Covering the New World Disorder

American journalists can hardly be expected to admit being nostalgic for the good old cold-war days when covering the world meant finding out who won and who lost the latest global match between Washington and Moscow. But things were a lot simpler back then. Journalists took their cue from the president, who set the foreign policy agenda and used his favorite columnists to send trial balloons to foreign leaders. News organizations followed the Marines to wars and located their bureaus in those foreign capitals with the largest U.S. diplomatic presence. Only when cracks showed up in the national consensus, as it did during the Vietnam War, did the press dissent from the official line. As John Walcott, who covered the superpower rivalry for Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal, puts it, "The cold war provided us with a coherent global road map, in terms of what to cover and how to cover it."

But no more. "Since the fall of the Berlin Wall and the elimination of the cold-war news filter, the task of making sense of global events has become less manageable for the media," says Don Oberdorfer, who served as a diplomatic correspondent for The Washington Post. The press is unaccustomed to reacting to a world full of conflicts and violent encounters that, as historian and diplomat George Kennan puts it, offer no "great and all-absorbing focal points for American policy." Predictability has given way to uncertainty: Now what are we going to do?

"If ten years ago Armenia and Azerbaijan had been at war as they are now, it would have been a daily front-page story, seeing the Soviet Union being torn asunder," wrote Bernard Gwertzman, foreign editor of The New York Times, in a memo to his staff in December 1992. "Now, we are struggling to come up with a formula for covering that war as well as the other local conflicts in what used to be the Soviet Union."

In the cold-war mindset, Sylvia Poggioli, an award-winning National Public Radio reporter, observed in a recent Nieman report, "good and evil were easily defined and identified." When it ended, "reporters had to confront new problems that most of them had never explored before, such as ethnic self-assertion, tribalism, religious conflicts, and the rights and limits to self-determination." Poggioli compared journalists covering post-cold-war conflicts to "scouts without compasses in a completely unknown terrain."

And the current White House occupant, unlike the cold-war presidents, has so far been unable to provide the press with a foreign policy compass. Instead, says Bill Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy, he "has abdicated the diplomatic news agenda-setting role of the presidency to the media."

The clear mandate given by a post-cold-war electorate to focus on domestic rather than foreign issues compounds the problem. "We assumed during the cold war that there was a secure market for international news," says Allen Alter, foreign editor for The CBS Evening News. "Now, it's difficult to figure out who our clients are and what foreign stories they want, if any." Even big stories, like the coup against Yeltsin, have failed to attract large audiences, according to CNN vice-president for public relations Steve Haworth.

It is all too easy to overemphasize the problems created -- for journalists and diplomats alike -- by the collapse of the old, simplistic view of the world. Among the possible journalistic benefits is the emergence of more nuanced and objective coverage. Harper's Magazine publisher John R. MacArthur for one, believes that cold-war lenses all too often blocked the journalist's view of international issues so that, for example, developing countries were portrayed as mere pawns in the coldwar struggle. The social roots of third world conflicts were rarely explored.

It was also more difficult to convince editors to pay attention to the economic rise of Asia or to trade issues anywhere, says James Fallows, who covered those issues for The Atlantic Monthly at a time when the press at large was preoccupied with the Soviet-American conflict. Now, Fallows says, he senses a growing interest in geo-economic news.

At The New York Times, says Gwertzman, "We have been quietly and not so quietly urging more and more stories on economic affairs for the foreign report. Every correspondent must make a major effort to become literate in economic affairs, to be able to write about macroeconomic trends such as monetary policies, as well as on micro stories such as new business in former communist states."

The fact that the Times chose former Middle East correspondent (and two-time Pulitzer Prizewinner) Thomas L. Friedman to cover global trade and finance reflects this new commitment. "A few years ago, selecting someone with my background to cover trade would have been considered a demotion," says Friedman. "Now, in the era of geo-economics, covering trade wars is becoming as important as covering 'real' wars."

At The Washington Post, David Ignatius, also a former Middle East correspondent, is revamping the business section so that it will reflect the newly perceived need to coordinate the international coverage between the foreign and business desks. "At a time when what [investor] George Soros does is as important as what the Fed's Alan Greenspan decides, our foreign coverage is still focused too much on government policy and not enough on the market forces," Ignatius says.

While the Times's Gwertzman emphasizes the "need to demystify global economic news the way we dejargonized nuclear-strategic news during the cold war," Alan Tonelson, research director at the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Strategy Institute, worries that the press will simply substitute "a dogmatic 'freetrade-is-good' bias" for its dogmatic cold-war bias. If it does so, Tonelson warns, the press could easily lose sight of the "losers" in the global economic story, be it American steel workers or Indians in Chiapas.

While the Times and Post search for new ways of covering international news, other media organizations, including the television networks, have been slow to take up the challenge. "We are just continuing to cover the world in the most comprehensive way, as we always did," says John Stack, foreign news director for NBC News. "There was no need for a post-cold-war reassessment." Ralph Begleiter, world affairs correspondent for CNN, says that, while he finds that he is paying less attention to arms control issues and more to Russian ethnic politics, "that has not been a result of a systematic or structural post-cold-war restructuring of news process," adding that the network has not instigated any thorough discussion of the issue.

CBS's Alter, for his part, says, "We are changing all the time, responding to global developments. But we haven't made dramatic transformation of the way we cover the news, as a result of the end of the cold war, like changing the bureau system."

Meanwhile, over at ABC, senior vice-president Richard Wald says that "with the end of the cold war, we came to the conclusion that our coverage of international affairs would become less centered on the East-West conflict and more diffused, in terms of having to shift coverage from one area of the world to another." The network, he notes, has made an effort to provide its global newsgathering with more "flexibility" through an alliance with two major international broadcasting organizations -- the BBC and Japan's NHK.

Financial constraints, combined with the conventional wisdom that the public is now less interested in foreign affairs, have led to increasingly severe cutbacks at the networks' foreign bureaus and a growing reliance on freelance video footage. "In tandem, the global reach of both the United States government and the newsgathering resources of the American broadcast networks have shrunk," observes Andrew Tyndall, publisher of the Tyndall Report, a newsletter that monitors network television coverage. "In our domestic president, Bill Clinton, our news organizations have found an ideological soul mate."

While Tyndall's analysis suggests that Bosnia and Somalia have not been entirely pushed aside on the tube by tabloid stories, a whole middle tier of stories of some significance to U.S. interests -- Japanese politics, the rise of radical Islam in the Middle East, political and economic upheavals in Ukraine and Poland, to name a few -- was undercovered.

Coverage of Bosnia is a good example of the lack of an informed filter, argues NPR's Sylvia Poggioli. News judgments, she says, were based on such factors as access to certain geographical areas (hence the focus on Bosnia rather than on the bloodier war in Nagorno-Karabakh; on Sarajevo, but not Tuzla); on the successful public relations efforts by certain players (the Croats and the Muslims); and on personal sympathies of journalists (sympathetic toward the westernized Muslims of Sarajevo).

What was missing from the reporting from Bosnia, Poggioli contends, was a realistic picture of its "complex cultural, historical, and political geography." What American viewers were given, then, was a simplified cold-warlike story, with heroes (the suffering residents of Sarajevo) and villains (the murderous Serbs).

In an op-ed piece that appeared in the June 7, 1990, Wall Street Journal, neoconservative pundit Irving Kristol recommended that The New York Times should relegate foreign news to its back pages. With the cold war over, he argued, there was no reason why a coup in Liberia "should even be within the purview of American foreign policy -- or why the Times should be devoting so much space to it."

Cold war or no cold war, came the reply from the Times in an editorial three days later, the newspaper was committed to international news. "Is foreign coverage still important to the Times?" asked Gwertzman in his memo. "The answer is an unambiguous yes," he responded, while admitting the need for a new "formula" to determine which foreign news stories are now "significant."

But one person's significant is, of course, another's insignificant. While isolationists like Kristol are proposing a more restrictive definition of American interests in the world, others would like to see more coverage of "transnational" global issues, like human rights, the environment, and AIDS. In short, the debate over foreign news choices mirrors the debate over foreign policy alternatives. In the end, journalists cannot determine what the new foreign policy paradigm will be. A consensus will have to develop through a dialogue between the American people and their leaders. It is a dialogue which the media could -- and should -- help to facilitate. Like the debate over the role of America in the world, the debate over the future of American news coverage of that world has just begun.

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