ALL NEWS IS LOCAL NEWS
By Allan R. Andrews

WASHINGTON - "All politics is local politics," said the late "Tip" O'Neill of Massachusetts, long-time Democratic speaker of the House. Taking a small liberty with O'Neill's conviction, an editor can rightfully and ought consistently to assert, "All news is local news."

Recent research suggests Americans consistently ignore international news and tell survey-takers they desire more local news in their daily papers and on nightly news broadcasts. Our biggest newspapers have been pulling correspondents from overseas assignments. The number of newspaper pages devoted to international news is shrinking.

Newspapers that pay deep attention to international news do so at their economic peril. The Christian Science Monitor, generally recognized as one of the finest newspapers in the world for reporting international news, lost a reported $18.7 million in 1997.

This phenomenon of disdaining foreign news echoes American history. President Woodrow Wilson is remembered for his promise of isolationism when World War I broke out. "He'll keep us out of war," became a Wilson campaign cry.

A good proportion of Americans took a similar stance when hostilities broke out in Europe that led to World War II. Willing overseas involvement has never been one of America's strong suits; we have two oceans separating us from the continents that gave birth to civilization.

Often Americans' concerns with foreign policy come to the fore only after our leaders have determined to commit troops to a region. Thus, the geography of remote places such as Iwo Jima, Pusan, Saigon, Bahrain and - in today's headlines -- Kosovo become etched on our national consciousness.

Currently, news of economic hardships in East Asia, of boundless poverty and disease as well as modern slavery on the continent of Africa or of rampant injustices in the nations comprising South Asia and South America has done little to draw Americans into concern for the global village.

In the 1970s, exuberant unionists smashed Japanese automobiles. Many of those workers have since labored to manufacture in the United States Toyotas, Hondas and Chryslers with Mitsubishi engines, and it is being driven home dramatically with mergers that Chrysler and Ford are no longer local companies.

Even as news of the "global economy" supports the notion that we live on a fragile planet where little if anything can be ignored because of its eventual impact upon our lives, Americans nonchalantly bury their minds in their own affairs, oblivious if not downright hostile to foreign affairs.

Much evidence for this provincial attitude can be found in a Congress that still mouths O'Neill's maxim without understanding its implications. It's not that international news isn't out there. News organizations around the globe chronicle its horrors and hardships. We simply don't pay attention until we're touched.

Despite historical alerts to the importance of international news for Americans, it remains a tale of woe for an editor who judges the day's significant news to be originating in Jerusalem or Kosovo or Freetown, Sierra Leone, rather than in Washington, New York or Middletown, USA.

I mention Sierra Leone because it thrust itself into my life in a personal way this year.

Sierra Leone is one of Africa's smallest nations, tucked into the West Coast of the massive continent. It has been wracked by battles of an eight-year civil war between the Nigeria-backed troops of the installed government and a massive rebel army of mostly ex-Sierra Leone soldiers.

In the three months since Thanksgiving, 1998, between 3,000 and 4,000 people in the country have been killed. That's more than have died in Kosovo in a year. People in the ravaged country accuse the U.N. of ignoring its plight and denying much-needed humanitarian aid. The organized nations of the globe, like many Americans clamoring for more local news, are oblivious to this tiny nation from which only sporadic news accounts of murder, mutilation and mass-exodus are published.

One Sunday in January it was announced in my church that the brother of a parishioner with whom I have developed a growing friendship had been murdered in Sierra Leone. The 48-year-old man was attempting with his wife to relocate his mother-in-law from the dangerous side of Freetown to the safer side.

Accosted by rebels who mistook him for a government soldier, the man ran from his mother-in-law's house to escape their terror. The rebels responded by locking the women in the house and torching it. Only after the women had escaped the burning building did they discovered the dead body of their husband and son-in-law. As he ran to avoid trouble, he had been senselessly and mercilessly gunned down by other rebels in the street.

Last week, I attended a memorial service for the slain man. Other than his relatives who were attending, few at the service knew the dead man; we came as friends of his brother, our fellow parishioner.

In a moving eulogy, my friend called his brother "an ordinary man" and yet "an extraordinary man." The life of an ordinary man I did not know half a globe away had suddenly touched me.

In the span of a few hours, through the extraordinary power of communication that we cannot deny or turn back, an event in West Africa had become my concern in Eastern Maryland.

Someday I may be forcing a eulogy through tears for my sons or my daughter slain in some unknown, distant battlefield or for friends who have been victimized by treachery and greed originating half a globe away. Such stories often arise outside my range of travel.

This tiny story from the tiny nation of Sierra Leone grips me with the strength of local news. Indeed, all news is local news. Somebody in my parish, in my neighborhood, in my city, in my state, is deeply affected by every event that occurs in the world.

Just as assuredly as a blizzard in Fairbanks, Alaska, a week or so hence portends cold weather and possible snow for Washington, D.C., so some international event is planting a seed that will flower in my time and extend its growth into my concern for the future.

I have no doubt that the polls are correct, that Americans want less international news and more local news. My question is whether we who gather and publish the news can afford to cater to their provincial indifference. To do so may be to invite their condemnation when they later ask, "How come nobody warned us?"

Admit it or not, like it or not, Americans need to be reminded with the conviction of a "Tip" O'Neill that all news is local news.