Knowing the world ‘no luxury’

I tend to agree with the major premise of Fareed Zakaria’s new book, “The Post-American World.” The Newsweek editor argues that despite a relative loss of power, the United States will remain the most powerful nation for decades to come – largely on the strength of American ideas, ideals and institutions.

China, India and other “second world” nations are on the rise, meaning a relative shift in the balance of power. While he underestimates the impact of the Iraq war and current economic travail, Zakaria highlights the resilience of our system, education and resources.

But he does warn that American political leaders need to engage the rest of the world, embrace the dynamic, market-driven changes that the U.S. encouraged – and not recoil from “a world with a diversity of voices and viewpoints.”

And that points out one of the most worrisome trends in the last few years: the decline in coverage of international news – and those viewpoints – by both newspapers and TV. A well-informed electorate is critical to the renewal of American leadership in the post-Bush era, yet we seem to be headed in another direction.

Stung by a sharp shift in advertising to the Internet, many U.S. newspapers closed their offices overseas in the last few years as part of a major retrenchment. The Baltimore Sun, my employer for 20 years and for which I covered Western Europe and Africa in the 1970s, closed all its foreign bureaus, as have many big-city papers such as The Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer and Miami Herald. Only a handful of newspapers now assign correspondents abroad, including The New York Times, the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

Smaller papers, including the BDN, still devote significant space to international news, but many others are shrinking that coverage. It is possible to pick up many newspapers today and not find one article about the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The cutback in coverage of international developments by TV networks is even more alarming – in part because the majority of Americans get their news from television. A recent survey reported that coverage of the war in Iraq has been “massively scaled back” by the three major networks. Halfway through 2008, CBS had devoted 51 minutes of their nightly news programs to Iraq, ABC 55 minutes and NBC 74. Altogether, the three networks have devoted approximately 20 percent of the coverage for the same half of 2007. CBS does not even station a full-time correspondent in Iraq; none has a regular person in Afghanistan.

An economic crisis, a competitive political campaign, floods and fires have caused part of that shift. Nevertheless, this sharp decline in international coverage is happening at the very time the American people need to understand the complex societies and forces at work in a globalizing world more than ever.

Pamela Constable, a Washington Post correspondent who has reported from 35 countries, wrote recently: “Knowing about the world is not a luxury; it is an urgent necessity.”

Josh Friedman, professor of international reporting at Columbia’s School of Journalism, agrees: “It’s very dangerous because it allows unscrupulous political leaders to manipulate public attitudes. And it flies in the face of serious trends of a smaller, more complex world.”

Ironically, we can be an ahistorical people. We revere the past and share a proud history and dynamic culture that still attracts millions. Our optimism is an asset: We tend to look ahead and see possibility. But we often forget our mistakes or do not absorb their lessons.

Just look at our total failure to develop a serious plan to reduce our addiction to foreign oil, despite grave crises in 1973 and 1980. Or how Bush’s rush to war in Iraq repeated the mistakes of Vietnam.

To deal effectively with the formidable challenges this year and in the future, this country will need real leadership again. It also will need a healthy, diverse media that provides a comprehensive, in-depth array of information and analysis – not just the drivel of half-baked talk-show hosts and superficial news clips. As the playwright Arthur Miller once commented: “A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself.”

Fred Hill, of Arrowsic, served as a correspondent for The Baltimore Sun and later worked on national security issues on Capitol Hill and for the Department of State. He can be reached at hill207@juno.com