Foreign News? It’s All Alien to the Networks

While President Clinton has been hobbling across western Europe on his cane--hoping to shed Paula Corbin Jones while broadening his global profile and stumping for a widened North Atlantic Treaty Organization--much of U.S. television has been executing its own foreign policy. The usual one.

Neglect.

The chicken or the egg argument comes into play here. Are the networks and their affiliate stations reflecting viewer tastes or shaping those tastes, and then using that to excuse the nature of their news coverage? In either case, the result is less knowledge, not more.

Thursday morning symbolized the gap in foreign coverage between the regular broadcast networks and cable’s all-news networks. After attending a meeting of new British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet, the president held a press conference with Blair in London that was shown live by CNN, MSNBC and the Fox News Channel, each of which afterward added a bit of analysis that gave the event some texture.

Same morning: ABC’s “Good Morning America” gave the president’s trip 90 seconds and “CBS This Morning” a minute (with reporter Bill Plante in London quizzed by anchor Jane Robelot in New York about similarities between First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton and her British counterpart). On NBC’s “Today,” Clinton was almost invisible, his meeting with the British cabinet earning an anorexic 14 seconds.

In fact, “Today’s” best foreign coverage that morning came when it interviewed the young winner of the National Geography Bee, whose revelations included Mongolia being the largest land-locked country.

Wednesday was even more classic. Local newscasts in Los Angeles either ignored or barely noticed Clinton’s trip, and nightly network newscasts gave it relatively short shrift, although “The CBS Evening News” outdistanced its rivals with a piece about a Dutchman’s-eye-view of the historic Marshall Plan that poured billions of dollars into postwar Europe.

Moreover, the network morning shows that day treated the president’s trip as a mere footnote to the Supreme Court’s ruling that allows Jones to immediately pursue her $700,000 sexual harassment suit against Clinton. Although the ruling was a major story, so was Clinton’s Europe trip, even with its carefully designed photo ops.

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And even when not meriting banner headlines, the president has been doing some fascinating things worthy of attention in the United States. Yet there was “Today” on Wednesday, using the president’s speech at The Hague in the Netherlands--commemorating the 50th anniversary of the Marshall Plan--mostly as a backdrop for the Supreme Court story and Jones’ allegations of sexual crudity by Clinton in 1991 when he was Arkansas governor. CNN and MSNBC covered the speech live.

While “Today” gave the president’s Europe trip brief mention, it devoted about 10 minutes to the Jones spectacle. “Every day this will steal headlines from the president trying to do important work for the country,” NBC’s Tim Russert predicted Wednesday morning. A prophet, Russert on Thursday morning was on NBC’s cable partner, MSNBC, speaking expansively about the Jones case.

So . . . what else is new?

It wasn’t for gratuitous reasons that first ABC and then NBC unfurled themselves like Old Glory while televising the Summer Olympics in the ‘80s and ‘90s. Although there was a scattering of hisses and boos, these networks knew the narrow interests of their primary audience.

After ranking so high on the global food chain for so long, the United States sees itself largely as the throbbing, pulsating epicenter of sentient life, a lush, green oasis in a barren moonscape, and expects to remain so evermore. And no wonder, for most Americans see the world beyond this continent as largely a blur of teeming, anonymous masses, hot spots surfacing and disappearing according to the whims of the cameras.

Our ignorance is not total. We know Asia as a monolith that delivers suspicious political contributions to the Democratic Party, and that Central America sends us illegal immigrants. Africa is where peoples with funny names slaughter other people with funny names. England is where Charles, Di and other royals play, France is the Eiffel Tower, Russia is Yeltsin and Sicily homeland of Godfather clans like the Corleones.

The rest of Europe consists only of too-tangled-to-figure Bosnia and, for the moment, Poland, where that mysterious masked man, Michael Jackson, is scouting locations for a theme park.

Of course, out of camera range, out of mind. It’s hard caring about or feeling connected, either historically, politically or as humanitarians, to abstractions that we don’t hear or know about.

News abroad was a UFO on newscasts even before the networks began decimating their foreign bureaus in the ‘80s for budgetary reasons. But now, with the exception of “The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer” on PBS, global network CNN and, to a lesser extent, MSNBC, it’s an even tougher sell.

We’re constantly reminded by many in television that Americans are intolerant of foreign news. JonBenet Ramsey, other crime stories and the sex scandal du jour are turn-ons. Beyond that, blotto. Lids get heavy, eyes glaze over.

If so, then TV, where Americans increasingly get most of their news, is at least partially responsible. And what TV does or doesn’t do can have a big impact on public policy.

The less coverage of the rest of the globe, the more disconnected we feel. The less meaningful coverage of Clinton in Europe, the harder it is for him to sell his vision of Europe in the United States, where NATO might as well be the North Atlantic Titillation Organization.

Meanwhile, this month’s international hot spot, Zaire, has now vanished from nearly all of TV. And likely will remain absent unless Michael Jackson visits.