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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 29-Jan-07
Journalists complain about closing of foreign bureaus

Web Log - January, 2007

Journalists complain about closing of foreign bureaus

And yet, I have no difficulty reporting foreign news on this web site.

The complaints have centered about last week's announcement by the Boston Globe that it is closing it's last foreign bureaus, in Jerusalem, Berlin and Bogota, Colombia. The reason for the cuts is to save money, at a time when newspapers are making less money, as people turn more and more to the Internet for their news. Journalists have been expressing regrets about this, such as on the Boston local PBS media show, Beat the Press.

On Sunday morning on CNN's media show Reliable Sources, Howard Kurtz pointed out that CNN still have many foreign bureaus, as do many major newspapers, including the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal. But midsize newspapers, such as the Boston Globe, New York's Newsday, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, have closed all their foreign bureaus. Other newspapers, such as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and the Toledo Blade have even closed their Washington DC bureaus.

"Don't you think that readers of the Boston Globe or Philadephia Inquirer or Baltimore Sun took pride in reading world-class newspapers, whose vision extended beyond the immediate suburbs?," asked Howard Kurtz. He concluded, "You won't see much [more] of that. Their owners have downsized their dreams."

The ironic thing about Kurtz's remarks is that they were immediately followed by one of CNN's "Now in the News" news briefs, featuring a report from one of their foreign reporters in Iraq. The brief showed three video segments: a grainy scene of American soldiers running across a field, a blackened car that had been demolished by a terrorist suicide bomber, and a school that had been the targeted by terrorist missiles.

Now, what's the point of claiming that you need foreign bureaus and foreign reporters, if all they're going to do is show the gore resulting from terrorist attacks? And if you look at almost any mainstream media news report, that's most of what they do.

Ironically, there was a truly major story on Sunday that was barely mentioned. The level of conflict between Hamas and Fatah in the Palestinian territories has escalated sharply in the last few days, and a major Palestinian civil war at any time would not be a surprise. This will affect America and the world far more than a terrorist act in Iraq, but these news organizations have their priorities, and it isn't the news.

This web site, GenerationalDynamics.com, isn't primarily a news site, but I do report a lot of relevant news, and it's perfectly obvious to me that you can use Internet sources to do excellent international reporting, certainly much better than CNN's reporting on Iraq.

If you happen to doubt this, dear reader, let me assure you that it's absolutely true. I've done articles on this web site and prepared for it by collecting as many as 40 or 50 stories from mainstream news sites around the world, allowing me to get points of view from dozens countries. Since 2003 alone, I've collected over 15,000 stories and articles from the web, and they're all indexed and available to me on my computer at any time. This is a capability that's far superior, and produces far superior results, compared to getting the point of view of just one foreign bureau reporter.

So Howard Kurtz's poetic claims about newspapers' "vision extended beyond the immediate suburbs" falls flat with me. What reporters are really complaining about is that they can't get expense-paid trips abroad where they get to use their nationwide news platform to express their personal political opinions.

I began noticing a change in journalism about ten years ago, when several people over the course of a couple of years sent me e-mail messages containing articles they'd written, asking me to critique their writings and about getting published.

The e-mail conversation usually went something like this:

In my critique, I would write, "Your article says X, Y and Z, which are unsubstantiated claims."

The writer would reply, "This is an opinion article, not a news article. I don't have to provide substantiation."

I had to write back, "You've got it wrong. Opinion pieces have to follow the same journalistic standards as news articles, except that you're allowed to add your own interpretation of the facts."

And this is, in fact, the journalistic standard. If you write an opinion piece, you have to provide substantiation for all your facts as if it were a news story. You're allowed to add your own interpretation, provided that it's clear from the wording that it's your opinion. So an opinion piece can contain facts and opinions, but they have to be clearly separated, and the facts have to be substantiated.

On this web site, I actually have a larger problem, since I have to distinguish between four different classes of information, and I have to maintain as high a level of credibility as possibility:

Facts, which I always try to substantiate with stories from mainstream media Internet sources.
My opinions and interpretation.
Generational Dynamics trend predictions, which are certain (such as "an all-out civil war in Iraq is impossible" or "the U.N. won't be able to stop the genocide in Darfur").
Generational Dynamics probabilistic predictions, which are likely but not certain, and are usually signaled with such words a "likely scenario" or "probably."

However, journalistic standards of this sort are of little concern to many of today's journalists. We say that two weeks ago when NBC's Chris Matthews melted down on MSNBC, expressing the view that he knows more than anyone else when in fact he knows little of what's happening in the Mideast.

And we see it on the front pages of newspapers every day, when supposedly professional journalists feel free to allow their political biases affect the reporting, as desired. We also see it on the BBC every day, whose every report seethes with fanatical anti-Americanism.

So it's too bad that Howard Kurtz thinks that newspapers have "downsized their dreams," but it seems to me that their dreams SHOULD be downsized. (29-Jan-07) Permanent Link
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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 29-Jan-07 Journalists complain about closing of foreign bureaus

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Generational Dynamics Web Log for 29-Jan-07
Journalists complain about closing of foreign bureaus