If the death and funeral of Princess Diana were the appropriate indicator, there is no dearth of foreign news in American media. TV anchors and correspondents were called back from vacation and dispatched to London and Paris. Newspapers added special sections, and piled on heart-tugging headlines. Newsmagazines devoted half or more of their pages to Di. The Internet overflowed with sorrowful chat and conspiratorial speculation.

But the story of Diana, of course, was not foreign news. Rather it was a compelling human- interest tale of the tangled life, shocking death, and ceremonial funeral of the best-known celebrity in the world that happened to take place abroad. On Friday, September 5, the day before the Westminster pageantry, another figure of global renown, Mother Teresa, died at age eighty-seven. Prominent, if far more subdued, coverage recounted the work of the missionary nun who won a Nobel Peace Prize. After the over-the-top coverage of Princess Diana, network anchors found their presence required in Calcutta for Mother Teresa's state funeral a week later, even though it appeared on American television just after midnight.

The everyday stuff of foreign news is more prosaic. It consists of political and economic events that raise policy issues and force governments and people to choose. Except for the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-90, the coverage of such international news in American media has steadily declined since the late seventies, when the cold war lost its sense of imminent danger.

 The shrinkage was neatly symbolized this summer during Hong Kong's transition from British to Chinese rule. The three major networks sent their anchors half-way around the world for the historic ceremony, and all three filed advance stories in the preceding days. The turnover itself found CBS and ABC anchors Dan Rather and Peter Jennings reporting live from mid-morning to early afternoon of July 1. But NBC, under contract to cover the Wimbledon tennis tournament, cut for only three minutes to Tom Brokaw in Hong Kong. For more than that, NBC viewers had to wait until the evening news -- unless they switched channels to another network or perhaps to MSNBC, the Microsoft-NBC cable news network that carried live, full-length coverage of the ceremony to a very limited audience.

NBC spokespeople argued lamely that the Hong Kong transition was ceremonial and fully anticipated. It lacked breaking news significance unless something went wrong. And were something to go awry, NBC had the resources in place for sustained live coverage. (More to the point, the Wimbledon contract was a tight one.)

Competitor Roone Arledge, chairman of ABC News, saw things differently. "It was an opportunity to show our viewers the spectacle of the end of the British empire, a truly historic moment that people are entitled to see and interested in seeing." The viewing public agreed, providing ABC and CBS 4.8 and 4.4 ratings respectively while the tennis netted 2.2 for NBC.

In an earlier era before there was cable and fragmented audiences, all three networks would have used their technology and talent to the maximum in covering the Hong Kong story. Times change and there is nothing that says news decisions shouldn't too. "A lot of the foreign news coverage ten years ago was deadly dull," observed the broadcast trade magazine editor Andrew Tyndall in an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review last spring. However one assesses the differing news judgments concerning the Hong Kong transition, it is further evidence of declining media interest in foreign affairs.

The Size of the Decline

A survey by the news agency executive Claude Moisy for the Joan Shorenstein Center showed a drop in time devoted to foreign news on network TV from 45 percent in the 1970s to 13.5 percent by 1995. And TV networks increasingly employ stringers or make deals with foreign providers to gather the news more cheaply. Foreign news is even scarcer on radio. Increasingly, commercial stations broadcast syndicated news services, which are cut-and-paste assemblages of wire service and newspaper accounts, few of them about foreign events. In Washington, D.C., nineteen radio stations rely on one or the other of two news-packaging operations for minimal headline services. "For the average station, news is a dying area," says John Matthews, news director for radio station WMAL in Washington.

In newspapers, foreign news dropped from 10.2 percent of the newshole in 1971 to 6 percent by 1982, according to a National Advertising Bureau study. Other surveys indicate further decline in the years since.

 A California State University journalism professor, Michael Emery, in 1989 found only 2.6 percent of the non-advertising space in ten leading American newspapers devoted to news from abroad.

 As for the newsweeklies, Hall's Magazine Editorial Reports found that from 1985 to 1995 the space devoted to international news declined from 24 percent to 14 percent in Time, from 22 percent to 12 percent in Newsweek, and 20 percent to 14 percent in U.S. News and World Report. Editors struck the same explanatory chord when interviewed by The New York Times. "Week in and week out, international news has been a bit less urgent" (Walter Isaacson, managing editor, Time). "There is a diminution of coverage, simply because the issues are less relevant" (Mortimer Zuckerman, editor in chief, U.S. News). Maynard Parker, editor of Newsweek, says that featuring a foreign subject on the cover results in a 25 percent drop in newsstand sales. Zuckerman concurs: "The poorest-selling covers of the year are always those on international news."

A post-cold war provincialism is not exclusive to the U.S. The International Institute of Communications in London found in a recent study that the much-touted globalization of news is more myth than reality in most parts of the world. West European television stations and quality newspapers remain, as they have historically been, more internationally minded than U.S. media. But even they pay scant attention to developments in Asia and Latin America.

 Paradoxically, the number of reporters overseas for all U.S. media is up. A survey by the Newspaper Research Journal identified 820 full-time U.S. foreign correspondents in the early '90s versus 429 in the mid-'70s. Some of the increase, of course, is explained by the fast growth of business and economic publications and news services, such as Reuters, Bloomberg, Dow Jones. The Associated Press has also expanded its corps of overseas correspondents.

When Knight-Ridder announced in July that it was shifting direction of eight overseas bureaus from the newspaper chain's four large metros to a single foreign desk in Washington, some observers saw yet another diminishment in resources devoted to foreign coverage. At the large Knight-Ridder papers, editors and correspondents expressed concern that the move was a money-saving, dumbing-down initiative. Speaking anonymously, Knight-Ridder staffers told a New York Times reporter that they feared the reorganization meant more time would be spent "covering breaking news with short, quick articles and less time developing more in-depth articles about trends overseas." Indeed, few lengthy, expensive trend stories were being picked up by Knight-Ridder's thirty-five newspapers except for the four metros, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Detroit Free Press, The Miami Herald, and The San Jose Mercury News.

Knight-Ridder executives argue that consolidating the direction of the foreign bureaus is meant to get more, not less, foreign news into the chain's newspapers. And while there are undoubtedly some efficiencies, the move would appear not to be about saving money. No bureaus are being closed, no correspondents recalled. In fact, two extra editors are being hired for the Washington-based foreign desk. Gary Blonston, Knight-Ridder Washington bureau chief, says that internal studies showed that there is public interest in foreign news -- if it is made interesting and relevant.

What Knight-Ridder had was a communications problem. Too few editors except those at the four big newspapers knew what the foreign correspondents were doing. And too few correspondents knew what the editors wanted. Now, Blonston says, "the foreign service will file on the major stories of the day because that is our job and it maintains sources. But the emphasis will remain on enterprise and explanatory journalism," with special attention to such post-cold war topics as economic relations, environmental protection, the social and economic status of women, and "the next soft subject that helps explain the human condition."

Though there still will be some lengthy articles as the material warrants, most stories will come in at about 1,000 words for daily use and 1,500 words for Sunday editions. Correspondents will be rotated every three years with openings available to "the cream of the crop" among reporters within and outside Knight-Ridder.

The Reasons Why

 A world less threatening to America is less newsy, as the newsweekly editors put it. Or in the more colloquial words of television veteran Reuven Frank, sunshine is a weather report, a raging storm is news. The assumption is that lagging public interest explains the shrinkage in media attention. But opinion surveys over the past decade, coupled with the experiential evidence of editors and producers, show that isn't necessarily so.

News consumers do register less interest in traditional state-to-state affairs and in regional or ethnic conflicts that seem to lack wider significance. For example, a survey in 1995 by the Washington-based Center for The People & The Press found that a low of 8 percent of the American public paid "very close" attention to events in Bosnia except for a brief spurt to 23 percent in 1993. The war in Chechnya never hit more than 10 percent. The picture improves somewhat when the issues are international extensions of domestic concerns such as control of crime, drug trafficking, and pollution or advances in health care. But international economic news, even when directly connected to American jobs and trade, rates low attention from the general public.

 To the general public, much of foreign news seems confusing and without sufficient significance to justify working it out. Dennis Ryerson, editor of The Des Moines Register, says of the low-level conflicts around the globe, "You need a scorecard just to keep up. So we're confused and not directly affected, and besides we have other issues to worry about closer to home."

The shifting news agenda, then, is another reason cited for less public interest. Security is inherently more interesting than economics, now the focus of much U.S. policy overseas. The ascendancy of television as the medium of communication for the general public is yet another contributing factor. TV's emphasis on dramatic images and short narratives and the intense battle for audiences amid proliferating choices of outlets all work against foreign news. Crises do get covered but without context by correspondents who are "parachuted" in to report the inflammation. The veteran NBC and ABC foreign correspondent Garrick Utley wrote in the March/April issue of Foreign Affairs of a five-day period in 1978 when from his London base he was dispatched to cover "South Moluccans seizing hostages in the Netherlands, the Israeli incursion to the Litani River in southern Lebanon, and the kidnapping of Prime Minister Aldo Moro in Rome."

Andie Tucher reported in this magazine ("You News," cjr, May/June)that Tom Brokaw led his March 13 broadcast from New York with the dramatic evacuation of several hundred Americans during the "meltdown" of Albania, a country "whose name had first been breathed on the weeknight newscast just the previous evening."

CNN's world affairs correspondent Ralph Beigleiter thinks the last decade has seen a marked increase in consumer-driven journalism in both print and broadcast. Late sports scores, better weather forecasts, health and life-style tips, these are what are promoted. He sees the trend intensifying as interactive media increase the consumer's capacity to choose. "I cannot grab you by the lapels and say, 'You may not know where Bosnia is, but here is why you ought to know,' " Beigleiter observed at a Freedom Forum Media Studies Center discussion in February. "That is the problem with the Web. You can find what you want to know on it, but you miss the seeding of stories on subjects about which you may not know anything."

 Media proprietors may be more the problem than changes in news or technology or public attention. Seymour Topping, former managing editor of The New York Times, says, "The great threat today to intelligent coverage of foreign news is not so much a lack of interest as it is a concentration of ownership that is profit-driven and a lack of inclination to meet responsibilities, except that of the bottom line."

Today's large, public media companies are more profit-obsessed than some of the private proprietors of old. They are also confronting more intense competition for volatile consumer attention. Even if media companies were moved by traditional journalistic responsibilities, pressure would be on editors and producers to make their news "products" what the marketers in the business call "user friendly."

Topping himself recognizes that shorter attention spans and other changes in the consumer market cannot be ignored, and if the newspaper "is not being read, there is a great problem." So there is a movement toward news summaries, particularly for much of the daily flow of international events.

 Editors are also looking for local implications that would increase the relevance of foreign news for their audiences. Several recent Pulitzer Prize entries stressed the effects of overseas developments on local economies and the involvement of local people in distant humanitarian efforts. The Houston Chronicle, for example, published a riveting account of the poor treatment of ill children in Romania as experienced by a visiting Houston medical group.

 Local tie-ins are also used by major papers like the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, and The Wall Street Journal. A Journal story by James L. Sterba struck commentators John Maxwell Hamilton and George A. Krimsky writing in the Gannett Center Journal as the "quintessential" example. Sterba reported how people in India manufacture manhole covers for people in Phoenix, Arizona; Newport News, Virginia; and other U.S. cities.

 Editors are pushing correspondents to write compellingly about the lives of people overseas, serious human-interest stories in place of "process" accounts that document the step-by-step evolution of an issue like the movement for a common European currency. More attention is being paid to the public agenda of international concerns -- the management of crime, drug, health and environmental challenges. Michael Getler, editor of the International Herald Tribune and former foreign editor of TheWashington Post, says his former paper looks to young reporters, rotated rather than permanently assigned to overseas posts, as best equipped to handle the new agenda and subjects involving science and technology and economies.

Does It Matter?

There is no consensus on whether the decline in public attention and media coverage of foreign affairs is cause for alarm. Some, including the notable political thinker Samuel Huntington of Harvard, are hardly overwrought. Writing in the September issue of Foreign Affairs, Huntington finds it understandable that in a time of relative security Americans would delegate, within prescribed boundaries of 'no surprises,' the day-to-day oversight of foreign affairs to professionals. Meanwhile, businessmen and others with a direct need to know have plenty of elite and niche sources of information, both print and electronic. Publications and news services devoted to international business and economics have proliferated.

Even if one accepts that the country's international relations will remain in the hands of a small, informed establishment with the tacit consent of a relatively indifferent public, some informed observers raise a flag of warning. Claude Moisy writes in his Shorenstein study that "there will always be circumstances in which the public at large will be stirred to make itself heard on an international issue out of a perception, right or wrong, that the very 'raison d'�tre' of the nation is at stake. In these cases the public will not necessarily react on the basis of knowledge, but more likely on the basis of emotions aroused by mass media. But because of the exceptional extent of public involvement, these rare cases have the potential of becoming turning points in the life of the country. That is why the amount and quality of international news carried by these changing mass media, or the lack thereof, remain relevant to the conduct of the foreign policy of the United States."

When Topping, now administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes and a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, was the Times's foreign editor, he insisted upon stationing correspondents in areas that were not getting a lot of attention. He believed there was an obligation "to keep on covering foreign news, even if it is not great consumer stuff . . . While the public may at this particular time not be showing a great deal of interest in foreign affairs, the reporting of the media still has an impact on the power structure."

 And to Moisy's point, the cycle will turn and the reasons for public concern and involvement will reappear. Responsible media will have attempted to keep the public prepared. Ultimately in a democracy, that is the rationale for sustaining media coverage of international affairs. By that standard, much of the press gets a mixed report card at best. Elites in business, the professions, and government have ample news and information sources. It is the general public that is being short-changed by media that have yet to exhibit the combination of effort and talent to make news of the wider world interesting and relevant.

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