Mass layoffs of American foreign correspondents may leave public ill-informed.
LONDON, United Kingdom — Recently, I sadly said goodbye to former colleagues who were fired in another round of cost cutting by CBS News. The CBS London bureau now stands half empty, and the dwindling band of survivors wonder who will go next.
Now ABC News has announced much deeper cuts. Hundreds of employees will be let go in a wave of corporate bloodletting that will decimate its worldwide staff. The opening announcement of ABC World News still boasts that it comes “from the global resources of ABC News,” but does not mention how thin they now are. NBC News has already cut its overseas operations to the bone.
Here in Britain, even the mighty BBC is said to be planning widespread spending reductions which include closing several radio stations and slashing output on its websites. But these cuts seem minor compared to what is being done to the American news media.
Coverage of foreign news for American audiences has been one of the major casualties and is in danger of disappearing. Each of the mainstream American news broadcasters (with the exception of CNN) now maintains only a handful of full-time foreign correspondents, and does very little original news gathering abroad. Few American newspapers have any foreign correspondents at all.
GlobalPost aims to fill the void in foreign coverage and has hired more than 70 part-time contributors from the small army of American foreign correspondents who are now under- or unemployed. But most will never work again in their field.
I know many of them. They are dedicated professionals whose expertise had to be learned the hard way. Their employers tossed them in the dustbin in pursuit of corporate profits. Their unique knowledge and hands-on experience will be lost forever. (Unless they decide to teach journalism, but where would their students find jobs?)
Broadcast news has taken a big hit in the frenzy of downsizing, but things are no better in the world of American newspapers. In the past two years, they have been shedding more than a thousand employees a month.
In a visit to my hometown of Baltimore last month, I was shocked to see what corporate cost cutting has done to the paper where I began my journalistic career. It was like meeting an old friend who has been mugged and robbed of everything valuable he possessed. The Baltimore Sun now has no foreign correspondents, and only a skeleton domestic staff. And in a final indignity, it has been sliced in half, vertically, which makes it a skinny paper. It looks silly, and you would be silly to spend money buying a copy. You could read it in 10 minutes.
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/worldview/100228/downsizing-foreign-news-threatens-us-democracy
