Without foreign coverage, missing more than news

Andrew Strohlein of the Ploughshares-funded International Crisis Group laments the slow loss of foreign media correspondents in an opinion piece for the Christian Science Monitor.  He writes, “The shrinking of news from the far reaches of the globe is a problem only partially addressed by a few financially constrained news agencies and a couple of hopeful media upstarts with untried business models or limited audiences.”  The result, he warns, citing Somalia and Sri Lanka as examples, is that “we will get superficial coverage of issues that are hugely important, we will miss real threats to our security, and we will fail to know about – and thus potentially help stop – mass murders in progress.”