Issue:
June 2024 | Cover story
CBS News’ departure is the latest in a long line of bureau closures
Such was the importance accorded to the death of Japan’s Emperor Hirohito by American television network CBS in 1989 that 95 people covered it. “They sent in Dan Rather and an entire team to present the CBS Evening News in Tokyo for a week,” to supplement bureau staff, said Randy Schmidt, a former cameraman-editor with itsTokyo news bureau.
It was, then, a measure of both the television industry’s vastly reduced circumstances and Japan’s relatively lowly position in the global news cycle 35 years later when CBS News announced in April that it was closing its bureau in Tokyo, over half a century after it was set up.
Liz Palmer, who was on temporary assignment in Tokyo while waiting for a visa for China, will move to London. The news division of one of America’s big three TV networks now no longer has a bureau in Asia. CBS will “likely” cover the region from London, Los Angeles or Washington DC.
The move can hardly have been a surprise, coming at the sharp end of budget cuts that have left about 20 CBS News employees looking for new jobs. That in turn is part of the now regular bloodletting that afflicts the global television and newspaper business as it shrinks and reorganizes for the digital era. The result is crimped advertising budgets, hollowed-out newsrooms and shuttered foreign bureaus.
Fragmented audiences
CBS and its network rivals NBC and ABC once ruled the U.S. airwaves before audiences fragmented across hundreds of channels. Americans can now opt for cable rivals like Fox or CNN, as well as multiple Internet news sources. And the news is expected to make money, although often it doesn’t.
One result is the downsizing or demise of foreign news bureaus. A landmark report in 2004, just after membership of the FCCJ peaked at over 2,100 (it is 1,450 today), estimated the cost of supporting a single newspaper correspondent abroad at about $250,000 a year; and twice that for a TV correspondent. A large chunk of those budgets came from paying for office space in expensive cities such as Tokyo.
Since the early 2000s, foreign newspapers, including the LA Times, the Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and Corriere della Sera of Italy, have found the price tag too steep. Many remaining correspondents are working from home, often on a contract or freelance basis. Just a handful of newspaper bureaus – notably the New York Times, the Economist, and the Times (UK) – can afford to rent an office.
Television has fared little better. “When I first moved to Japan 28 years ago in 1996, all the major foreign news bureaus (ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, BBC) had about a dozen staff," Schmidt said. CNN has shrunk to five, the BBC has a correspondent, producer, and freelance cameraman-editor, and ABC and NBC each employ a single member of staff. “CBS kept about seven people but shifted emphasis from Tokyo to Beijing,”he added.
In that sense, CBS was something of an outlier, said James Oaten, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Northeast Asia correspondent. “A lot of the shrinking has already happened,” he said. As a publicly funded broadcaster, ABC has better weathered the funding storm, but it shifted some time ago from traditional to video-journalism on reduced staff. Like the BBC and ABC America, it rents discounted office space from NHK in Shibuya.
Oaten confirmed that Japan was pretty low on the news radar for a lot of countries - but not all. CNN still maintains a sizeable presence here, as do Asian bureaus such as KBS of South Korea and Xinhua, China’s state news agency. And given Japan’s importance to Australia, it would be difficult to further downsize ABC’s bureau.
As for the big agencies, Bloomberg is “stable” after a period of major shrinkage 15 years ago, said one source, and may even have grown by boosting resources in Japanese-language services. But Associated Press has contracted since it lost its Asia-Pacific hub status when the agency’s control bureau moved to Bangkok.
Thirty years ago, AP Tokyo employed about 10 people in the editorial staff plus seven or eight photographers and photo editors, a bureau chief and a news editor devoted to Tokyo. Now an editor in Bangkok oversees the region, and a team of editors handle copy from all over Asia, including Japan, both Koreas and Australia and New Zealand. That leaves two AP reporters in Tokyo, one sports journalist, four photographers and two videographers.
But the downsizing story also includes technology. Most of the surviving television bureaus, while smaller, are also more fleetfooted, with a single reporter and video-journalist able to move quickly and cheaply. Foreign reporters at the NHK headquarters in Shibuya look wistfully at NHK crews, who operate in larger teams that include sound operators.
China from afar
The next pitstop for many departing full-time Tokyo correspondents was once Beijing, but that, too, has been closed off. Over the last decade China has been less inclined to grant visas to journalists (including CBS News), forcing them to cover the country from Singapore, South Korea or elsewhere. The BBC’s recently departed Tokyo bureau chief, Rupert Wingfield-Hayes, for example, reports on China from Taiwan.
Wingfield-Hayes said there were no plans to close Tokyo or any of the BBCs Asian bureaus. But he added: “That could change. Especially with budgets tightening further. But even if they don’t close any bureaus in Asia there are big changes to what the bureaus do.
“I think Asia is a real problem for the breaking news model of TV news – there just isn’t that much. Stories unfold over months or years (or decades) and the focus of broadcasters on ‘what happened today’ doesn’t fit. The problem is even bigger in Japan where the same party has ruled for so long and where the economic story has been pretty much the same for the last three decades.
“Of course, Japan isn’t the same today as it was in the 1990s, but the changes are so gradual. For many of us who love this part of the world and have spent our adult lives trying to understand it, this is a bit frustrating.”
The closure of Asian bureaus is bad news for people trying to stay informed. As long ago as 2001, the LA Times lamented that the space and time devoted to foreign coverage of the world in newspapers and TV had plummeted by 70% to 80% over the previous two decades. Executives had decided that readers and viewers in post-Cold War America “cared more about celebrities, scandals” and local developments than global news.
Saturation coverage of major stories has done nothing to arrest the long-term decline. As one study points out, news outlets trained a lot of resources on the Middle East after the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. “But this coverage was limited in geographic scope and not prolonged.” Similarly, while the March 2011 triple disaster led to a surge of reporters in Japan, most quickly departed.
The only story likely to reverse the trend in Tokyo would be a major natural disaster or - heaven forbid - a war. “If you took China out of the equation, Japan would shrink even further in the global news cycle,” Oaten said. If that happens, the world will have more to worry about than unemployed journalists.
David McNeill is professor of communications and English at University of the Sacred Heart in Tokyo, and co-chair of the FCCJ’s Professional Activities Committee. He was previously a correspondent for the Independent, the Economist and the Chronicle of Higher Education.
