It was often difficult for policymakers to arouse public emotion on the Yugoslav conflict throughout the period leading up to the 1999 intervention, and some believe this was representative of the public’s attitude toward international news as a whole during US President Bill Clinton’s administration. Is that a fair statement, and have attitudes toward international news changed?

One thing I remember hearing at the time was that US citizens could react to the Kosovo crisis because those refugees looked more like themselves than refugees in other stories that we had previously followed. In Rwanda, for example, there might have been a greater disconnect with that story because some individuals in the United States could not understand what the Rwandans had gone through. Many of the Kosovo refugees, though, had come from a capital city; those were images that US citizens understood. In many cases, it hearkened back to images of World War II. That said, certainly NPR’s listeners have an understanding of these stories and care deeply about them, as they do probably with a lot of the foreign news that NPR presents.

The impact that CNN has had in its coverage of international news cannot be overestimated. More and more people are seeing news that they would never have seen before because CNN’s correspondents are everywhere. September 11 cannot be overestimated either; the attacks have brought a tremendous awareness of groups, people, and parts of the world that I think many of us had not paid attention to earlier.

That said, I spent the better part of a year covering a trial in New York City involving people who were accused of bombing two US embassies in Africa. NPR gave tremendous coverage to the organization that was involved in the attack, an organization that had not been getting much attention. The organization was called Al Qaeda. Its leader, Osama bin Laden, was actually the lead figure in the indictment, though he himself was not on trial. NPR put those stories on the air on a daily basis, before September 11, 2001, and I must assume that our listeners were paying attention. We did receive mail indicating that these were stories that hit home to listeners when they heard about what happened to people in the embassies, to both the US citizens and the Africans who were killed in the bombing, and about the international terrorist network that was behind the attacks.

Do you think there are any recent international issues that have been covered particularly well, or badly, by the world media?

I think the campaign in Afghanistan has been covered tremendously. Stories coming out of that country I think are being read by many people who would not have read them five or 10 years ago. The reporting there was very strong. I think there are huge parts of the world that are under-covered, Africa being a prime example. Since reporting from Angola a few years ago, I have constantly been struck by how little one hears or reads about Africa.

NPR is often named in discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is a particularly difficult story to cover. Has the media done a good job?

I think so. You are right that NPR gets a lot of criticism—praise also, but a lot of criticism—for its Middle East coverage. Most other news organizations do as well, and I am not sure that there is a way around that when you have an area of the world that is so divided and where opinions and emotions run so strong. Coverage will inevitably be offensive to one side or the other because many people do not have a balanced view of what is going on there. They want their position told and do not necessarily want to hear about the other side. It may be that NPR airs a story from a Palestinian refugee camp on one day, and the next day there is a story about Israeli settlers who were killed. If someone only heard one of those reports, he or she might conclude that NPR’s coverage was biased or one-sided. What NPR tends to argue is that the totality of our coverage should be considered. We feel that there is balance and that our stories are fair and accurate.

Speaking more broadly, do you feel there is a bias one way or the other in the media?

I think reporters bring their own world experiences to the job. That can be reflected in the stories they choose to tell, or in the way that they tell them. I tend to think that on the whole, things balance out; I do not detect a strong bias one way or the other. There are those who say that the US media is too liberal and gave US President Bill Clinton and other Democratic candidates a free ride. But there are also those who say that the media has groveled to Republican leadership and given US President George Bush the free ride. I think the truth is probably somewhere in the middle and that good reporters put aside whatever personal opinions they may have and try to present things fairly. It tends to make stories more interesting when you do that.

Are people particularly harsh toward NPR in this regard, and does NPR have an extra obligation to be objective because it is publicly funded?

There are some who are particularly harsh, and certainly the network does hear from them and hear about them. At the same time I see the counterpoint; I see letters and emails from listeners who feel just the opposite. As a reporter I have certainly seen that there are people—politicians, experts, academics, leaders—who are thrilled to be on NPR because they know that the audience is huge and intelligent, and they want to speak to those people. I think if there were a strong feeling that NPR is biased, then we would not have such an easy time getting those people on the air.

The notion of public funding is tricky if you look at how NPR’s finances in particular break down. But I think all news organizations have the same obligation, to present fair and balanced reporting, so I am not sure that obligation applies more to NPR than to anyone else. It is part of the mission that we accept.