HISTORY OF THE PRESENT: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s.

• Author: Kettmann, Steve
• Position: Review

HISTORY OF THE PRESENT: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s by Timothy Garton Ash Random House, $29.95

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN's star foreign correspondent, voiced the thoughts of many in a recent speech blasting networks for chiming viewers do not care about foreign news. "It's just flat out not true," she said. "What Americans don't care much about is the piffle we put on TV these days. What they don't care about is boring, irrelevant, badly told stories, and what they really hate is the presumption that they are too stupid to know the difference"

Hear, hear to that. But as New York Review essayist Timothy Garton Ash points out in this new collection, Amanpour herself has been known to put one over on viewers--or so he believes. He recalled the Brandenburg Gate gathering last November for the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was a pale echo of the original historic moment, Garton Ash tells us, a media event drawing a "quite small and quite subdued" crowd. The main attraction was the large screens set up for the occasion, on which the people could watch themselves.

"They watch themselves watching themselves watching themselves watching themselves, in a kind of eternal iteration," he writes. "Of course, television itself does not tell you that this is what is happening. When I go to be interviewed by CNN, their monitors seem to be showing a large, celebrating crowd behind us. And when, in the course of the interview, I tell Christiane Amanpour that I think the Germans have a lot to celebrate, she gestures at the people behind us and says words to the effect of `and so they are.' Thus does television create its own story."

Not to pick on Amanpour, whose work stands out for its intelligence and clarity, but everyone cuts comers from time to time, and that especially applies to foreign news coverage. The Mobius strip of people watching themselves watching themselves has a lot in common, actually, with journalism as it is all too often practiced--the smallest bits of information or insight being recycled again and again.

Declining foreign-news budgets mean that outside of The New York Times and a handful of other top papers, little serious foreign reporting or analysis gets undertaken. Serious foreign-policy specialists who both travel regularly and write for newspapers in the tradition of Walter Lippmann are almost an endangered species. That's not to say there are not skilled journalists covering...