ABSTRACT
At the height of the Greek debt crisis, I chanced to be on the phone with the editor of a major Athens daily and, making small talk, said he must be awfully busy. He was, he said—laying off the reporters he so desperately needed to cover the crisis. Tell me about it, I thought to myself. The world is changing and moving in ways that will profoundly affect the future—the United States is mired in two confusing wars, new economic powers flex their muscles, old ones groan under debilitating crises, nasty regimes develop nuclear bombs, the planet is rapidly heating up, pirates roam the seas—yet foreign reporting in the American media (as in Greece’s) is on the wane, especially in the quality media.
