There's always been a balance between educating your reader and serving your reader, but we're not getting a lot of demand for international coverage these days in broad consumer publications. Sinatra won both covers. Ten years ago, says Pearlstine, the decision probably would have gone the other way. In newspapers, foreign news has declined drastically as a percentage of the news hole. The evening TV news programs, according to the Shorenstein Center at Harvard, gave 45 percent of their time to foreign affairs in the 1970s and a mere 13.5 percent in 1995.
Media companies aim to feed that appetite.
It's no good to say that people now are not interested in consequential news. The general public has never been truly interested in it. But we delivered it, like it or not. By so doing, we piqued public interest in the very matters that must, to some degree, interest the citizens of a democracy. In network television, the audience for evening news broadcasts continues to dwindle.