I’d love to see Brian explore a very important, usually overlooked aspect of our current media environment—the gradual death of foreign news and the gaping hole in coverage left by the complete unsustainability of freelance journalism
Seriously @brianstelter has one of the smartest media analysis platforms out there but I just Googled “Reliable Sources CNN foreign news” and came up with zip. The decline of foreign coverage, especially in the Trump era, is a hugely important piece of the modern media landscape.
I know I endlessly harp on this but that’s because I was raised by and around foreign correspondents of a different generation and as a result have an acute awareness of exactly what we’re losing with the destruction of a sustainable business model for that kind of coverage.
This is not a new phenomenon. Interest in foreign news has been declining for over a decade. I haven’t been able to find any recent studies that explore how that process has been affected by the last two years of Trump-dominated coverage but I imagine it has sped up considerably.
News outlets have long been cutting foreign bureaus and staff, so much of that content is outsourced to freelancers, but as I explained in this @cjr piece, the demand for those stories from editors/producers has all but dried up since the 2016 election. cjr.org/covering_trump…
I’ve personally witnessed important foreign stories that impact American interests and should get much more in-depth coverage disappear through the cracks of our awareness because of this. We are losing a sense of our place in the world, and that has real-life consequences.
Most crucially, you can’t expect Americans to vote for political candidates with sensible foreign policy when they simply don’t know what that looks like because they have no idea what’s happening in countries with which we are militarily or diplomatically engaged.
Perhaps the decline of quality foreign news coverage is part of the reason we now have a president whose foreign policy is akin to a bull in a china shop. Not enough Americans actually understand the costs of his reckless interaction with the rest of the world.
Anyway, I won’t waste any more characters on this because it doesn’t ever seem to have much of an impact. I just think it’s a topic that should at least be brought to the public’s attention by influential media analysis like @ReliableSources.
P.S. With the declining interest in foreign news comes a lack of understanding of the risks involved in reporting it. My dad’s kidnapping made headlines for 6 1/2 years. Austin Tice has been in captivity for 6 years. When was the last time you saw him in the news? #FreeAustinTice
