TV executives in Europe and the United States are following a bizarre kind of logic: the more inter-connected the world becomes, the less foreign coverage we have beamed into our sitting rooms.
Even though dramatic events like the global credit crunch show how inter-dependent we all are, recent research in Britain, America and Eastern Europe all point to media moguls' increasing reluctance to invest in overseas programming.
Foreign coverage could disappear altogether from British television screens within four years as British broadcasters chase ever higher audience ratings, former director of news at the BBC World Service, Phil Harding, has warned.
His report, The Great Global Switch-Off, commissioned by Oxfam, Polis (part of the London School of Economics) and the International Broadcasting Trust, has uncovered some shocking figures:
In the whole of 2007, developing countries received just five hours' air time on one of Britain's most watched channels, ITV. The channel's international coverage dropped by 73 percent in the last two years and coverage of the developing world has practically disappeared outside of the news.
Overall, a quarter of coverage of international issues has been moved off mainstream channels to sister digital channels, which have lower audience ratings.
"African people almost never appear on our screens outside of news - where coverage is often about natural disasters and famine - because almost all of the non-news programming from Africa is about animals and wildlife," says Harding.
But Africa fares better than South America, which is virtually ignored, says Harding.
In the United States, things have also taken a turn for the worse.
The Tyndall Report, which monitors nightly newscasts of the three American broadcast television networks ABC, CBS and NBC, says their 2008 news coverage of foreign stories was the lowest in 21 years - and that takes into account their sports coverage from the Beijing Olympics, which got by far the most airtime.
Last week's dramatic survival story of the US Airways flight that crash landed on the Hudson River was the third most covered story of the past 18 months on US television - aside from presidential election coverage - according to Tyndall.
It got a lot more coverage than Gaza, where Israeli shells hit a U.N. compound that same day, setting light to a warehouse storing vital food and medicines.
You could argue that for just one day a national "good news" story in which 155 people's lives were saved by the heroic pilot's skill will make it ahead of an ongoing humanitarian disaster in Gaza.
But the total coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in 2008 was just 41 minutes, plus 8 minutes on U.S. government policy on the issue.
The business model that dominates U.S. and increasingly British broadcasters has spread. In Eastern Europe the scene is changing fast. As owners increasingly "demand quick, high returns on their investments" they have "cut foreign reporting and other forms of expensive coverage due to the availability of such information on the internet", according to recent research by U.S. think tank Open Society Institute.
But it's a frightening prospect that Western publics know less about the countries their governments are planning to invade, or the wars and humanitarian disasters their governments are ignoring - or even the connections between climate change and future crises on the other side of the world.
Encouragingly, the top foreign news stories on U.S. TV screens in 2008 weren't all about American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. They also included China's earthquake, Myanmar's Cyclone Nargis, and the Russia-Georgia war over South Ossetia.
Back in Britain, many broadcasters say that factual programmes about other countries are important, but they attract relatively small audiences. Harding's response is that although they may not fare as well in the numbers stakes as, say, reality TV, they can have a much greater impact on their audiences.
He is pushing for a new rating to be introduced: the Importance Index. This would measure how important an audience thought it was that such a programme had been made and shown.
"British television is sleepwalking towards a global switch off... The tragedy is that no one denies the importance of international coverage but at the same time (no one) seems prepared to do something about it," says Harding.
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Alex Whiting joined the AlertNet team in July 2005. Before that she was assistant editor of Panos Features and correspondent of Gemini News Service, specialising in trade, aid and development. She began her journalism career making television documentaries for the BBC and Britain's Channel 4, and since then has also worked in radio. Now she is combining work with a part-time MA in Middle Eastern studies at the School of Oriental and African Studies.
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