Should U.S. Newspapers Care About Canada?

Edward Wasserman writes in the Miami Herald about how US newspapers are abandoning Canada. It’s a sad comment on the weakness of journalism here, he says.

“Amid all the wailing over the decline of U.S. journalism, word that The Washington Post is shutting its Toronto bureau was barely audible. The Post follows The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times in ending full-time coverage of this country’s northern neighbor. By this summer, The Toronto Star reports, no U.S. newspaper will have a staff correspondent in Canada.

So why should you care? After all, if Canada were brimming with news U.S. readers would naturally demand to know what was happening there, and metro papers here would oblige.

But by conventional U.S. standards of newsworthiness Canada is a nullity. If it’s true, as Churchill remarked of the Balkans, that some places produce more history than they consume, Canada would be the opposite, a black hole that imports trends, culture, politics, histories from elsewhere — from Scotland, England, France, the United States and, lately, the West Indies and South Asia — and emits no perceptible light.

At least that would be the explanation a budget-minded U.S. news executive might offer. The problem with that is that it says more about the wafer-thin imagination of our journalists than the realities of contemporary Canada. And I think it also says something about the weirdly selective way in which our media deem certain parts of the world worthy of notice.

For an imperial power, the United States is an oddly incurious place. Our media don’t help. They should poke and prod and demand that we pay attention to people abroad even when they’re neither disaster victims nor terrorists. Instead, by their inattention, the media perpetuate the dangerous belief that our divine right is to speak and be heeded, never to listen.”