Global Ignorance

In a digest of depressing statistics about the financial meltdown of the newspaper business, the scariest of all:

The number of foreign newspaper correspondents in 2002: 188

The number of foreign newspaper correspondents in 2006: 141

Nothing like dumbing down America in an era of globalization and global economic chaos. Imagine no newspaper or wire service with a bureau in Moscow or Beijing, covering complex stories and cultivating both official and unofficial sources. How do we learn what's going on? Not from TV networks, which depend on newspapers more than they'd like you to think. Not from bloggers sitting in Starbucks (or even bloggers sitting in their apartments in Moscow or Beijing). The answer is that we'll know what the U.S. and foreign governments choose to tell us.