By Patricia H. Kushlis
Yesterday, I came upon an insightful post by The Washington Times State Department correspondent Nick Kralev on his blog Nick Kralev on Diplomacy about his latest trip to Israel, Palestine and London with Condi Rice.
What intrigued me most about “Flying with Miss Rice” was Kralev’s comment – almost in passing - that he was one of only nine reporters sent by their news organizations to cover Rice’s trip. As he explained, the media has to weigh whether the stories produced by such a trip are worth the expenditures when deciding whether to send a reporter along or not. Most organizations, clearly, decided in this case not.
In some senses, the nay-saying editors were right: there would be no break-throughs in Israeli-Palestinian talks whether Rice came calling or not. For my money, there will not be until after W departs from the scene. Why pay the money, therefore, to send a reporter along to report a non-event or a series of non-events when it's clear the event or events is/are not going to happen anyway? So why send along a content provider, previously known as a reporter or correspondent.
And if there had been a break-through it would have been picked up and reported instantly by the local media organizations and even, horror-of-horrors, citizen journalists aka bloggers in-situ. Headlines are what consitute 30 second sound bites - no context and little content needed thank you very much.
As Kralev also pointed out in his post, stories related to policy do not get the hits – or the readers – that non-policy stories do. So editors have to decide whether an expensive foreign trip has enough "public interest value" to make it worth it. In my view, most of our commercial media – dependent on ad revenues and needing to meet the bottom line plus some obscene profit margin for their continued existence – continue to cut back on substance in favor of fluff, fluff and more fluff which unfortunately is far the more attractive to the mass audience - as I suppose it always has been.
Have times changed
But wait a minute. When I was press attaché in Helsinki at the end of the Cold War and the Secretary came through, anywhere between 25 and 50 reporters straggled off the back of the Secretary’s plane and onto the waiting press bus. This was nothing compared to the media that came along on a Presidential visit. Regardless, there were enough reporters with the Secretary that we set up and staffed round-tbe-clock press (filing) centers where I saw major US media personalities in action or inaction.
What does this lack of State Department media attention that Kralev reports now mean? That Rice and the State Department are superfluous?
That the media climate is so changed that it is no longer necessary to send reporters along with the Secretary to get a story when transcripts are posted almost immediately on State’s webpage anyway?
That the American public is so poorly educated and uninterested in US foreign policy or what the administration is doing abroad to warrant the expense?
That State’s charges to the media organizations are out of line (after all a $60 passport now costs $100 and one has to wonder how much of that goes to a private contractor with a head office in the Netherlands and a manufacturing plant in Thailand that provides insecure RFID chips)?
How much, by the way, does one seat on Rice’s plane cost and what does it pay for?
Or is there that intangeable added value – which Kralev also describes – to the personal touch: Real time proximity to the Secretary and others one meets (like the UN Secretary General) as a result of being there, to on-the-plane briefings which are reported, at least first, by those reporters who did go along, or to the inevitable un-reportable chatter that helps reporters key into future stories and put them in better context than they could otherwise?