Feature Article

The Death of the Foreign Bureau

By Isaac Horwith

The media has historically been known as the Fourth Estate, equally important as the three branches of government. They connect the federal government to the people, and sometimes speak on the people’s behalf more effectively than the institutional means of representation. The tradition of muckraking, of journalists championing the weak and underprivileged by blowing the whistle on unfair government and business practices, however, has largely fallen by the wayside.

Lately this responsibility has been adopted by online groups such as Anonymous and Wikileaks, as identified by journalists Norman Levey and Jennifer Martinez in a July Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article. They quote Tom Rosenthal, the founder and director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, as saying “Old journalism still has the means, experience, expertise, and resources” to make sense of the controversial information Wikileaks has released. Old media may have the means, but they seem, however, to not have the will. Though unintentional, media can act as a tool of the government itself, facilitating or selling government policy to the public.

In an article in Global Journalist Magazine, Diana Russo chronicles the death of the foreign bureau. During most of the 20th Century, a dozen employees would be stationed in a foreign country, establishing contacts and gaining experience and knowledge of the region. They may only have a handful of stories make it to the front page over the course of a year, but the stories were measured and put into the context of the country as a whole.

Today, the expense of maintaining foreign bureaus has become too burdensome. The focus is instead on creating a flexible but small group of reporters who travel to areas as temporary correspondents. In an interview with “Frontline,” news veteran Ted Koppel said, “when there’s a war going on, by God, you’ll see the networks there,” but once the conflict is over, they go home and “wait for the next crisis.” Often in this form of international reporting, it is embassies or other arms of the government on the front line of the story that end up giving the most of the information used in new reports.

This new emphasis on crisis reporting makes the government the most convenient and consistent source of information. If a notable event does occur, the government is likely to know more about it than any reporter can, even if the government is only indirectly involved. If reporters have no contacts in the country, which is increasingly the case, they have no one else reliable to talk to. This gives government an opportunity to get out in front of events before the news media knows about them, allowing them to frame the story as they see fit. “Framing” refers to the placement of a news event in a familiar storyline or context. At the same time, the framer identifies the cause of this event, guiding the reader to the solution the framer wants.

When the government holds the information, it largely has control over the media. It can use tactics such as withholding information based on claims of national security, rewarding flattering reporters by giving them exclusive interview, embedding reporters with troops in times of conflict, producing content in the form of press releases, prerecorded interviews, government reports, photo opportunities, and even staging “pseudo-events.” When the line between the media and government becomes this blurred, we should question whether it should really be called news.