The piece by Anjan Sundaram in yesterday's New York Times, "We're Missing the Story," began: "The Western news media is in crisis and is turning its back on the world."
That was a lead that was destined to pull in few people as forcefully as it pulled in me, the author of an unpublished book about a year in the life of a dying newspaper as told by a travel editor. I continued to read the piece, nodding in agreement and thinking I'd found a fellow victim of American parochialism. Halfway through I glanced up and read that Sundaram is "the author of Stringer: A Reporter's Journey in the Congo." The publishing industry is not the news media, but the author's tagline did seem slightly at odds with the author's argument.
