In a February 18, 2007 article in the Washington Post, veteran staff writer Pamela Constable argues the case for why newspapers and broadcast networks need foreign bureaus more than ever. Below are excerpts from her article:...Today, Americans' need to understand the struggles of distant peoples is greater than ever. Our troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries that we did not know enough about when we invaded them and that we are still trying to fathom. We have been victimized by foreign terrorists, yet we still cannot imagine why anyone would hate us. Our economy is intimately linked to global markets, our population is nearly 20 percent foreign-born, and our lives are directly affected by borderless scourges such as global warming and AIDS. Knowing about the world is not a luxury; it is an urgent necessity.But instead of stepping up coverage of international affairs, American newspapers and television networks are steadily cutting back. The [Boston] Globe, which stunned the journalism world last month by announcing that it would shut down its last three foreign bureaus, is the most recent example......[N]ewspapers can also fill an important niche between television and academe, offering an accessible way for busy people to learn about distant events and an outlet for writing that captures the essence of a time and place without polemics or pedantry. They can put events in context, explain human behavior and belief, evoke a way of life. Foreign correspondents can burrow into a society, cultivate strangers' trust, follow meandering trails and dig beneath layers of diplomatic spin and government propaganda......Don't we learn more about Islam from Anthony Shadid's wide-ranging Post interviews with thoughtful Muslims in Egypt and Turkey than from images of the latest bombing in Baghdad? Don't we identify more with Sharon LaFraniere's New York Times portraits of village customs in Malawi and Mozambique than with dry reports about the grim toll of AIDS across Africa? If newspapers stop covering the world, I fear we will end up with a microscopic elite reading Foreign Affairs and a numbed nation watching terrorist bombings flash briefly among a barrage of commentary, crawls and celebrity gossip.Even amid the broader wave of newspaper cutbacks, the announcement that the Globe was shutting down its foreign bureaus hit a special nerve among newspaper journalists. Somehow it seemed a watershed in the inexorable surrender of an honorable craft to the bottom line...Click here to read Constable's article in its entirety on the Washington Post website.