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Coverage of Terrorism
kids shooting up their classrooms, and
reporting on deep-seated concerns
about abortion isn’t limited to coverage
of the Army of God.
Journalists take a much broader
view. And that is what I’m arguing for
in foreign news coverage. The way to
give Americans understanding about
how the rest of the world lives and why
it does so and how these things came to
be is to provide international coverage,
over the long haul, that reflects the
same values that are given to reporting
news at home.
Begin by throwing away the notion
that every foreign story that isn’t about
a war has to have a local peg. We miss
a lot of important stories because of
this assumption. Take the Asian money
crisis of 1997 that went largely unreketing
prescription drugs to the general
public. Most of these drugs have
very proscribed and limited indications.
Many of them have less expensive and
equally or more effective generic counterparts.
Therefore, the track record of
the pharmaceutical industry in acting
in the broad public interest as opposed
to the narrow interests of their shareholders
is not comforting.
These ad campaigns put pressure
on physicians to prescribe drugs when
they might otherwise not do so. But
they are likely to be highly effective
even without the complicity of physicians
due to the increasing availability
of antibiotics and other drugs over the
Internet without prescriptions.
It is equally unlikely that our political
leaders will provide the necessary
leadership on this issue. With few exceptions,
they lack the expertise to do
so. In addition, it seems to go against
the popular American response to pop
a pill as an answer to almost every
problem and may therefore be seen by
many as an unpopular position for a
politician to take. And this message
may not be seen by the pharmaceutical
industry, perennially one of the nation’s
leading contributors to political campaigns,
to be friendly to them.
That leaves the public relying upon
journalists, using their traditional role
of digging up the facts and publishing
them, as the best hope for getting this
message out. The trend in recent years
has been for ratings to drive coverage
as evidenced by how reporting on the
incidence of anthrax has far outpaced a
story such as this one, even though the
level of harm it can alert people to
might potentially be much higher.
The anthrax scare has also uncovered
serious deficiencies in our system
of public health surveillance and services.
But these deficiencies were hardly
a secret even before anthrax. Just last
year Laurie Garrett, a highly respected
journalist, published a book called “Betrayal
of Trust: The Collapse of Global
Public Health,” that received a flurry of
attention in the “elite” media at the
time but was never picked up in the
popular media, particularly television.
We seem to have a great deal of trouble
paying much attention to serious—but
not dramatic—problems, especially if
they involve the sacrifice of short-term
personal gratification for long-term societal
goals. Where is the coverage of
the long-term implications of the Bush
tax cuts (“the people know better how
to spend their money than the government
does”) for programs such as our
public health infrastructure? There are
many more examples.
Increasingly, news coverage has
come to be driven by the bottom line
more than the news value or public
importance of a story. Let’s hope this
important story is an exception. Let’s
hope journalism is up to the task.■
Philip Caper, M.D. is an adjunct
lecturer at the Harvard School of
Public Health and an internationally
recognized expert on patterns of
medical practice.
pcaper@netscape.net
Reporting International News in a Serious Way
Coverage needs to reflect ‘the same values that are given to reporting news at home.’
By William F. Woo
As journalists reflect on the lessons
of September 11, they are
likely to conclude that foreign
news coverage must be improved.
Walter Isaacson, chairman of CNN, has
told David Shaw of the Los Angeles
Times that the terrorist attacks helped
his network rediscover “the vital
importance…to cover international
news in a serious way.”
But what does it mean to cover international
news in a serious way? Foreign
news is expensive, but that’s only
part of the reason for its well-documented
decline. News executives also
assume that people aren’t interested in
news unless it affects them personally.
And if people aren’t interested, the
thinking goes, news organizations that
invest dollars, time and space in reporting
foreign news will discover their
audience is disappearing. Given these
assumptions, what kind of foreign coverage
can news organizations afford if
they believe there is value in providing
audiences with a better understanding
of the world?
If the emerging model of international
coverage means only more news
about terrorism here, there and everywhere,
it won’t be the right one. If it
only means more about war, social
unrest, and ferries sinking, news organizations
ought to save their money.
At home, when journalists want to
tell readers and viewers about Christianity
in America, they don’t confine
their coverage to the Branch Davidian
and other extremist sects. Stories about
education don’t begin and end with
24 Nieman Reports / Winter 2001