If there’s no Trump, apparently there’s no story, and in the end, Americans knowledge of global affairs is the true loser.

Not too long ago, I was in Indonesia where historic elections were about to take place in what was the world third largest democracy. An outsider candidate, who only a few years earlier was a furniture salesman in a medium sized city, was running an Obamesque campaign to become the first non-elite President in the country’s history.

You probably heard nothing about that campaign. None of the US media outlets I pitched showed any interest, and most only covered the final results in a short news pieces, ignoring the entire campaign and its significance. In the end, only Al Jazeera, a non-American outlet, accepted my stories. It was disappointing but unfortunately, not terribly surprising. In fact, For decades, the American news media has been very inwardly focused. International stories only got attention insofar as they related to the US. Entire conflicts were ignored. How much attention did the Congo Civil War, the deadliest conflict since World War II, get in the 1990s? Or the Sudan crisis?

Maybe one could could argue that there was some logic to the US-centric world coverage in the past, as then, America was the world’s largest economy and undisputed military leader, dominating global trade and international institutions. The world, though, has changed. But our media has not. In fact, it’s gotten worse, particularly in the past three years, since Donald Trump declared that he was running for the White House, turning what was already a media focused too inwardly into one that is creating a nation of globally ignorant citizens — to our detriment.

I believe that ignorance about America’s place in the world led to Trump’s election as President. It allowed candidate Trump to make generalizations about Mexicans, Muslims, and demonize countries like China. It is why his supporters believe myths like that entire parts of Sweden are overrun with Muslims gangs, or that there are sharia law-neighborhoods in Europe.

This has real consequences. How can readers understand the complexities of civil unrest driving migration from Central America if they’ve never heard about it until Trump started talking about a dangerous migrant caravan? Because we are ignorant about the world, due to the lacking media coverage of global issues, these myths and lies often have credence despite attempts to debunk them after the fact.

Trump, Trump, Trump, all the time

A common sight: Nothing but Trump on the front page of a major US media outlet

The more attention that we give to Donald Trump, the less attention, space, and pages goes to coverage about other important issues. And the ultimate loser is often international news coverage.

This is a problem. We all have limited time, and limited attention. The news media is not an infinite resource, but one that is constrained whether by the number of pages in a magazine or newspaper, links on a front page, staff in a newsroom, or time that we, consumers, spend reading, watching or browsing news coverage.

It’s clear to me that since Donald Trump announced his run for the Presidency in late 2017, American media has given even less space to global issues than before. The questions, though, is just how much? As my personal experience from earlier shows, it’s not like mainstream US media was covering the world great pre-Trump. So I decided to look into this.

This analysis compares coverage of Trump to of coverage of three countries before and after the announcement of his candidacy. For comparison’s sake, I choose Indonesia, my focus country as a freelance journalist, which has had plenty of important news mostly ignored by US media over the past 18 months, including the dramatic ousting of a Christian Governor in a religiously tinged campaign, and important regional election races.

The other two represents different countries from regions of the world that also tend to be undercovered and have also had fairly dramatic news take place in the past year. South Africa, which saw its President step down after a long corruption scandal, and Brazil, where we heard a lot about the election of Jair Bolsonaro (often through the lens of Trump) but little about what preceded his election — a de-facto coup that removed the former left-wing President and a corrupt trial that jailed her popular predecessor and did not allow him to contest the election against Bolsonaro.

I used tools including Google Trends, Lexis-Nexis, Parese.ly, and analysis of keywords in archives of major media. I used this list to define mainstream US media. This is not scientific and just an estimation — but I think the conclusions are clear.

Here’s what I found.

Coverage in two of the three countries was sparse pre-Trump, but it’s worse now

I did rough searches through archives of three major US media outlets and found the following.

New York Times full-length stories about Indonesia in 2014–43 New York Times full-length stories about Indonesia in 2017–18

Indonesia gets 55% percent less coverage in 2017 than 2014 in the New York Times.

San Francisco Chronicle full-length stories about Brazil in 2014–16 San Francisco Chronicle full-length stories about Brazil in 2017–8

Brazil gets 50% less coverage in 2017 than 2014 in the San Francisco Chronicle.

South Africa was an exception, and it got more coverage in 2017 due to the impeachment of Jacob Zuma. Of course, this doesn’t factor in where in the paper or website these articles were places. I imagine far behind the countless front page headlines, tweets, and social media posts on Trump.

And, the worst part is, the outlets I choose are the cream of the crop, mostly doing a better job than the norm in covering international affairs. Here’s how bad it was when I searched other outlets for stories on these three countries over the past year.

The Intercept , which brands itself as an “award-winning news organization that covers international affairs” among other topics, last did a story on Indonesia in April of 2017, more than a year ago, and, guess what…it focuses on Trump.

, which brands itself as an “award-winning news organization that covers international affairs” among other topics, last did a story on Indonesia in April of 2017, more than a year ago, and, guess what…it focuses on Trump. Quartz similarly only published a single story on Indonesia in all of 2017.

similarly only published a single story on Indonesia in all of 2017. Slate has published as many stories about Trump’s South Africa tweet as it has on South Africa this year. And they haven’t run a single feature on Indonesia since 2015.

Americans search less for stories on these countries than before

Less supply means less demand too. Americans are becoming less interested in the world, as Google trends shows clearly. Searches for “Indonesia” were going up steadily until late 2015, timed almost perfectly to when Trump’s search number began to rise.

Searches in the US for “Indonesia”

Searches for Trump rise just as searches for Indonesia fall.

Keywords in Trump Tweets get more searches and coverage than…nearly anything abroad

Covfefe vs. Brazil Impeachment (starting from more than 2 weeks after the tweet)

Even a year later, Covfefe is more popular.

South Africa is no longer a bright spot when you compare coverage of it to Trump’s Fire and Fury tweet.

Fire and Fury vs. South African President Jacob Zuma — 2017-present

New York Times stories mentioning Fire and Fury — 347. New York Times stories mentioning Jacob Zuma — 151.

Trump’s Iran Threat Tweet vs all coverage mentioning Indonesian President Joko Widodo — 2017-present

New York Times stories mentioning Trump’s Iran Tweet — 397. New York Times stories mentioning Indonesian President Joko Widodo — 75.

The Chicken and Egg question

I used to wonder whether most Americans ignorance about the world was due the fault of audiences not showing interest, or of the media not covering global stories. In 2014, during that Indonesian Presidential race, I was a novice journalist. Then, I thought, perhaps it was my lack of connections, or small number of clips that was why US editors would not commission me.

Sadly, After three years of freelancing, I have come to the conclusion that the media, and editors at US mainstream publications, are failing. It repeatedly astounds me how much easier it is to place stories about Southeast Asia in mainstream Asian and European media outlets than most American media.

An example took place earlier this year, when I pitched a story about how the downturn in coal usage in Asia would impact the US coal industry’s hopes to export across the Pacific. I sent in my first draft and got an upset response from my editor. Essentially — your drafts focuses too much on Asia. Add more about how Trump is impacting Asia. Of course, as anyone who follows the coal industry in Asia knows, the US has almost no presence in the market. So I added this to the story. The editor decided killed it, despite it being exactly what I pitched because I did not include enough on Trump’s role in Asia.

So I then tried a European outlet and received not only a positive response, but an expression of gratitude from the editor there for pitching such an important story. You can read it there now. It doesn’t mention Europe at all. In fact, never, in my years of writing for European or Asian outlets, have I once been asked by an editor to include more “Europe” or “Asia” in a story. Only US media requires you to include the US, which has morphed into including Trump.

If there’s no Trump, apparently there’s no story. It was bad before November 8th, 2016. But it’s gotten much, much worse since then. As more and more print, digital, and television space gets turned over to coverage of a single man, the rest of the world get token coverage at best. I wonder how many important story ideas get killed because they don’t have enough Trump.

From what I see on Twitter, Trump dominates the feeds of most of the top editors at US media outlets. Sometimes I go a particular’s editors Twitter feed to see how far down I have to scroll to find a Tweet or retweet that has no connection to US politics. Quite often, I have to scroll a long ways. And sometimes, I give up after nearly a minute of going down.

My Twitter feed has been Trump-free since early 2016

It’s time American media to break out of this vicious newscycle. Yes, Trump’s actions and scandals deserve coverage. But we need to stop obsessing over every one of his tweets. A misspelled word in a tweet should not get more attention than an entire foreign nation. Nor should his calling a reporter “Mr. Kurd” get more attention than all of Kurdistan and it’s referendum last year.

The media industry needs to rethink global coverage as well. Why spend $25 million to cover one single summit in Singapore that happened to feature the US President and the one global leader who gets ample space in the media — Kim Jong Un. The summit ended up with little substantial news. Why not use that money to invest in genuine, global reporting?

Ignorance is the enemy of progress. Trump won* in part because most Americans have a limited understanding of our place in the world. Yet, in the frenzy to cover Trump, we, the media, are making the situation worse. We cover the world even less, leaving American readers more ignorant.

My biggest fear: this turns into a vicious cycle that enables Trump and others to continue to manipulate Americans for power. As we become less informed, and less understand our place in an increasingly complex, interconnected world, then the path towards the ultimate destruction of American democracy and our global power is clear.