It is vital for U.S. media to maintain a presence overseas, Jonathan Landay, chief Pentagon correspondent for the McClatchy Company, said during a speech Monday in Mary Graydon Center.
"You can cut back and cut back your staffs as much as you want, but at some point, it is going to be at diminishing returns," he said. "You need people who understand the topics they are writing on to fill the pages, [otherwise you] can be doing yourself a hell of a lot of harm."
The way U.S. media cover foreign affairs continues to worsen as they cut their foreign bureaus. The reasons for the cutbacks are newspapers' inability to fund operations, especially those of foreign correspondence, Landay said.
"Wall Street has got to come to a point to accept that we are not the cash cows that we used to be, but that we are still solid businesses and that we produce a vital function to our community," he said.
The media are walking a fine line between being a craft and becoming a moneymaking business, School of Communication professor Bill Gentile said following the speech.
Gentile helped to organize the speakers' series, according to a university press release.
"Our craft, though it is a business, is sliding into a danger zone in which the business component is becoming more important than the craft component, and when that happens, we lose a key tool that our country needs to sustain its democratic system," he said.
Though it is expensive and dangerous to keep U.S. staffers overseas, there is a deeper level of expertise and understanding of foreign culture in stories when the media has foreign bureaus at their disposal, Landay said.
"If you take views from all across the battlefields and take views from people here in Washington, you can come up with a pretty darn good view of what is going on and not just what they are saying in Washington," Landay said.Eum Kang, a graduate student in SOC, said she thinks the decline in the number of foreign correspondents is a negative trend. "I do think it is important for the population to know what is going on beyond their immediate area of where they live," she said.
Landay came to AU as part of a speakers' series on foreign correspondence and public media. The Center for Social Media sponsored the series, according to a university press release.