- Too often the media tread familiar and formulaic paths in their telling of the news; the media's coverage of international affairs often does an injustice to those they purport to cover. In an industry driven more by the profit motive than by a commitment to public service, attracting and keeping an audience has too often become the point of coverage.

"It s not the news itself that dictates the shape of coverage; past accounts of comparable events are a better predictor of the level and tenor of reporting.  For some types of crises earthquakes and hurricanes, insurrections, famine there is a virtual template for reporting.

"In the case of a famine, for example, first, there will be no coverage until people are literally starving to death. Editors want solid, Ethiopian-style hunger stories. Second, once coverage begins, the causes of and solutions for the famine are simplified. That allows the media to avoid a serious assessment of the factors that created the famine. Simplistic causes suggest and make plausible simplistic solutions such as the giving of money and tend to exaggerate the importance of Western aid and to minimize indigenous efforts.  Third, the story of the famine is told in the language of a morality play, with good and evil fighting for ascendancy, and characters fit into the parts of victim, rescuer and villain.  The media have few hesitations about using pictures of extremes to emphasize who's good and who's bad: juxtaposing a picture of a starving mother and child with an image of men brandishing automatic weapons, say.  And fourth, there must be images ideally available on a continuous basis. Any cutoff of pictures, whether caused by problems of access or censorship, shortfalls in the media's budget or glitches in the communication technology, risks severing the entire story.

"The formulaic coverage of crises also shoehorns crises into a preordained time slot, ignoring the inevitable slop of a crisis beyond its formulaic moments. Simplifying causes, stereotyping the protagonists, streamlining the chronology results in news becoming a product. And the packaging of news as a product tends to make all events uniform, and ironically tends to make events boringly familiar, causing an audience to turn away, turn the page. The disasters all run together in people's minds because they are all covered in the same way." 

- You said that coverage of international affairs is often viewed through the lens of "What does this means for us? In your judgment, which are the benefits and which are the disadvantages of this focus?

- The US media prioritize those international events that are perceived to have a strong and direct American connection: American troops are involved, the American public is at risk, American economic or national security is in jeopardy, etc.  But Americans and the American media aren't  the only chauvinistic observers.  It is a truism that most everyone cares about themselves or others closely resembling themselves first.

"In the US media, all international crises are Americanized. Sometimes that comes through by way of analogy: decision makers refer to present situations by reference to some past American event as in the conversations during summer 2003 as to whether the reconstruction period in Iraq was becoming a Vietnam-like quagmire. Other times, that comes through by way of the reflexive prioritization of domestic stories over international ones.

"There is also a tendency for the US media to spotlight US diplomatic efforts at a cost of under-covering the diplomatic initiatives of others, especially international organizations such as the UN and IAEA and for the US media to validate US officials critical assessments of the contribution of other countries or international organizations. Officials from those other organizations or countries may not be given an equally prominent opportunity to counter charges of ineffectiveness the counterarguments may be run far down in the story or even omitted entirely.

"As a result, international stories can become less simple hard-news telling of the problems existing somewhere else than commentaries on the meaning of the events for Americans. This approach can over-simplify an event or distort its meaning. By making international stories into American ones, important content and broader analysis may be ignored.

"The Americanizing of stories (once called the Coca-Colonization of events) is typically a product of editors and producers in the media's home offices listening more to the administration's agenda and to their presumptions about the public's interest than to their own foreign correspondents in the field. For obvious reasons, the foreign correspondents see more of the perspective of the country they are in and less of a narrow American perspective, so decisions about focusing so extensively on the American angle is due, most often, to the predilection of the editors and producers in New York and Washington and abetted, at times (such as in Iraq) by the administration and the Pentagon (which set up the policy of embedding, for example), which are interested in tying reporters to the American experience rather than to a more international one".

- You criticize in a certain way the use of analogies, metaphors and some images to explain international events that are complex and hard for the public to understand.  Why?

- We' ve lost media where the bottom line is public service, and replaced them with media whose raison d'etre is entertainment.  So facile steps are taken to attract and keep an audience.  Topics that should have received a careful accounting and analysis can be treated almost frivolously. 

"Let me give you the example of the coverage of weapons of mass destruction.   It wasn't unusual in the lead-up to the war in Iraq to have reporters use cute terms such as mini-nukes or bunker-busters (or quoting others using them). Such friendly characterizations are in a long history of the military and administration officials using upbeat and accessible terms to refer to nasty weapons whether the military hardware is officially named, such as the Patriot missile, or informally nicknamed, such as Puff the Magic Dragon or Bouncing Betty. Employing such a term as mini-nuke conjures images of Austin Powers Mini-Me a wanna-be weapon not to be taken terribly seriously.

"By the same token, putting the deck of cards in the lead or using the monikers "Dr. Germ" or "Chemical Ali" when referring to Rihab Taha al-Azawi al-Tikriti or Ali Hassan al-Majid also trivialized the events of the Iraq war. Such references turned WMD into a cartoon-esque James Bond film, where evil characters have names like Dr. No or Goldfinger. As writer Margaret Drabble wrote in the Daily Telegraph, Long ago Voltaire told us that we invent words to conceal truths.

"The responsibility to tell the news is not a light one it does not begin or end with a facile relating of information.   In their role as eyewitnesses, the media can hold government and international organizations morally as well as politically accountable for their actions and they can do that without attempting political persuasion or even by being actively adversarial.  They can hold political actors liable by being eyewitnesses to events, by communicating what they see and hear, by publicly juxtaposing a statement made previously with a comment made later." 

- What is, in your opinion, the main challenge for the media's coverage of international news?

- Again, let me answer this from the perspective of the United States.  The Cold War framed the world into an us versus them arena.  Not only relations with the Soviet Union, but international affairs in Africa, Asia and Central America were understood through the lens of communism.  The fear of losing countries to the Soviets gave birth to the domino principle and the notion of proxy states policies that prompted the American engagement with countries such as Vietnam, Nicaragua and Ethiopia. During the Cold War, American moral calculus was not tied to the question of whether distant individuals were protected, but whether the state (and its peoples) was secure.

"The meaning of the Cold War went well beyond stereotyping who the good guys were and who the bad guys were.  The Cold War defined who Americans could support and who they couldn't anyone who was a friend of the USSR was no friend of the USA's.  The enemy of my enemy is my friend logic made for some very uncomfortable bedfellows, but helped immensely in clarifying who Americans should care about, in defining who mattered.

"Then the rattling of the Iron Curtain in the 1980s, which culminated in the tumbling of the Berlin Wall in 1989, changed not only the political landscape in Europe, but the perception of global politics.  Entire regions fell off the political and media radar.  Nasty conflicts in out of the way places no longer mattered as proxy wars; brutal struggles for power were dismissed by both politicians and the press as internecine tribal or ethnic or religious conflicts without external ramifications. There were few perceived over-arching reasons as to why outsiders should care about Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia or even eastern Europe any more. No dominant vision appeared to unify what was happening, despite a call by many that humanitarianism compelled engagement.  Indeed, there was a general retreat from international affairs on the part of both the Bush, Sr. and Clinton White Houses as well as the media. 

"Then came September 11^th.  Within weeks, President George W. Bush's new War on Terror frame became the default test used to discover who were Americans global  friends and enemies.   The war on terrorism became the window through which all international events were viewed a situation that emphasized places and events that had (or were purported to have) connections to global terrorism, but that left others that didn't neatly fit the terrorism frame out of public view. 

"Newsrooms scrambled to cover both domestic and foreign terrorist-related events a scramble made all the more ungainly because all but a few media outlets were woefully understaffed with reporters expert in international affairs, a consequence of the past years closing of overseas bureaus and cutbacks on time and space devoted to foreign news in order to save money and boost profits.  Understaffing and the prior undervaluing of international coverage made it more difficult for news organizations to cover the assumptions behind the war on terror frame, and parenthetically made it more difficult for them either to nimbly cover the changing terrorism story or to cover foreign stories unrelated to the terrorism arc.

"Just as the Cold War label seduced the media and entire nations into believing that it explained everything, even though it omitted much and distorted more, so too the terrorism frame continues to threaten a nuanced understanding of the world.

- You propose that media should better analyze the causes and consequences of international events. Nevertheless, many editors believe that international news holds little interest for the public. For that reason editors resort to methods that can be considered inappropriate. How can editors make the important interesting, particularly in international news especially stories that their audiences do not have any personal connections with?

- As critic Walter Lippmann wrote in the 1920s:  Every newspaper when it reaches the reader is the result of a whole series of selections as to what items shall be printed, in what position they shall be printed, how much space each shall occupy, what emphasis each shall have.  There are no objective standards here.  There are conventions.   There are formulas and guidelines that are followed.  Sometimes. 

"Stories traditionally make the news depending on the answers to a range of questions.  Timeliness:  Did the event just happen?  Proximity:  How close is the event, physically and psychologically?  Prominence:  How many people have some knowledge or interest in the subject?  Significance:  How many people will (potentially) be affected by the event?  Controversy:  Is there conflict or drama?  Novelty:  Is the event unusual?  Currency:  Is the event part of an ongoing issue?  If not, should people know?  Emotional appeal:  Is there humor, sadness or a thrill?  And when the medium is television (or media that take their cues for what to cover from television effectively all of them on some occasions), a final questions looms:  How good are the pictures? 

"How are those questions applied to the coverage of international affairs? News values are not universal; they are culturally, politically and ideologically determined.  Is an international crisis a headline event?  A story about Pinochet is more likely to make the news in South America than one about some African former general, even if he is charged with similar crimes.  Certain kinds of international stories, such as human rights abuse, can connect to the media's audience in multiple ways.  Human rights stories can be assessed through the lens of national security (during the height of the Cold War, stories about Soviet dissidents were perennial in the US press), through cultural ties (stories about violations in Northern Ireland would be of interest to residents of Irish ancestry in London and Boston, for example), or simply through a shared sense of horror (once the rebels in Sierra Leone began chopping the arms and legs off of children and adults, the entire world found common cause with the victims). 

"More so than other types of international stories, human rights stories can prompt readers, listeners and viewers to care about a people and a place they have not formerly known.  But some of the best journalism on any subject tries to personalize its topic, making it live for an audience through its effect on people's lives.  When the media do their best reporting, they can prompt their audience members to feel more compassionate and even altruistic than they had felt before.  The way to provoke an audience into relating to international events surrounding them is to draw connections between their private lives and the news beyond them. Show individuals that they are not alone in their interests and experiences, and they will engage with others.  Identify a private problem that an audience member (or group) wants to resolve and then link that private problem to the larger public issue."