Time was, all the major networks had foreign bureaus and reported on international news from those places. Not any more.
I was watching the CBS Evening News last night and Mark Phillips did a two-minute segment on the bushfires in Australia. Where was he? In London.
Now, color me foolish, but it seems to me there ought to be a bureau in Southeast Asia or China which would be responsible for stories from that neighborhood. No matter how good Phillips is, he's only as familiar with an Aussie story as the audio and video he gets from locals on the scene.
Apparently it costs too much to have reporters and editors in foreign places (except Jerusalem! Gotta have reporters in the Middle East!). What the heck, Americans don't care about foreign news anyway.
Bah.
Posted by Linkmeister at February 9, 2009 12:39 PM | TrackBackLots of news channels are closing bureaus. Too much money lost.
My bet is on increasing newspeople in the Middle East.
Did you ever wonder why our news is so filtered? Maybe "they" want us to be only concerned with Britney Spears and others to spend time thinking about the important things. Thereby placing our confidence in people who "will make the decisions for us"...I have just been wondering lately on who decides what news topics we see during a given day. Who decides what we learn???
Couldn't they have picked up a report from an Australian network? Or the BBC? Or somebody within a couple of thousand miles of Melbourne?
Posted by: N in Seattle at February 10, 2009 07:42 AMYou'd think. They did get video from ABC (the Aussie one, not the American one).
Posted by: Linkmeister at February 10, 2009 08:56 AM