See Appendix A).The reduction of international stories in American news coincided with a general change toward consumer-driven journalism. What began as basic good business, news sources strove to give customers what they want by putting more weight in polls. However, this need to please for profits has since overshadowed all else. Media venues like Internet news, news magazines, reformed newscasts are born by the minute, all seeking to tap into profitable audiences (Dennis, Merrill, p.221). Journalistic quality and content has taken the back seat to the shrewdly delivered big boom stories of violence, tragedies, celebrities-stories that can be packaged with colorful graphics and photos-stories that catch readers' eyes and get them to buy. Editors, faced with the facts that readers don't purchase or watch international stories, have cut back coverage to give room for more splashy stories. Editor of Media Industry Newsletter, Steven Cohen, complied the following list of some of the worst selling magazine covers in 1994: Newsweek, "Bosnia's Anne Frank," February 28; New Yorker, Yasir Arafat, May 16; U.S. News & World Report, Nelson Mandela, May 9; Business Week, "China: How Much Change?" June 9 (Hohenberg, p88). Given such statistics, and increasingly competitive media venues, news sources have sacrificed international coverage. Journalism business ventures center on cutting back on spending while in the search for big-selling stories to entice advertisers. While diversity of coverage as well as the coverage's quality dwindles, one of the largest forfeits of budget cuts is the elimination of foreign bureaus and correspondents. Dan Rather of CBS says " 'the trend in American journalism is away from, not toward, increased foreign coverage. Foreign coverage is the most expensive. It requires the most space and the most time because you're dealing with complicated situations which you have to explain a lot.'" (Hohenberg, p6) This...
