April 4, 2006 — Doyle McManus, Washington bureau chief for the Los Angeles Times, spoke at the Shorenstein Center’s brown-bag lunch on what he called his “first love”—covering foreign policy.
Focusing on the allocation of scarce resources as a way of explaining the quantity and quality of foreign affairs coverage done by major news outlets today, McManus acknowledged that, in a post–9/11 world, foreign policy news resources are gobbled up by coverage of the War in Iraq and by the war against terrorism in general.
McMannus maintained that despite the scarcity of resources and other pressures major newspapers are facing, foreign news coverage has not diminished—not among the nation’s top papers.
Market research at the Los Angeles Times, McMannus said, reveals that sophisticated consumers demand in-depth foreign affairs coverage. This segment of the readership, he said, will sustain foreign news bureaus through the hard times.
