The Foreign Service Journal, September 2005

FSJ: Are there any issues that you see as important that the press simply ignores? RB: Economics. When the Secre- tary of State travels around the world, he or she spends a good deal of time talking about economics, talking about development assistance, talking about economic growth, good gover- nance, corruption, how [to become] a Millennium Challenge country, how [to] export more textiles to the U.S. When the airplanes hit the World Trade Center on 9/11, Secretary Powell was talking to the president of Peru [in Lima] about exports of Peruvian cotton to the United States. Secretary Rice, whenever she’s gone on her trips to Asia, to Latin America, to Europe, met with African leaders, everybody’s talking about China and China’s export policies. That’s what a lot of the world’s fussing about. I think there is a lot less (media) atten- tion to economics and how it fits into foreign policy. We do try to talk about the doubling of development assis- tance. We try to talk about the impor- tance of CAFTA [the Central American Free Trade Agreement]. FSJ: There is a lot of good work that is done out of this building. You have the annual reports on human rights, on U.S. support for human rights, on trafficking in persons, on the state of religious freedom around the world. Do you think the media should be paying more attention to these activities? RB: All the time. Part of it is the nature of our business and the nature of the press business. News is news. News is drama. News is different. Our work involves steady pursuit of a lot of things. It may not be different from one day to another. It may not be different from one year to another. So there are all these reports that we do and once a year create big stories, maybe a couple of other times, maybe different pieces of it. But there are dozens and dozens of people who work on these every day to try to make next year’s story better than this year’s story, to try to help people who are caught in slavery, who are caught in jail because of human rights viola- tions. I’m sure there are a lot of things that we can do better in terms of [drawing] attention to them. [Take the issue of] Middle East peace. People are working every day on that. Every day or every other day there is a story that we failed to get peace in the Middle East. One day the Israelis and the Palestinians or the Jordanians sign a treaty and it’s big news. [Then] there’s maybe three or four days of follow-up stories — and within three or four days there’s another story saying we failed to get peace in the Middle East today. It’s part of the nature of our business. There are these moments that stick in your mind and I think the Afghan elections, you know some of the pic- tures from there, the Iraqi elections, again, pictures from there. That will stick in people’s minds. You’ve given them an image they can grab onto. Part of our job is to make sure that people see those images. n 78 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 5 “One day the Israelis and the Palestinians or the Jordanians sign a treaty and it’s big news. [Then] there’s another story saying we failed to get peace in the Middle East today.”