How Journalism Should Cover a World with the U.S. No Longer at its Center

Reporting after the end of American Exceptionalism

Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.

During all of my life—I’m 68—this country has been the most parochial in the world, the least interested in what was happening elsewhere. Why? Because it could be. It was the richest nation, the one with the most powerful military, separated by large oceans or land masses from all but two others, both of which lived in its economic and geopolitical shadow. It also told itself that it was the only nation born from an idea, that accepted Jefferson’s assertion, in his last letter, that American liberty and self-government were a signal sweeping the world, “to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all.”

One of the biggest things changing right now is that much of this is simply no longer true. John Winthrop and Ronald Reagan’s “shining city on a hill” is not perched there any more, and uninterested in being a beacon.

Our own Suez moment

The US, I believe, is living through a moment not entirely unlike what Britain experienced in the Suez Crisis of 1956, events that compel it to recognize it is no longer what it was, no longer the center of world events, no longer a moral leader, just one nation, albeit a powerful one, among others. That is to say that American exceptionalism-- a phrase the Atlantic once claimed I personally had revived (incorrectly, I think)—is, for better or worse, coming to an end.

Whether you believe that Trump is engaged in unilateral soft power disarmament (as I do), or that he and his Vice President are just trying to collapse our reach to fit our reduced grasp, as Ross Douthat and others rationalize, there is no question that we are in headlong retreat from the role we have played as a nation for the last 80 years.

How we need to start seeing the US photo: Apollo 8, 1968

Lest you be inclined to doubt this, consider the following evidence:

• Unprecedented ill feeling for the US from our closest allies, the Canadians, to the point that resistance to American bullying may be decisive in this year’s Canadian elections;

• As the US abandons Ukraine, France and Germany make early moves to effectively exchange German cash for collaboration on nuclear weapons (i.e. for Germany to finally get the Bomb), while less powerful nations, such as Poland, also muse about making their own contributions to nuclear proliferation;

• Random and repeated American threats to the territorial integrity of nations from Denmark to Panama, and of the aggressive use of US force from Mexico to Gaza to Iran;

• The silencing of the Voice of America, Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty and Radio Free Asia, once relied upon by hundreds of millions around the world as a beacon of honest news;

• Increasing realization around the world that the rise of China as a hegemonic power may be coming sooner than later, and sooner than had been expected; and,

• In our own country, generalized apathy at the prospect of hundreds of thousands of deaths from starvation and disease as a direct result of our reducing our commitments without warning or fallback plan, and ostensibly to effect only immaterial cost savings. If you have not already, I beg you to read Nick Kristof’s account bearing witness as children die as a result of American neglect.

The dangers of pride in ignorance

The overall US attitude to all this seemed to me best summed up by the reaction to Trump asserting, in his joint session speech earlier this month, that he and Musk were cutting aid to Lesotho “which no one has ever heard of.” Republicans laughed; Democrats sat silently, then and afterward. As a reminder, Lesotho is a country of more than two million people—more than Phoenix or Philadelphia-- that has been an independent country and a member of the United Nations for nearly 60 years. You don’t have to know that, but if you didn’t, I wouldn’t brag about your ignorance.

American journalism needs to begin adapting to such a profound shift, and that’s what I want to turn to this week.

We need—that is, our readers, viewers and listeners urgently need—to better understand this new world being forged. That includes not just what the US is doing, and failing or refusing to do, but also what others are doing, both on their own initiative and in response.

Above all, it means we need practical access for American readers, viewers and listeners to more original reporting from reporters on the ground elsewhere. Recognizing that the resources do not exist in most newsrooms to expand the very limited number of US reporters posted to international assignments, we are going to require new forms of coordination and aggregation to accomplish this.

Seeing the world as others do

Our objective, as editors and publishers, must be to help our audiences see the world as others do, and not solely from our own viewpoint.

That, in turn, has two principal components: First, we need a better and more sophisticated appreciation of the domestic politics of other countries. Trump’s inability, for instance, to gauge the domestic politics of both Canada and Mexico has already been a big contributor to the failure of his tariffs in both economic and political terms. This sort of ignorance was a large factor in the disastrous tariff wars of the late 1920s and early 1930s, and, even more catastrophically, the stumbling of nations into the First World War.

More broadly, we need to stop reporting on international events primarily through the prism of what they mean for the US or, even more problematically, and more often, what they narrowly mean for US domestic politics. That is already not what is most significant in most cases, and it will now, as America retreats voluntarily and is increasingly pushed to retreat further, represent even less of what is at stake. All of this is to say that we need to report on international affairs more nearly in the manner that journalists in other countries have long done.

Parachute journalism will, in most cases, fail to achieve these aims. Again recognizing budget constraints, we need to become closer readers of the local press elsewhere, and more discerning consumers of the views of academics and other analysts who study other polities and economies, there as well as here.

We need also to convince our audiences, if we can, that as American power and influence fade, our parochialism needs to wane as well. It is a luxury we can no longer afford. If we opt to do less to shape the world, we should expect that it will do more to shape us, and our lives and fortunes.

Nine decades ago isolationism seemed to many Americans a course they might choose. In a world of climate change and global pandemics, of competitive currencies and worldwide markets, there is no such choice available, and journalism needs to convey that reality. We are not organized to meet that challenge today. We need to change how we work and the stories we tell in order to meet it tomorrow.