How About A Bureau In India?

Yesterday at the TCA press tour, a critic asked Charles Gibson whether he “thought it was more important for a network news division to ‘flood the zone’ in a hot news region…or to maintain bureaus in these regions. Gibson came down strongly in favor of bureaus,” Lisa de Moraes reports. “Then a critic mentioned that Ted Koppel had appeared at Summer TV Press Tour 2006 a few days earlier and said no American broadcast network has a news bureau in India — the world’s largest democracy, with three times the population of the United States — which he said was indicative of the problem with the networks’ foreign news coverage. The critic wondered what Gibson thought of that.”

Gibson deferred to EP Jon Banner, who said: “I think big countries deserve big coverage and Jim Sciutto, our senior foreign correspondent, was in India for a week, did a three-part series just five, six months ago and was in China to do the same thing. So I think the idea and the advantage of air travel and satellite feeds and the ease that we can communicate from around the world allows us to spend an awful lot of time and effort covering places that we don’t necessarily have permanent offices in.”