The Foreign Service Journal, December 2015

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | DECEMBER 2015 47 world and keeping those of us in the public sector on our toes. Without journalism, how can we have democracy? RCL: You won’t get an argument fromme on that. Democracy is based, first and last, on an informed electorate. Voters who are ignorant of what’s going on in, say, China or today’s Pakistan are, by definition, unequipped to cast a ballot. CS: Speaking of the importance of journalism to a democracy, as long as most Americans have online access to reporting from the few newspapers that still have foreign bureaus, does it really matter that, say, the Chicago Tribune doesn’t have any foreign bureaus anymore? RCL: Oh yes. Most Americans may have online access to foreign news, but that doesn’t mean they read it. Howmany people bother to go to the Times site, or The Guardian or Le Monde Diplomatique , to catch up on foreign news? Too many Americans get their news from networks like Fox or CNN. Some of those networks never had foreign correspondents; the rest barely pretend now to cover foreign news. Otherwise, Americans get their news (to the degree that Americans get any news these days) from local papers. These papers, fighting to stay in business, focus relentlessly on the local-local-local beats and bury foreign and national news way inside. My job, when I was overseas, was to target my stories especially to a Chicago audience, which often got me on the front page. The readers may have wanted only the sports news, but they had to get past my story to get it. It’s easier now to read a paper and get no foreign news at all. CS: Do you have any advice for members of the Foreign Ser- vice dealing with the U.S. press? RCL: We often do the same work but for different bosses. A diplomat’s main job is to represent and further the interests of the U.S. government. A correspondent’s main job is to get the facts and present them to the reader, even if they cause heartburn in Washington. Our first obligation is to the reader, and almost not at all to our government. We feel our job is to create an informed electorate. No diplomat would object to this, but the path to this end (again, see Iraq or Vietnam) can be pretty rocky. n