News

Bureaus down to the wire

By Nidhi Prakash and Cale Bain

25 May 2008

From Mt Rushmore to Guantanamo Bay, Leigh Sales has seen the world’s highs and lows.

Foreign affairs journalism is in crisis from inadequate funding and the closure of many overseas bureaus, according to foreign correspondents speaking at the Festival.

“Fairfax has seen the closure of a number of bureaus, particularly in Asia, in the last few years,” says Kirsty Needham, deputy foreign affairs editor for the Sydney Morning Herald.

Major news organisations, including Fairfax and the ABC, are being forced to rely more on reports from wire services and other newspapers, such as the New York Times.

“That has got some merits. But the problem is that then they’re looking at what’s going on through their prism of being Americans, whereas we go there and look at it through our prism of being Australians,” says Leigh Sales, National Security correspondent for the ABC.

Important issues for Australians are not always reflected in the international media. Referring to the Burmese protests last year, Needham says: “The American and the British newspapers were useless. They had no coverage at all. Unless we’d had someone there ourselves, there would have been a huge vacuum. It’s our responsibility to report on Asia as well, because if we don’t do it, who will?”

Sales, who has reported intensively on David Hicks and Guantanamo Bay, says, “If you had relied on the American media to report on the case of David Hicks we would have got almost nothing. It hardly ever appeared in the American press.”

Reliable journalists reporting on location are a much better option, she says. The ABC and the Sydney Morning Herald had Beijing correspondents on the scene to cover the aftermath of the recent earthquake in China. “Now that is invaluable that we have our own person there and he can actually tell us what’s going on, that we trust that person, we know who they are,” says Sales.

The quality of Australian reporting on the earthquake was better than in the overseas press, Needham says. “To be honest, the coverage that Stephen [McDonnell of the ABC] and John [Garnaut of the Sydney Morning Herald] gave that week was just outstanding and was much better than anything that I read in the New York Times or the Washington Post so we really need to invest in sending Australians out into the world … and reporting back to our own community,” she says.

But concerns about the state of international reportage are emerging across the world. Jon Lee Anderson is foreign correspondent for The New Yorker magazine. “Ask anyone on the streets, even the more worldly and well read, what they understand of Darfur, and I’ll bet you nine out of 10 of us won’t really be able to explain what’s going on, and that’s despite the coverage. So what does that tell you? We haven’t found ways to engage the interest of people, not even ourselves, with the rest of the world,” he says.

Anderson thinks the worldwide media’s coverage of international affairs is the first thing to suffer as a result of budget cuts. “I think the foreign bureaus cost a lot of money, or at least that’s always been the perception that’s been the excuse for slashing them as opposed to other parts of the operations, like for example management with big salaries.”