International News & Foreign Correspondents

...arrival and departure in that country, "We went into Somalia because of horrible television images and we will leave Somalia because of horrible television images...

...Since the glory days of American foreign news reporting in the 1960's and 70's, he notes, there has been a steady decline in the presence overseas of American reporters...

...Muslims) are now our friends, and some of our former friends (e.g...

...What if he is right...

...Aware of the deep theological differences between these monotheistic faiths, Kreeft calls for a moratorium on our polemics against each other so that we can form an alliance to fight together to save western civilization...

...In a study of network news reporting from overseas during 1988-1992, Hess discovered that nearly one-third of all stories included "bang-bang"—combat footage...

...The American Spectator • June 199 6 Balance of Power mostly dishes out vapid observations and bland anecdotes about political figures that Wright encountered ("Lyndon Johnson was bigger than life...

...On the front lines in today's culture war, Kreeft is one of our most valiant intellectual warriors...

...Both "good behavior" and "noblesse oblige," after all, would surely have been applauded by Henry Luce, a conservative of strong convictions who founded Time and proclaimed ours to be "the American century...

...In 1989, one might have assumed that Wright would slink offstage and take his congressional pension in grateful silence...

...It now has just four (London, Moscow, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo...

...But Hess believes the problem is not simply that TV networks can't think of any better way to keep people from switching channels to reruns of "The Addams Family" than endless combatfootage...

...But at the editorial or TV producer level, they clearly aren't...

...The AP, of course, sometimes does do a44 Only the tiniest trickle of foreign news ever seems to penetrate the thick wall of editorial parochialism at most American newspapers...

...In 1985 Time had thirty-six foreign correspondents on its masthead...

...You will probably get a polite response, too...

...No wonder so many Americans have a view of the world that is at best a caricature of reality...

...The Americans, predictably, performed worse than all of the respondents of all the other countries —a staggering one-third of them got every single answer wrong...

...Some studies have even calibrated the news "value" of victims of natural disaster or some other foreign catastrophe...

...One example: a story datelined Jerusalem and headed "25 sects to vie for Israeli vote," which wound up crammed into a corner of a small-town newspaper's "Pets in Particular" page...

...You can email your personal comments to bureaucrats in the once near-clandestine political organization, the African National Congress, in South Africa...

...The accepted response to this near-terminal state of international ignorance—when there is a response—is to nail the blame on the decline of educational standards in the U.S...

...The reader looking for pained mea culpas will not find them here...

...The fourth explanation is more down to earth: sheer social irresponsibility and Made66 June 1996 • The American Spectator quate professionalism among producers and editors...

...The electronic revolution and the Internet have created gold mines of information...

...One local newspaper editor over whose shoulder Hess looked during his investigation made it clear that he preferred the Associated Press story to the New York Times version of the same event because the AP used short sentences (good) and the Times, long ones (bad...

...A discouraging example: the ill-fated U.S...

...humanists) are now our enemies...

...He admits, parenthetically, that readers often say they want more of whatever they think the pollster himself is interested in...

...Even so, news images from abroad seem to exert more influence than ever on how American foreign policy is conducted...

...They clearly imply that some values—and, indeed, some cultures—may be more admirable than others when Americans take a close look at the globe on which they are living...

...Fr...

...There are four basic possible explanations of the inadequacy of American reporting about the world...

...Please enclose payment with order...

...Definitely not recommended for people who are unprepared for a rollickingly adventurous journey into truths that might change them forever...

...Chuck Colson "Be forewarned...

...Three of them are external to journalism as such: the crassness of value-free consumerism in media markets, an American fin-de-siecle fatigue with the burdens of world leadership, and a belief that nothing very "serious" for Americans tends to happen abroad now that the Cold War is over...

...In its heyday, CBS News had twenty foreign bureaus...

...Does he have in mind the predictable, "government-knows-best" approach of the New York Times op-ed page, or something more bracing—say the notion that journalism requires intellectual integrity anddisciplined detachment more than anything else, especially more than well-meaning sentimentalism...

...Who is Boutros Boutros-Ghali...

...The American Spectator • June 1996 Ecumenism and the Culture War by Peter Juxtaposing "ecumenism" and "jihad", two words that many would consider at odds with each other, Peter Kreeft argues that we need to change our current alignments...

...The constitutional and legal preferments of the press are not based on good behavior, but it helps...

...J.I...

...Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox alike need to ponder Kreeft's vision of things...

...The death of one European was found equal to nine Latin Americans, eleven Middle Easterners, or twelve Asians...

...In Balance of Power, Wright now surveys his 34-year career in the House and returns to the scene of his ouster...

...A 1993 Times Mirror poll about general knowledge of foreign affairs among citizens of eight countries—the U.S., Germany, Britain, France, Italy, Canada, Mexico and Spain—posed five basic questions: Who is the president of Russia...

...Hess squarely blames the editors themselves for dumping foreign dateline stories indiscriminately into the domestic hopper of traditional newsworthiness: "a cyclone, a fire, an election, someone shooting someone else...

...What country is threatening to withdraw from the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty...

...Wright's enterprise, rather, is to revise the record, laying the groundwork for a future mythology starring himself: an honorable man forced out of office, as he put it in his farewell speech, by "mindless cannibalism...

...Documenting the spiritual and moral decay of modern society, Kreeft issues a wake-up call to all God-fearing Kreeft Christians, Jews and Muslims to unite together in a "religious war" against the common enemy of godless secular humanism, materialism and immorality...

...ORDER TOLL-FREE with credit card 1-800-651-1531 AMR-J Ecumenical Jihad 65 Internet, there are rich nodes of information about the rest of the world available through CNN and C-Span, not to mention the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, National Public Radio, Jim Lehrer, and so on for hard-core foreign news addicts...

...Although Wright was forced to resign as Speaker of the House, he pooh-poohed the charges against him, as Rostenkowski has, and magnanimously offered that he DAVID ANDREW PRICE is national issues reporter in the Washington bureau of Investor's Business Daily...

...There are multiple ironies in all of this...

...public school system...

...A TV producer in El Salvador in the 1980's is quoted with a swash-buckling cynicism: "I've got to have bang-bang or a massacre," he says, "to get on the air...

...military effort to "save" Somalia...

...Now that would be news...

...We need to realize that we are at war and that the sides have changed radically: many of our former enemies (e.g...

...That Gingrich succeeded was due, in turn, to the work of another villain, Richard Phelan, the outside counsel hired by the House Ethics Committee to investigate the allegations against him...

...Simpson broke the speed limit in his white Bronco...

...When human rights, accidents, and natural catastrophes were added into the total, more than half of all foreign television reporting turned out to be violence-related...

...God is calling for this unity, Kreeft says, and if we respond, God will do something wonderful...

...172 pages, Sewn Softcover, $10.95 "This racy little book opens up a far-reaching theme...

...better job than the Times, but the reasons have more to do with reporting accuracy and good analysis than fashions of newsroom syntax...

...With entertaining insight Kreeft looks into the attitudes, alliances, and strategies that today's state of affairs requires of believers...

...Worse, certain countries (notably Israel) are so stereotyped as locations of violent activity that it is virtually impossible to air stories that relate to social, cultural, or economic matters there...

...Wright presents himself as a victim—not of his own wrongdoing, but of a fiercely partisan Republican cabal led by Newt Gingrich...

...Packer "Peter Kreeft is one of the premiere apologists in America today, witty, incisive and powerful...

...One is "awash in specialized information," the other has "limited attention to subjects so far removed from their necessary concerns...

...Scarcely a month goes by without someone or other documenting our national thick-headedness about global events...

...Yet for the vast majority of ordinary citizens, foreign news reporting has become hopelessly dismal...

...But this kind of crassness, Hess believes, is nothing compared with television's violence and disaster whenever overseas subjects are aired...

...But a sizable portion of the responsibility for American foreign-affairs ignorance lies at the door of the U.S...

...Og ment in the struggle for Nicaragua...

...Coming from a member of the Brookings Institution, perhaps the most staid of Washington's liberal think tanks, that is an intriguing comment...

...As Dan Rather told a 1990 audience at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, "Don't kid yourself—the trend line in American journalism is away from, not toward, increased foreign coverage...

...He argues that the habitually produced editorial explanation—that readers are not interested in foreign news—is not borne out by polls consistently showing readers as saying they would like to see more of it...

...If that sentiment takes root at any point among mainstream media, then the deterioration in the quality of foreign reporting may be reversed...

...Hess notes that, even without the International News & Foreign Correspondents Stephen Hess Brookings Institution 209 pages / $26.95 REVIEWED BY David Aikman The ignorance of most Americans about the rest of the world is such an accepted fact of national life that it seldom evokes more than a shrug...

...As Hess puts it, this neglect has led the United States to become "one nation and two media societies...

...As columnist Marianne Means noted during the debacle of the U.S...

...Which ethnic group has conquered much of Bosnia...

...In this wittily-written and highly informative book, one of Washington's best-informed media experts confirms what many of us have long suspected: the DAVID AIKMAN is a former Time foreign correspondent...

...But this season of Rosty's downfall coincides with the publication of Wright's second autobiographical book since his resignation—the latest effort in his improbable campaign to polish his place in history...

...Arguably, American school kids are more "cerebrally challenged," to coin a phrase, in no field more than geography, which isn't even called geography anymore...

...With the Cold War over, too, Americans ought to be paying attention to the dicey new geopolitical realities...

...Among mainstream media leaders, he says, there has been an abdication of social responsibility that theoretically makes the news business different from the fast food or automotive industries...

...Foreign correspondents today, though ever fewer in number (there were about 1,500 in 1992, the majority of them working for business and other specialized publications), tend also to be better educated than ever before, with advanced degrees and often years of experience formally studying difficult languages like Chinese or Arabic...

...Wrightg also talks lovl ingly of the67...

...Someone in New York might come to understand that what happens in Russia, or China, or Japan, may have more bearing on the lives of ordinary Americans than whether O.J...

...I enclose full payment plus $2.00 per book for shipping and handling...

...In recounting the years before his speakership, Rosty Jim Wright was "not a bitter man"—as if the public servant caught with his hand in the cookie jar had cause to be bitter in the first place...

...Stephen Hess notes a striking paradox about our ignorance—for those genuinely interested, there is moreinformation available than ever before about global events...

...This book pricks prejudices, jostles assumptions, and can do permanent harm to complacent Christianity...

...Richard Neuhaus Ignatius mess 33 Oakland Ave., Harrison, New York 10528 Name Address City, St, Zip Please rush me copies of Ecumenical Jihad ($10.95 ea...

...In his 1993 book Worth It All, Wright offered a revisionist account of his involveBalance of Power: Presidents and Congress From the Era of McCarthy to the Age of Gingrich Jim Wright Turner Publishing / 528 pages / $25.95 REVIEWED BY David Andrew Price Dan Rostenkowski's defiant reaction to his sentencing last April 9 for mail fraud recalled Jim Wright's similar defiance seven years earlier...

...Much of it is used as "filler," grammatically coherent but totally out-of-context news items filling up otherwise blank newspaper space...

...Interestingly, Hess opts for this explanation, but with an interesting twist...

...it now has only twenty-four...

...Though the Associated Press, which has an army of several hundred correspondents in seventy-one countries, serves 97 percent of America's 1,600 daily newspapers, only the tiniest trickle of foreign news ever seems to penetrate the thick wall of editorial parochialism in the vast majority of daily American newspapers...

...The standards of the press have been overwhelmingly sustained in this country by the noblesse oblige of a few families and firms...

...Which group recently reached a peace accord with Israel...