Iran war highlights local news decline and necessity | The Free Press Initiative

Published 1:00 pm Tuesday, March 10, 2026

The last time America went to war in the Middle East, it was covered by scores of journalists from news organizations around the United States.

Even some local newspapers had foreign correspondents and overseas bureaus in the early 2000s. They could quickly cover wars, embed with troops and provide regional perspective and understanding to their readers.

They are mostly gone, victims of cutbacks and consolidation that eliminated 75% of newspaper jobs and a third of America’s local newspapers since the Iraq and Afghanistan wars started.

We’re not in the dark. The handful of national news outlets, wire services and broadcasters we mostly depend on to cover foreign news are doing phenomenal work.

But if the Iran war drags on, I fear the diminished capacity of the country’s overall press system and its increased reliance on social media will make the struggle even worse at home.

With fewer trusted and local news sources, disagreements will be harder to overcome, the shared sacrifice and contributions may be less widely understood and our vulnerab

ility to being misled will be far greater.

More than half of U.S. counties now have few if any local news outlets. If they still have a local newspaper, chances are good it’s not carrying much news from afar.

Tim Franklin, a Northwestern University journalism professor who oversaw foreign bureaus during previous Middle East wars, said he’s been struck by “how thin a lot of the coverage is of the war with Iran.”

“I don’t mean there isn’t excellent reporting happening — there is, and some of the on-scene reporting and analysis from a few of the news organizations is as good as it’s ever been or better,” he said. “But you don’t see the breadth of coverage that certainly you saw during the first Iraq War.”

Back then, “a lot of metros and even some mid-size newspapers had correspondents in the Middle East so you were getting much more textured, on-the-ground coverage of what was happening that we’re just not getting today.”

Many TV networks have also cut foreign bureaus and foreign coverage, he added.

Franklin was editor of the Orlando Sentinel from 2000 to 2004. The newspaper had a photographer and reporter embedded with military units in Iraq.

“They did great work and they were able to, I think, portray what was happening on the ground both in the country where the conflict was happening and also within the units themselves, that were dealing with the challenges day to day,” he said.

Later Franklin was editor of The Baltimore Sun. It had five foreign bureaus when he arrived, including one in Jerusalem.

The Sun was then owned by The Tribune Company. It began closing foreign bureaus in 2006 and The Sun’s were mostly gone by the time Franklin left at the end of 2008.

He referred me to a Northwestern colleague, Bob Rowley, a former Chicago Tribune correspondent who covered numerous conflicts, including the first Gulf War. Rowley even went ashore with the Marines in Somalia, riding in a Humvee and sleeping on an ammo box.

Now Rowley is writing a book about the decline of foreign correspondents. He said “hundreds” lost jobs in the last two decades.

“I think it’s hurting democracy,” he said. “I think it’s hurting Americans’ knowledge of the world and I think it may be contributing in some ways to the rise of isolationism.”

Only a few newspapers can still afford substantial foreign staff, Rowley said. There are also new, online outlets with some providing strong overseas coverage. But he lamented The Washington Post’s recent decision to shutter its Middle East bureau.

“Now here’s the most important, potentially one of the most pivotal wars in this century depending on where it goes, and it’s largely being covered from the outside,” he said.

Even if there were more journalists available to cover the war, it would be more difficult. Iran is relatively closed and there aren’t yet American troops on the ground.

Then there’s the hostility toward the press stoked by President Donald Trump and his minions. They attack and undermine it with sneering, petty responses to questions.

That includes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, a former Fox News personality. He effectively expelled experienced military reporters from the Pentagon last year by imposing noxious restrictions on their work.

Since Trump took office in 2016, Americans’ trust in national news fell from 76% to 56% and trust in local news fell from 82% to 70%, according to Pew Research Center. Trust in “the media” is at record lows.

Newspaper chains made other decisions that gave millions of Americans less news about what’s happening globally and how it affects them. In 2024, USA Today (formerly Gannett) and McClatchy cut their Associated Press wire service. Combined with cuts in space and resources for world news, their daily report narrowed.

Now 53% of Americans get news from social media and those aged 18 to 29 trust it about as much as they do national news, Pew found.

Perhaps this is a good time for leaders to consider how all of this weakens the country and makes it more vulnerable to the information warfare that accompanies global conflicts.

Pseudo news sowing division, distrust and confusion is a weapon used by Iran, Russia and other adversaries. Technology and a weakened news ecosystem make it more powerful and effective.

Three days into the current war, bogus images and videos asserting that Iran was winning had been viewed more than 21.9 million times just on social media platform X, according to NewsGuard, a service tracking false information. It also found that Google’s AI Overviews — a primary way people now get information — is supercharging Iranian hoaxes.

The best defense, the Iron Dome needed to repel this swarm of digital missiles and drones, is media literacy and a robust, trusted press system.

That should include a new generation of Bob Rowleys on the ground, telling people back home what’s really going on.

This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.