THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MEDIA

John Simpson laments the increasing

ignorance of the only remaining superpower, and blames the television networks

I WAS at a dinner party in a pleasant uni- versity town in the western United States. My fellow-guests were cultivated and intel- ligent, and for half an hour the conversa- tion was general. Then someone said, 'You've just been in eastern Europe: tell us what the changes there mean."Oh, yes, do,' said someone else flatteringly. Eyes turned to me, chins rested on hands, forks were laid aside. I started to speak — and within a few humiliating minutes I realised I had lost them. Their eyes had gone into soft focus and they were playing with their coffee spoons.

'Sounds a bit like the battle we're having here over water rights,' someone said at last; and soon they were laying into Bush or the Democrats with the relief of baroque music enthusiasts when the Stockhausen has finished. No doubt I am a bore of formidable proportions; but away from the charmed circle of foreign affairs enthusi- asts, anyone who talks about the outside world to Americans nowadays runs the risk of boring them. Where foreign affairs are concerned, the common ground between Europeans and Americans is shrinking at the -rate of a tropical rainforest.

In the 30 years during which I have visit- ed the United States regularly, I have never found it quite as self-absorbed as it is today: not in the late Sixties, when it was undergoing a shattering challenge to its sys- tem of values, nor even in the early Seven- ties, when it was eaten up with its own political crises. In those days it still paid reasonable attention to the world which it dominated politically and economically. Now that domination is passing, Americans are taking refuge in a narrow tunnel of their own construction, and it is hard for us to follow them there.

This past week the serious newspapers in Europe have devoted space by the column yard to the Democratic convention in New York, and there have been hours of cover- age on television and radio. Arguably, it was all too much, since the selection of Bill Clinton was a foregone conclusion; but it was a milestone, and required proper marking. Yet it is hard to think of a politi- cal event in Europe which would attract such attention in the United States. Weeks can go by without a political report from France, Germany or Britain even in the serious American press, let alone on televi- sion, the source of most people's informa- tion. When Mrs Thatcher fell from power it came as a particular shock to Americans because her growing unpopularity had gone largely unreported. Even normally well-informed people, accustomed to her vocal support for the United States, assumed her fall was the result of an upsurge of anti-Americanism in Britain.

The lack of awareness of the outside world among Americans has obvious and damaging consequences. Any administra- tion in Washington knows that it can afford to take big risks in foreign affairs, because the vast majority of voters will neither know nor care what it does. A word out of place on the question of black people's rights or the abortion issue can cost politi- cal leaders an election; a major change of approach which affects entire nations can take place almost without notice. It is an odd way for the world's greatest democracy to run its affairs.

Because Americans have never been par- ticularly interested in the rest of the world, their newspapers and television services have traditionally told them relatively little about it: and the less they know, the less they want to know. The executive producer of one big television news show has warned his staff that the only foreign news stories which interest him are those which have direct relevance to Americans. Any story which his shrinking number of foreign bureaux produce must either contain a clear explanation of why Americans should care about it, or else be about Americans doing something interesting abroad. The only exception would be an item which was so dramatic and enthralling that it had what one disaffected producer calls deri- sively 'the Gee-Whizz factor': 'They want Earl to nudge Irma and say, "Gee whizz, didn't know they did that kind of thing in Omsk."

The gloomy conclusion of the G7 meet- ing in Munich on 7 July showed there was unlikely to be an early improvement in the international economic situation: some- thing that will affect every Earl and Irma in the United States and beyond. But if they were watching the CBS Evening News that night, the significance of it all may have passed them by. The lead story was an important one: Amoco's annuncement that it would cut its workforce by nearly 10,000 jobs. But it was not placed in any context except a purely American one, and no link was made to the G7 meeting. The second story was a speculative piece on the likeli- hood that Bill Clinton would choose Al Gore as his running-mate. The third was about the aftermath of an outbreak of vio- lence in New York and its likely effect on the Democratic convention.

An American network news bulletin lasts around 22 minutes, and these three items, serious enough in themselves, had taken up a third of the time available. Only then did we hear that the leaders of the world's seven leading economies had finished their work; but the report chose to concentrate on the way in which Boris Yeltsin had stolen the limelight in Munich, and it lasted just 15 seconds. Fifteen seconds is time for only about 45 words: the length of the aver- age nursery rhyme.

Apart from a good piece on the fighting in Sarajevo (which justified its existence in the bulletin by stressing that the inhabi- tants were looking to the United States for help) and ten seconds on President Bush's refusal to send ground troops to Bosnia, the only other reminders that a world exist- ed outside America were ten seconds devoted to the UN inspectors in Iraq, 12 seconds on an explosion in Amsterdam and 13 on the ending of the French lorry drivers' protest: a grand total of two min- utes, 51 seconds out of the 22 minutes available.

American news suffered from no such restrictions. After reports on drought in the western United States and the day's domestic political news, the rest of CBS's news broadcast was devoted to a regular feature, 'Eye on America.' This evening's item was about a man who was cycling across America with his son, a sufferer from cerebral palsy. It was designed to leave you with a warm feeling, and lasted for three minutes, 58 seconds: longer than the time devoted that night to the whole of the rest of the world.

It is no surprise that soon there will almost certainly be no American television network correspondent based anywhere in the southern hemisphere. Goodbye Africa; goodbye most of Asia; goodbye Latin America.

The sound of an Englishman being supe- rior about America is rarely uplifting; but in this case the complaints come most fiercely from the people who work for American television themselves. They know how steep the decline has been, and why it has happened. All three networks have been bought up by giant corporations Which appear to regard news and current affairs as branches of the entertainment industry, and insist they have to pay their way with advertisers just as chat-shows and sit coms do. Advertisers are not good peo- ple for a news organisation to rely on: dur- ing the Gulf war NBC lost $25 million in revenue because companies which had bought space in the news bulletins can- celled their advertisements — they were afraid their products would appear along- side reports of American casualties.

The decline of the networks is depress- ing. CBS is one of the grandest names in Journalism, the high-minded organisation Which broadcast Ed Murrow's wartime despatches from London and Walter Cronkite's influential verdicts on the Viet- nam war and Watergate. NBC's record is a Proud one too. Recently it announced it was back in the news business and would stop broadcasting stories that were simply features. But NBC News seems very close to the rocks nowadays, and it does not have the money to send its teams abroad in the way it did until a couple of years ago. The foreign coverage will mostly be based on pictures from the British television news agency Visnews, and from the BBC.

The changes have happened so fast that many of the correspondents and producers from the great days are still working for the same companies. But they complain that their editors quickly lose interest in long- running foreign stories nowadays; after a recent earthquake one team was told, 'Less rubble — we're bored with rubble.' Signifi- cant issues are ignored because they are too complicated to explain in a minute and a half, and there is no possibility of giving them more time. News bulletins are often prepared days in advance; Saturday's pro- gramme, in particular, can be planned (aside from breaking news) as far ahead as Wednesday. Smoothness of presentation is the summum bonum, so that every corre- spondent in the field has to fax his or her script back to New York for prior approval by an editorial team which rarely knows much about the situation and is often determinedly lowbrow. 'Matrimony?' said a show producer to someone in the field. 'No one's going to understand a word like that.' When a grenade went off outside a Euro- pean summit in Luxembourg, the desk edi- tor at one of the major networks thought at first it was near the Soviet border. 'Any big shots there?' he asked. He seemed disap- pointed to hear it was only a French presi- dent and a clutch of prime ministers, and the story was not used.

Two television programmes are a clear exception to all this: the MacNeil-Lehrer .News Hour on PBS, and ABC's Nightline. But MacNeil-Lehrer's audience is small and largely highbrow, and there is little attempt to attract the general viewer. Nightline is like a cross between Panorama . . and it goes on. . . daily the green shoots of economic recovery are springing up round us.' and Newsnight, and goes in for serious and often controversial journalism which is as good as anything on British television. But its audience is small and many of ABC's affiliated stations, regarding it as boring or dangerous, try to put it on as late as possi- ble: sometimes well after midnight.

Americans who stubbornly demand to know what is really happening in the world must either listen to National Public Radio or turn to the better newspapers. There are few enough of those, and even they provide thin pickings. On the morning after the G7 meeting the New York Times's lead story was Clinton's search for a running-mate. It devoted a column to the G7 and an entire inside page. But, as ever, a thin trickle of foreign reports ran like a river at low tide between the wide shoals of advertisements, and relatively few of them passed the for- bidding sluice-gate at the head of the paper: 'All the News That's Fit to Print.' That day the New York Times, the best newspaper in America, thought only 20 for- eign items were fit to print, far fewer for example than the Independent in London or Le Monde in Paris.

The American journalists, academics and diplomats whose job is the evaluation of foreign affairs are every bit as good as those in Europe: often better. But the press and television act as a filter for ordinary Americans and keep them ignorant. There is therefore no body of informed public opinion in the United States on foreign policy matters, and the government is mostly free to do what it wants, unques- tioned. It can invade Grenada or Panama on flimsy excuses which no one outside the United States takes seriously; it can help Saddam Hussein defeat his enemies and build up his war machine, because no one has heard of him; it can create guerrilla armies to subvert countries it says, improb- ably, are planning to invade America; it can sell weapons in secret to regimes it con- demns in public as terrorist. Watergate brought down a president because it hap- pened at home; Irangate happened abroad, so it didn't. In 1987 an Iraqi plane mistak- enly attacked the USS Stark, and President Reagan warned Iran that any repetition would be severely dealt with. No one seemed to notice he was warning the wrong country. One television show producer, indeed, is said to have ordered a standard- ising of the house style: 'We've got to decide if we're calling it Iraq or Iran.'

Earl and Irma, meanwhile, are still there in front of their television sets, serenely unaware of what is happening around them. Decisions which affect their lives are being taken every day in Frankfurt, Tokyo and London, but no one tells them about it. Most of the companies which advertise on television just want them to feel good; so, therefore, do the people in charge of providing them with news. The freest soci- ety in the world has achieved the kind of news blackout which totalitarian regimes can only dream about.