There is a crisis in international news reporting in the United States -- and not one that should simply be blamed on the reporters, the gatekeepers, or the owners. We know that there is stagnation, and even shrinkage, in the number of international stories in the media and the number of correspondents in the field for most U.S. media outlets. But the primary reason for this decline is an audience that expresses less and less interest in the international stories that do appear. What we're increasingly missing, as a culture, is connective tissue to bind us to the rest of the world.

Mid-twentieth-century Britons were connected to far-off continents by the legacies of their disappearing empire. World War II had the same sort of impact on the U.S. public -- everyone knew someone, loved someone, who had been shipped off to a place they once couldn't pronounce. The underlying lesson to this experience was not that Americans had become avid consumers of international news for all time to come. It was something less cheering: you can only rely on international news to turn a profit when it's actually domestic news. And the most certain way for international news to become domestic news is through a U.S. military intervention -- when it's "our boys" -- "over there."

I know a great many decent people working in American newsrooms who are passionate about covering international stories, beating their heads bloody against all the obstacles put in their way. They end up going after strong images of war and starvation -- because that's what they think will reach their audience. But it is impossible, as a human being, to fully absorb these horrific images without experiencing the will to do something about it.

So as coverage of an international crisis builds, the will to do something, anything, about it becomes overwhelming. It drives public opinion, it drives the administration, and it drives the story's shelf life. But all too often, doing "something, anything" about a crisis means military intervention for lack of a better alternative, and in news terms, the more dramatic the intervention, the more seemingly effective.

Unfortunately, intervention is a blunt instrument. It can only accomplish simple things. It can reopen oil pipelines. It can remove or restore a head of state -- on a good day. But it can't do complicated things, like creating a functioning democracy where none ever existed, or dismantling a billion-dollar drug industry that is the only crutch for a crippled third world economy.

International news coverage has been further complicated by the information revolution. The generation that learned about the world through World War II had a canonical set of media to rely on that responded to a hierarchical structure. That structure has been blown apart over the last few years. One person's primary news source might be an on-line financial service transmitted to her home computer while another's might be a tabloid television "news" show on cable.

People in the news business are constantly facing the question "Why should we care?" about international stories. We need to think hard about the answers that are implicit in news coverage. Should people care about international crises based on humanitarian concerns? If so, what are the criteria for how much information is presented about them, and how directly the U.S. should be involved?

Yet when crises are extensively covered, as in Somalia, the story creates its own momentum. There is strong evidence that, in the news media's impetus to cover and play out the story, and in the public's will to "do something" to relieve the suffering, the United States undertook a policy that helped no one and possibly did harm. We should ask whether the media have a responsibility, as they present their devastating images of suffering, to acknowledge that these images could impel the country towards intervention, and to take on the question, "What is present in this situation that intervention can actually fix?"

There are other good answers to the question "Why should we care?" but they aren't easy answers. We are living in an era where the forces that rule our lives are more internationalized than ever. International trade is coming to dominate our economy; the distinctions between local cultures and a world culture are disappearing. News travels around the world in a matter of moments. Most Americans don't understand these phenomena, and they need to.

We are inhabiting a strange moment in which the story selection process of a group of CNN editors in Atlanta has a remarkable degree of influence on the world's primary peacekeeping force. The United Nations, paralyzed for decades by the superpower deadlock in the Security Council, must respond to an international agenda that seems arbitrary and episodic. Governments from around the world are looking to the United Nations for leadership, yet our own political process has not sorted out the most basic questions of whether foreign policy should be conducted as an elite or a public concern. Either way, we owe it to the world that the decision is an informed one. Our international news coverage must measure the consequences of its impulses to help us achieve that end.

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