One of the first axioms American reporters learn is that a fender bender on Main Street is bigger news than a train wreck in Pakistan. Just as Tip O'Neill crystallized electoral wisdom in his dictum "All politics is local," many editors seem to have concluded that all journalism should be local too. Reportage from distant places tends to be limited to the melodramatic and gauged by personal relevance: either the it-could-have-been-me human-interest factor or the larger-implications factor of how, although the news consumer was untouched by a particular event, similar ones in the future might have greater impact.
U.S. press coverage...
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