A changing world, unchanging perspectives: American newspaper editors and enduring values in foreign news reporting

The purpose of this study is to examine, through a longitudinal analysis, the priorities and beliefs that American newspaper editors hold toward foreign news reporting. Using the theory of cultural values as the framework, the study seeks to compare how American newspaper editors assessed the importance of factors in their selection of foreign news over time. The results show that the priorities of journalistic values in foreign news reporting remain fundamentally unchanged in the United States. More importantly, the factor structure of foreign news values was invariant between 1988 and 2008. The persistence of such values strongly indicates a shared professional culture that appears to cultivate a common worldview through journalistic practices in the newsroom.