It’s a slow news time. Congress is taking a break from immiserating the nation to take its leisure the usual way: dodging constituents, asking for money, and trying not to think about midterms. We’re taking a break from bombing stuff in the Middle East, the Russia–Ukraine War grinds on badly and without excitement, Israel seems unlikely to stop pulverizing Gaza any time soon, the economic numbers are not good but not catastrophic. It’s hot in Washington, and torpor rules the day.
Amazingly, though, we gentlemen of the press are expected to continue to provide entertainment for the ravenous public. So, instead of squeezing some blood from the rock in this sere season, here’s a laundry list of omissions, things I think the press does not cover well or does not pay enough attention to (The American Conservative not necessarily excepted). If you think you can fill one of these holes, it’s not hard to find my email address.
India. India is the world’s most populous country, but few Western commentators write about it much, and fewer understand it particularly well. Modern India has a dauntingly complicated history, an enormous variety of different internal interests that do not map neatly onto the American and European right–left spectrum, and to boot is undergoing massive changes, both economic and social—your humble correspondent has written about them a little from time to time. India is also a nuclear power that has been engaged in constant hostilities with another nuclear power for decades; that, in itself, ought to demand attention. There’s a lot of room here for an enterprising writer to pick up a bit of Hindi, maybe a bit of Marathi or Bengali, and blow away the competition. Generally speaking, Anglophone journalists are extremely bad about learning the languages of whatever places they’re pontificating about, tending to rely on whatever English-language stuff comes through the wire services or the handful of big papers that can retain correspondents with foreign-language skills. If you are reading this and are under 25, and are foolhardy enough to want to become a journalist in the face of multiple mass extinction events facing the industry, my advice is this: learn a foreign language.
Latin America. Excepting the products of our own estimable Joseph Addington, there’s very little good regular Latin American coverage in the American press and particularly the conservative American press. The Western Hemisphere is notionally our core foreign-policy interest, so this is both strange and an indictment of the weird obsessions of our domestic media—perhaps especially of the conservative side, for which immigration from south of the border is a long-running priority. Reading El País and summarizing it in English is not a difficult task, but it is one that nobody has really taken on. Young people, take note.
The shipping and maritime industries. These had a brief day in the limelight during the Covid supply-chain catastrophe, but have again mostly receded into the specialist publications—gCaptain, Trade Winds, Lloyd’s, and the like—with the occasional ad hoc piece in the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times about shipbuilding vel sim. There’s a lot of room to stretch out here: labor policy, infrastructure, trade policy, international regulation. None of it is exceptionally abstruse, but it is intricate and takes time to learn about all the moving pieces. Especially as it continues to be a major locus of American strategic competition with China and both a measure and a tool for international economic alignments, someone in the general press should be writing about it weekly, if not more frequently.
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Religion. There is actually quite a lot of religion reporting, but most of it is frankly bad. (Vatican-watching is the second-lowest form of journalism, losing by a nose to “media analysis.”) And there are holes: Currents in Islam are basically only ever reflected in political or foreign-affairs coverage. Doing it well would be of great value.
Agriculture. Outside specialist publications, there’s very little agricultural reporting. POLITICO has its weekly agricultural newsletter, which is good so far as it goes, but is heavily DC-oriented. AP maintains one or two ag reporters, but, so far as I know, farming issues are rarely treated in the conservative press, and often only in a subordinate way to other issues (immigration, trade). The American ag sector is enormous and politically consequential; this is a real shortfall in coverage.
Of course, by articulating this list, I’ve invited the curse of one of these things suddenly becoming the pet issue of the week, or, more likely, the outbreak of something exciting and horrible from one of the usual hobbyhorses. (Maybe we’ll decide we want to bomb Iran again. Maybe we’ll nuke Russia. Who knows!) But that will be a problem for another column.
