It's Not All Anderson's Fault

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Rush of Events Gives Foreign News a Top Priority



CNN's Anderson Cooper, right, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta in Sendai, near the earthquake's epicenter.
By Brian Stelter
Published: March 20, 2011

Propelled by revolution in the Middle East and radiation in Japan, television news coverage of foreign events this year is at the highest level since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks 10 years ago, news executives in the United States say.

The foreign press corps is working in exceptionally dangerous conditions in countries like Japan, where members carry radiation monitors on assignment, and in Libya, where crews of journalists have been detained. “We’ve had a year’s worth of international breaking news, and we’re only halfway through March,” said Tony Maddox, the executive vice president and managing director at CNN International, where anchors spoke on Saturday of being “live on five continents.”

The coverage exposes just how much reporting of foreign news has changed in the past decade, through cuts at news outlets and through the contributions of the Internet and other new technologies. Fewer journalists covering foreign news work full time for American broadcast networks than once did, and those who remain have had to hopscotch from one hot spot to another this year, sometimes creating lags in coverage.

But the networks are aided by a bounty of audio and video clips that would have been nonexistent a few years ago. Much of it comes from cellphone-equipped residents who are acting not just as camera operators, but as reporters, too.

In part because the broadcasters were relatively short-staffed after the magnitude 9.0 earthquake near northern Japan on March 11, American tourists in Tokyo were interviewed live on television from their hotel rooms. Wired with webcams and Skype connections, they resembled reporters.

So did the anonymous man in Misrata, Libya, who called CNN on Friday to report that despite the Libyan government’s claim that a cease-fire was in effect, his city was “under fire.”

“Right now, as I speak to you, I can take the phone outside and you can hear the bombs,” the man said.

“Only if it’s safe to do that,” the anchor answered.

In Libya, professional journalists have been repeatedly harassed and detained. On Sunday, the Agence France-Presse news agency said two of its reporters and a Getty Images photographer had been missing since Saturday. Also on Sunday, four journalists from The New York Times and four journalists from Al Jazeera remained in the custody of Libyan authorities in Tripoli, the capital. Last week, an Al Jazeera cameraman was killed by gunmen near Benghazi in eastern Libya.

The busy season for foreign news started in January in Tunisia and quickly spread to Egypt, where networks and newspapers deployed hundreds of journalists. According to the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which conducts a weekly accounting of news coverage by national outlets, foreign news added up to 45 percent of all coverage from mid-January through mid-March. In the four years that the accounting has been done, foreign news has averaged about 20 percent of coverage.

The high levels of coverage have put severe strains on journalists covering foreign news, who leap from crisis to crisis. “Lots of people did Tunisia, then did Cairo, had a bit of an excursion to Bahrain, and now they’re in Libya,” Jon Williams, the foreign editor for the BBC, said from London. “This begins to take a toll on people.”

“These are pretty punishing conditions,” Mr. Williams added. “There’s not a Ritz Carlton in Benghazi. You’re sleeping in pretty rough places.”

Mr. Maddox of CNN called it “tough going,” but said “the level of commitment shown by the people in the field and on the desk is just absolutely extraordinary.” Similarly, Kate O’Brian, a senior vice president for ABC News, said, “I would hazard a guess to say that almost every correspondent has offered to go overseas.”

The broadcasters have promoted their globe-trotting troupes lately, and they are sensitive to suggestions that they are stretched too thin. NBC News, which is controlled by Comcast, declined interview requests. Just 12 months ago, ABC News, a unit of the Walt Disney Company, and CBS News, a unit of the CBS Corporation, were reeling from the latest round of buyouts and layoffs, but Ms. O’Brian said she did not think that the cuts at ABC, which resulted in a 25 percent smaller news division, had affected coverage of foreign events.

“I think we’ve done a really good job of covering all the stories,” she said.

ABC has benefited from last year’s hiring of Christiane Amanpour, the longtime CNN correspondent, who now hosts the Sunday public affairs program “This Week.” Ms. Amanpour secured exclusive interviews last month with the Egyptian president, Hosni Mubarak, before he resigned, and with the Libyan leader Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi.

On Saturday, ABC was the only broadcast network to break away from sports programming when President Obama announced United States missile strikes in Libya. NBC telecast a special report minutes later, and CBS had special reports during some commercial breaks in March Madness basketball games.

Amid the missile strikes, all of the networks had at least one crew in Libya over the weekend. CNN and Fox News broadcast live audio of what they said were missile strikes early Sunday.

But despite extensive coverage of Libya and Japan, the television networks have had major blind spots. Last week, none of the broadcast networks had correspondents in Bahrain, where the United States Navy’s Fifth Fleet is based, when security forces crushed the protest movement there, nor in Yemen when forces there killed dozens of protesters. The dearth of coverage of Yemen is largely because of its government’s refusal to grant visas to journalists. Ms. O’Brian acknowledged that had a crisis not enveloped Japan, Libya and Bahrain “would have gotten a lot more play,” but said that was not for budget reasons. “It’s a matter of deciding where we’re going to put our people,” she said.

Similarly, David Rhodes, the new president of CBS News, said coverage of each country was determined on a “case-by-case basis.”

“We have multiple teams in Libya,” Mr. Rhodes said. “We don’t have a team in Yemen.” He noted that Toula Vlahou, a CBS radio reporter in Bahrain, came under fire from riot police officers last week when the crackdown occurred there but was not injured. CNN also had a correspondent in Bahrain.

Journalists also have encountered danger in Japan in the wake of the earthquake, tsunami and nuclear crisis there. Last week, news organizations tried to limit reporters’ exposure to radiation by moving farther from the Fukushima nuclear plant. Mr. Williams said the BBC had scaled back to about 20 people in Tokyo, from more than 40 previously. NBC said in a statement that it had “downsized the number of folks on the ground, to limit exposure to the danger of the power plant,” and that the people who stayed had done so voluntarily.

If there is any media beneficiary, it is CNN, a unit of Time Warner, which has the most robust international staff levels of any network based in the United States. CNN has paired its domestic and international channels for hours on end, and last week it scored several rare — though probably fleeting — ratings victories against Fox News.

“This is the time when the judicious investments we’ve made in a proper international infrastructure are paying off,” Mr. Maddox said.

A version of this article appeared in print on March 21, 2011, on page B1 of the New York edition