I hope to make my remarks brief because you all know how the press has been used by ruling powers in the past to amplify barriers, whether it was communist states or others. What Hitler was able to do, for example, through control of the press convinced Germans that it was a good idea to get rid of Jews. But even in less obviously controlled situations the media has more often than not been a barrier not just between cultures but also between races and between domestic groups. We see what happened in Rwanda 10 years ago: a campaign for racial separation began in the press six months before the actual genocide. It was the press that generated the animus to go out and beat your neighbor to death. So the press is an incredibly powerful tool that we have to be very careful with in how it is used. We have seen many times how it has been used to the extreme negative, justifying the Holocaust in Germany or genocide in Rwanda.

However, I think the respectable press has been trying to clean itself up. Today, in the Western countries, in most of our countries, the press is relatively independent, but the factor that is most difficult to control is the yellow press, the sensationalist press. When we talk about barriers and dangerous areas, it is the cheap press that is going to get the cheap story and is the most dangerous. Even today we have a situation where after Hurricane Mitch and drought and other things that have hit the poor country of Nicaragua, we have almost a million Nicaraguans living in Cost Rica. A million is a lot of people, especially when the total population of Costa Rica is only four million people. So now one-quarter of Costa Ricans are Nicaraguans. When I went there five years ago, when this all started, I expected to see a lot of reaction to the economic pressure of having so many people living off your economy. But I am proud to say that Costa Rica has actually accepted the Nicaraguans very well and that the press did not start blaming every kind of crime or rape or whatever on the Nicaraguans, although there are a few less-educated people who maintain the idea that the crime rate has gone up because of the influx of Nicaraguans.

What surprised me last month was seeing that the yellow press in Nicaragua has suddenly become very interested in the state of the Nicaraguans living in Costa Rica, coming out with wild stories about how Costa Ricans are enslaving them and do this and that. In the long run that kind of press, which is obviously not responsible, is actually dangerous because if it is the only thing the Nicaraguans are reading, then they think that Costa Rica must be a horrible country, and it just divides and divides.

On the other hand, we have seen in the last year the negotiation of the Free Trade Agreement between the U.S. and Central America, or CAFTA. All the Chambers of Congress, basically the educated class, tend to be in favor of the agreement with caution—we have to be sure it is done well and that they are not going to take advantage of us, but they see the future coming. The less educated have no idea what the heck is going on and during the entire year of negotiations very little information was released either by the United States or the Central American governments about the contents until the very end.

Once the contents of the treaty were released, since it had been held back all year long there was a flood of reaction to it. Many people said it is a pretty reasonable agreement, though we wish this or that had changed. But a few people throughout Central America who had domestic business interests to protect made a huge clamor. So the nature of truth is that it is very strong but also very delicate. As the media disseminate so much information, the public must decide how much of it is true, just as in the Cold War the Soviets had disinformation campaigns.

In the same way, though on a much smaller scale, in some areas in Central America the media just poured out things about the negotiations that were patently false, just flooding the society with disinformation. Someone really had to be educated to read between the lines and figure out the source. Generally the major media have been very responsible, at least in Costa Rica. I haven’t personally watched Nicaraguan or Honduran television, but in Costa Rica there has been a very balanced, very clear presentation of views. There has been some concern, even from a famous CNN commentator, about the nature of exploding misinformation concerning these negotiations, not only for CAFTA but the Free Trade Agreement of the Americas, which is coming up next year.

On the positive side, the media is a bridge. Of course, the cliché when we think of bridging cultures and bringing peoples of the world together is to think of National Geographic. We are all going to show and share each other’s cultures and do all this stuff. What we are trying to do is find a way to integrate it into our daily reporting about political events and social events. But still, to step back a little bit, like Kathleen and Jury, I have spent more than half of my adult life in other countries, not in my home country. So it is interesting to see how everybody sees internationalism and how it develops.

In the U.S. National Geographic in the 1940s and ‘50s was basically the magazine that showed all these odd foreign cultures and “aren’t they curious and funny.” It didn’t mature until the 1960s or 1970s or even 1980s into something that valued foreign cultures as much as our own culture. When I lived in Japan in the 1980s they were just breaking through, as the U.S. was after World War II to get into internationalism. It was very popular to learn how to eat foreign foods and then laugh about how strange they were. So Japan was sort of in the 1950s stage when I was there in the 1980s.

One can see that the perception of internationalism is sort of like interreligious negotiations. It took so long to get beyond the fashion show stage, to seeing other people as real people. I lived in Japan, and I can assure you it is like China. As a foreigner I would never be accepted. I was always a Westerner. It was too obvious.

So, a different level of dialogue and a certain period of maturation are going to be necessary in cultures outside of, say, the U.S. and others. But I think it is true even for the U.S. because though the U.S. has the advantage of being a large, prosperous, and powerful country, on the other hand that is a disadvantage. Americans are so complacent. Few Americans are bilingual. Jury here is trilingual, actually speaking five languages. I have finally gotten to three, but it is hard. I want to say that living overseas, I spent most of my time reading. In Japan I learned to speak Japanese, but reading Japanese would take 10 years of intense study. So I read the English press in Japan and now in Central America. And the English press was all basically pretty international because they were all expatriates living overseas and comparing their experiences there and in other countries.

Living in a world of expatriates was like a little ideal world of international news coverage. Coming back to the States in the 1990s I was shocked by the limitations of American media in really covering the world. There were the international news pages, but in a newspaper of 40 pages you were lucky to get one page of really international news beyond the current crises. So I think America has a long way to go as well.

For example, in our Costa Rica office lunchroom we get CNN in English, CNN Headline News and CNN in Spanish, and we flip back and forth between the channels. During the first week of the Iraq invasion, everybody was covering everything in Iraq in detail, but later on CNN in English devoted maybe 20 percent of its time and coverage to Iraq. CNN in Spanish was devoting 90 percent of its time to Iraq. This struck me as strange. Why was the very country involved in this invasion paying less attention to it than the rest of the world? This is something we have to think seriously about in the U.S.

Along with Kathy and many others, I lament the change in types of foreign correspondents used today. I think the trend of “parachuters” is really a detriment to the quality of journalism. I slightly disagree about the nature of sources, that they have to be domestic sources in those countries. I have had experience not only as a correspondent and an editor but also in the translation business. Everybody has to have a second job to survive as a correspondent. And in doing translations for publishing, frankly I have never found a Japanese or Korean who could teach their own language to me, because they are not used to looking at themselves from the outside.

As a correspondent, you have to be a bridge between your home culture and what you are looking at. You can’t totally lose the freshness of looking at the place as a new experience. If you stay there too long, you can lose this perspective. You have to become an expert and be able to see that country from its own perspective, but not lose the foreign perspective of your readers at home. It is a very difficult balance, and I don’t think people who spend two months in any country can achieve that. There is something to be said for the lifers, who make a career of it. They really produce much better information, better news and can cover the stories that matter more, instead of the “sexy” stories of the moment.

As Luis said, the purpose of Tiempos del Mundo is to be a bridge. Rev. Moon is always talking about bridging things, eliminating barriers between races, religions, nationalities, cultures, everything. Break down the barriers. We are one family under God. Tiempos has had this as its mission from the beginning. So we set up bureaus in 16 countries and produced papers that are a mix of the hemisphere paper and from three to eight pages of local news. We are an interesting mix between Newsweek and the local political analysis paper, a sort of hybrid. We are experimenting in other ways as well.

Since we have sources everywhere, we should be the most international paper. How do you develop international coverage, an international sensibility, beyond just having a bunch of stories about other countries or from other countries? We have 16 countries and yet when we still had a centralized editorial system, we had 16 different bureaus with limited nationalistic viewpoints writing stories about their own country and then just sending them off to the other countries. So it wasn’t really going anywhere new.

I have been very lucky in Costa Rica to work with some of the best in the whole system. Let me share one little anecdote. There has been continuous conflict for the last 120 years between Nicaragua and Costa Rica over their border. There are many funny stories about the fights between them and many tragic stories. It is an ongoing thing. The former president of Nicaragua was always using the border as an excuse to escape domestic problems. So José Pastor, my editor, said let’s write about the border instead of just writing from Costa Rica’s viewpoint. He contacted the editor in Nicaragua and said let’s get together and do a series looking at both sides of the border situation. The Nicaraguan editor said, “Why would I want to do that?” In daily life it wasn’t a tragic thing and he wasn’t against it or anything, but to see it you have to step out of the box to even understand what breaking down the barriers means.

That is why many quality publications make a point of moving people around so you have an Argentinean covering Central America. Because even though Latin America has this myth that “we are all the same, we are all Latinos, we share the same culture,” in fact the countries in Latin America are as different as the countries in Europe. They are very, very different. So to look at Argentina from Cost Rican eyes, or to look at Guatemala from Chilean eyes, is a very different thing. But this is a very important step, in the sense of getting beyond the viewpoints of just my own country, just my own culture and all the assumptions that I have made all my life that must be true because I never really thought about them.

To people who are really world citizens, which is what we are talking about, the journalist has to be the vanguard of that kind of change in social thinking. You can’t build a truly international publication without creating truly international journalists. The journalists themselves must transcend those barriers to lead the reading public into a different conception of what the story really is all about. That is another argument for lifers, I guess. But as media organizations thinking about presenting a better international viewpoint, we need to think about the people. It is like a classroom; before you teach the students you have to teach the teacher. So that is great from the purely editorial side.

But I would like to step back a minute because I am, of course, also the business manager and then you have a problem. We should produce the ideal media and everybody should just love it, but they don’t necessarily love it. What are the best selling papers in any country? It is the yellow journalism. In Costa Rica La Nation spent 50 years developing itself as the leading newspaper, with over 100,000 circulation. Then in the 1990s someone came along and created a sensationalist newspaper and put car crashes and murders on the front page and a girl in a bathing suit on page two. In two years he was bigger than La Nation. It is discouraging how successful bad journalism is.

In terms of the market we have to sell stuff that people want to read, or somehow make it desirable to read. Then we have the problem between the product and the audience. We can produce a perfect product and everybody can respect it and yet nobody reads it. We become like the Bible. “Oh yeah, the Bible is wonderful. Of course, I never read it.” So there is this delicate balance between leading and following the market that on the business side of a newspaper is always going to be a problem.

Of course, the people who only follow and have no values make a lot of money, but we want to maintain our dignity and also fulfill something of the role of educating the public. All of us came into the profession not because we thought we were going to get rich; if we thought we were going to get rich we would go be lawyers or something else. But there is a sense of mission in journalism. And that sense is because we value the word and we value truth, we value language, and we value that people are intelligent enough to learn from experience and better the situation and better the world. So I hope that we can find that mix between the poles of the general public that doesn’t necessarily want to be educated but needs to be educated about the world to break down these barriers. Thank you.