By Edward Seaton
Special to Poynter.org
Edward Seaton is editor-in-chief of the Manhattan (Kan.) Mercury. He is a former president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors and also of the Inter-American Press Association. He has long been an advocate of more international coverage in daily newspapers.
As American newspaper journalism after Vietnam focused more and more on local news, journalism professors and editors often disparaged foreign coverage as "Afghanistanism."
No one much cares about the world beyond our borders, they said. Afghanistan seemed about as remote from the United States as one could get, so unless you wrote for The New York Times, you suffered from "Afghanistanism" if you advocated more foreign coverage.
That was before Sept. 11.
Now everyone cares, especially about Afghanistan. We know its capital city, Kabul. We know the names of many of its population centers. We know who runs it, who hides there, and what evil beliefs reside there. We've learned Muslim extremists are fundamentalists, but most fundamentalists are not extremists.
Whether sparse international coverage played a role in America's lack of readiness for Sept. 11 is a matter of debate, but editors today see a clear failure to adequately examine the country's anti-terrorism efforts, immigration policies, intelligence-gathering capabilities, sources of anti-Americanism, and foreign cultures generally.
We now know what we don't understand about the rest of the world can come home in tragic reality. We know we must better educate ourselves and the public about the world. We know our dwindling coverage of the world was not a good thing. As we scramble to cover the new war, we are learning how big a mistake we made. Our readers would have been better served had we been paying attention.
We've had a wake-up call. Will we stay awake?
As president of the American Society of Newspaper Editors in 1999, I tried to make the case for international news in local and regional papers. At meetings and workshops we developed the rationale for foreign coverage and explored techniques to make it relevant to local readers. We produced a newsroom handbook, still available from ASNE, called "Bringing the World Home." It offers practical ways of showing readers their global connections in our increasingly globalized world.
Despite Sept. 11, regional and local dailies have neither the budget nor the space to cover the world comprehensively. But they can make international developments relevant to readers by identifying local connections and impacts, and they can put them in context with editorials and op-ed pieces.
There are many reasons international news matters. The importance of intense anti-Americanism in many parts of the Islamic world is today's reason. But the United States is the world's only superpower, and there must be a level of public understanding if, in our democracy, foreign policy is to be conducted with public support in times of crises, as it must be.
We should also care because of the world's increasing interdependency, including increased international travel and the exploding growth of immigrant communities in our own country. These communities represent new markets for our newspapers. What happens in Mexico, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Vietnam, China, or Japan is as relevant to many readers as what goes on in Washington. In fact, a Pew Research Center study in the mid-1990s found that Americans' following of international news was just 1 percent below Washington politics (and slightly ahead of consumer news, celebrity news, or sports).
Covering international news also makes sense because it makes a newspaper a more complete newspaper. Until recently such coverage had been virtually abandoned by network television and the news magazines, creating an opening for newspapers to satisfy the public appetite. The international story also requires context, and TV can't provide it.
As we are learning from our new focus on the Muslim world, there are many engaging stories beyond our borders. A lot of them have local and regional angles.
For the moment, terrorism has dramatically increased the appetite for foreign news, especially news that helps readers understand their new and dramatically changed world. Isolating ourselves from the rest of the world is no longer acceptable. Newspapers have a public duty to cover international news--to bring the world home--even if that appetite eventually wanes.
