Vanishing foreign correspondents

Fred Hiatt is disheartened about America's shrinking foreign reporting community

Dawn
Monday, January 29, 2007

By Fred Hiatt

Washington --- When my wife and I worked as foreign correspondents for The Post in Tokyo 20 years ago, we befriended and competed against a host of other American reporters, including two talented writers from the Boston Globe, Colin Nickerson (still a Globe foreign correspondent) and Tom Ashbrook (now a star of public radio).

The reporting corps had diverse views on the central questions of the time, and even on what the central questions were, and the reports we sent home reflected that. Readers benefited from the diversity and competition.

I thought of this last week when the Globe, now owned by the New York Times Co., announced that it would close its remaining three overseas bureaus, which no longer include Tokyo, to conserve resources for coverage of local news.

The announcement punctuates what seems to be an accelerating trend. Journalist Jill Carroll, studying foreign news coverage for a report published by the Shorenstein Centre at Harvard University last fall, found that the number of US newspaper foreign correspondents declined from 188 in 2002 to 141 last year. (If you include the Wall Street Journal, which publishes editions in Europe and Asia, the decline was from 304 to 249.)

I find it disheartening that a fine newspaper such as the Globe would feel compelled to diminish itself in this way. But maybe that's the nostalgia of a dinosaur. After all, there are some very smart business people who see no harm in newspapers cutting back on foreign reporting.

Jack Welch, for example, the former chairman of General Electric Co. who has expressed interest in buying the Globe, said earlier this month on CNBC, "I'm not sure local papers need to cover Iraq, need to cover global events. They can be real local papers. And franchise, purchase from people very willing to sell you their wire services that will give you coverage."

Brian Tierney, who bought the Philadelphia Inquirer last year, expressed similar views in a November interview with The Post's Howard Kurtz. "We don't need a Jerusalem bureau," he said. "What we need are more people in the South Jersey bureau."

Yet in an era when clan structures in Somalia or separatist movements in the Philippines may have a direct bearing on US national security -- when the people who run multinational companies such as GE regularly complain that Americans don't understand the world -- we should all worry about who, if anyone, will report from abroad.

Date Posted: 1/29/2007