By CASSIE FLEMING
J Alumni News staff
Cassie Fleming interned at The Washington Times during the summer of 2009.
Open a newspaper’s international section to find articles on the insurgency in Afghanistan. Click on a news site’s “world” section to find a story on violence in Iraq.
International reporting is often skewed toward certain regions or events around the globe. The war on terrorism, nuclear weapons build-up and conflicts dominate world headlines. Countries with connections to the United States, either militarily or financially, receive the most attention.
A few days before I began my summer internship at The Washington Times, I saw a map that featured re-sized countries according to how much news coverage they received in the United States. Iraq was a bloated green blob surrounded by several other bulging Middle Eastern countries. South America and Africa looked like scraggly strands of hair.
I had been aware of the criticism of the U.S. media: Its lopsided coverage of certain areas or affairs leaves readers in the dark about the majority of the world.
As the foreign desk intern, I wanted to report on people and struggles that aren’t usually found in the pages of major newspapers.
During the eight-week internship, I learned how a foreign desk works. I was able to see how international news gets boiled down to a crisis or two at a time: a war, an ethnic conflict or the so-called belligerency of certain country’s leaders.
I learned that the majority of attention goes to Iran, Iraq and Afghanistan. And not unnecessarily so: Citizens of these countries have stories to be told, and the United States has spent billions of dollars and lost hundreds of thousands of lives in these areas.
But our globalized world is growing smaller. Communications and economies are becoming more interconnected and the Earth’s resources more used up. Reporters, I believe, must cover events from every corner of the world, rather than from certain hot spots.
In international reporting, it is not that the world’s major stories go unnoticed — but nearly everything else does.
This summer, though, I found voices that were eager to talk about conflict, oppression or reconciliation in South America, Africa, China or South East Asia.
While my co-reporters were busy reporting on Iran’s disputed election or the U.S. war on terrorism, I pitched stories about people beyond the Middle East’s borders. Some were accepted. Some weren’t.
Although I did report on the Iranian election protests, the Taliban in Pakistan and the imprisoned U.S. reporters in North Korea, I also reported on lingering violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo, an eruption of ethnic violence in China, possible peace in the conflict-ridden Darfur and an ex-political prisoner in Taiwan who started a media group to keep an eye on the government.
After attending a conference on rising ethnic violence in Thailand, I reported on the difficulties of Muslim assimilation in the overwhelmingly Buddhist country.
And while debates over energy policy raged in Washington, I was at the foreign desk wondering about the effects of petroleum consumption around the globe.
I worked on a story about an off-coast oil find in Brazil. How would it affect the energy mix of a country already self-sufficient in biofuels? Could the government use the money from oil sales to help combat social inequalities?
In Nigeria, the violence between the government and militants in the oil-rich Niger Delta has disrupted oil production for the past 20 years. Protesting poverty, human rights violations and environmental degradation by international oil companies, the militants have caused millions of dollars of damage to oil infrastructure and have helped boost world oil prices.
The struggle in Nigeria goes largely unreported, despite its global consequences.
Melting ice in the Arctic has created a scramble for the increasingly obtainable oil and natural gas there, causing competition for the resources as well as anxiety over safety and environmental concerns. As the Arctic becomes more important in the world energy scene, it will be important to have quality reporting on the various interests and issues in the area.
About 6.8 billion people live on the planet, and only about 5 percent of those people live in the Middle East, but stories with Middle East datelines dominate American newspapers. The United Sates makes up about 5 percent of the world population, but stories about the United States’ relationship with the world are the most common international stories.
The triumphs and struggles of billions of people on this planet go unreported every day. While budget constraints force newspapers to pull their bureaus and correspondents out of foreign countries, the need for reporters and readers in the United States to notice the entire world rather than only certain regions becomes more important now than ever.
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