of Osama bin Laden, the ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and other global crises.

Especially heartbreaking are the instances of journalists killed covering wars, including photojournalists Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, the latter a friend and former IRP Fellow whose stunning photos from Africa during our reporting fellowship program have been hanging above my desk for the past 10 years. Their deaths in Libya in April 2011 were a terrible tragedy. And this past February brought more reasons to mourn with the deaths, on assignment in Syria, of journalists Marie Colvin and Anthony Shadid.

For all of the momentous crises in 2011, most of which got substantial attention in the U.S. media, there were many other important stories that went largely uncovered and continue to be uncovered in 2012.

The continuing rise of China and India as global powers is a multifaceted story we need to track closely, not just in Asia and the United States. It is virtually impossible to visit any country in Africa without encountering the Chinese, building infrastructure or factories, while securing imports of key raw materials. “The Americans bring us democracy, the Chinese bring us roads,” one Rwandan journalist told us on our visit to his country last year. As we sped along an impressive divided highway, it was pretty clear which import was the most appreciated by Rwandans.

Other emerging powers—Brazil, Indonesia, Turkey and Korea—are on their way to joining or supplanting the U.S. and European countries as economic and political leaders in the world. Like it or not, the U.S. is learning to share power around the world, though much of the American public seems unaware of the new reality.

It’s hardly necessary any more to go over the reasons for the decline in international coverage by the U.S. media. The trend has been in place for two decades—the loss of advertising by newspapers and television to new online media; the merger of media companies that have consolidated once competitive bureaus; the end of the Cold War focus on global enemies, and the inward-looking nature of Americans worried about jobs in a time of recession.

The good news is that even while much of the old media is abdicating coverage of international issues, there is a lot being done in new platforms to try to keep Americans informed about global issues. Social media play a growing role in spreading news of rapidly moving events, as we all saw in the Arab Spring last year.

Most exciting, perhaps, is the creation of new programs and organizations that are experimenting with new ways of creating and funding foreign coverage.

Quick quiz: Which media organization has sent more U.S. journalists to report from Africa in the past decade, more than any other single journalistic organization? If you guessed The New York Times, National Public Radio or CNN, you’d be wrong. The answer is the International Reporting Project.

Yes, that’s our Washington D.C.-based group that enabled me to spend my hour with the mountain gorillas in Rwanda. In the past 14 years, the IRP has sent more than 150 different U.S. journalists to 36 different countries in Africa. Those journalists have produced award-winning stories from countries that even wire services rarely cover, from Benin to Zimbabwe, from Burkina Faso to Namibia.

And it’s not just Africa. The IRP has sent hundreds of other US journalists to report in Asia, Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. We partner with leading news organizations, so you’ve surely heard these journalists’ stories on All Things Considered and The World, watched them on CNN and Frontline and read them online and in print at The New York Times, The Atlantic and dozens of other publications and sites.

Is there a future to this new kind of journalistic coverage of the world? There is reason for optimism, judging by the emergence of other organizations in recent years—not just nonprofits like IRP, but also for-profit ventures such as ProPublica and GlobalPost. Many foundations, including Carnegie Corporation, have supported new initiatives. Since 1998 the IRP has used more than $14 million in foundation support to send nearly 400 journalists to 101 different countries around the world.

Sure, international reporting isn’t ever going to push local news, sports, or U.S. politics off the frontlines of American journalism. It shouldn’t. As citizens, we need more information about our schools, neighborhoods, crime and local government, just as we do about music, fashion, our favorite athletes and TV pop stars.

But we also need stories that tell us about our global connections, about forces that are transforming the United States as a whole as well as our local communities such as immigration, economic competition and cooperation, health issues, environmental concerns and cultural influences. And these stories need to be covered not just through social media feeds, as useful as they can be. Trying to cover a foreign country through following the posts of its Twitter users is interesting, but it’s no substitute for being on the ground oneself.

We need stories such as the one told by Julia Lyon of the Salt Lake Tribune about a Burmese refugee family that made its way to Utah only to suffer a shattering blow by the murder of their daughter. Lyon used a reporting grant from the IRP to go back to the village on the Thai-Burmese border where that family’s journey to the U.S. began and showed us through video, audio, photo and print coverage how the family made a journey that thousands of other new Americans make every year.

Or how about a lighter story, such as the one about the latest growth industry in Borneo, where entrepreneurs are building giant, four-story birdhouses with 24-hour electronic birdcalls to attract small birds called swiftlets? The birds’ regurgitated saliva produces edible nests that sell for about $1,000 a pound to Chinese restaurateurs who use it to make bird’s nest soup. This multimedia story, told by New York Times journalist Jeffery DelViscio from our recent trip to Indonesia, was whimsical, yet it touched on health, economic issues, export policy, wildlife and culinary topics—illustrating the complexity and diversity of the emerging power that is Indonesia.

There are also unexpected, and perhaps even unwelcome, revelations to be learned from reporting abroad. In Rwanda, President Paul Kagame, admired for initiating impressive economic gains in a country devastated by the genocide of 1994 but often criticized for not allowing more political and media freedoms, argued strenuously in a two-hour meeting with our group of journalists that Rwanda needed more time to consolidate its economic and social stability before allowing unchecked freedom of expression.

It was an argument that strikes most Americans as a justification for authoritarianism, and most of us didn’t buy Kagame’s rationale for what human rights experts universally describe as a repressive regime. But because we were there, and had seen so much of the country’s impressive gains, we realized the picture wasn’t as simple as might be portrayed. One of the journalists on the trip, Peter Canellos of the Boston Globe, wrote a thoughtful piece in which he praised the economic advances against the fact that, by stifling free expression, the government hasn’t fully dealt with the violence from the genocide that left nearly a million people dead:

The questions raised by Canellos’ article are the kind that linger in a reader’s mind. They trigger other questions, ignite debate and force us to reconsider some of our usual assumptions. That’s what good journalism has always done, and it’s what the best reporting from overseas is meant to do: make us think about things in new and different ways.

John Schidlovsky is the director of the Washington D.C.-based International Reporting Project (IRP).

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