Media : 1,800 Foreign Journalists Keep U.S. at Top of News : * ‘Americans don’t realize the awe with which their country is held in the remotest village of Kurdistan,’ marvels a writer from Israel.

WASHINGTON —  In his 12th-floor office a few blocks from the White House, Hamdi Fouad sits tapping an unlit cigar on his desk, glasses pushed back on his forehead, and wrestles with a daily dilemma: What will he tell his millions of readers back home in Egypt today about the United States?

“If it’s a decision made in Washington, it’s page one, even in Cairo, and my editors want it all. I’m lucky any night I get out of here before midnight,” says Fouad, whose assignment as Al Ahram’s Washington bureau chief has made him one of the most widely known journalists in the Arab world.

Two floors below Fouad in the National Press Building, Vladimir Matyash has finished a lengthy article for Tass, the Russian news agency, on U.S. aid to the former Soviet republics and is going through other stories his eight-member bureau--Tass’s largest--plans to file.

“I can tell you frankly,” he says, “that when I was based in New York in the mid-’70s, I looked for negative stories--crime, oppressed people, drugs, hunger, poverty, racial problems, unemployment. Not because I hated America but because those were the instructions from my boss in Moscow. Now, believe me, that has all changed; our stories are 400% positive today.”

Whatever the tone of their stories, Fouad and Matyash--and the more than 1,800 other foreign correspondents from 82 countries who work in the United States--play a key role in determining how the world perceives America, its policies and people.

Their presence--about 600 of the journalists are based in Washington, nearly 900 in New York, 200 in Southern California and 100 scattered in other cities--has made the United States the news-gathering capital of the world. And the world’s appetite for everything from the Magic Johnson story (prominently played in Moscow) to John H. Sununu’s resignation as White House chief of staff (page one in Saudi Arabia) is insatiable.

In the last five years, the number of resident foreign journalists in Moscow has increased threefold, to about 1,200. About 200 are based in Israel, 450 in London and nearly 500 in Tokyo. But year in and year out, starting with the influx of journalists who converged on New York after the establishment of the U.N. headquarters in 1951, no country has been more thoroughly covered, analyzed and dissected than the United States.

“What has changed our job is that a foreign correspondent, because of the universalization of American TV, no longer has a monopoly on trying to explain the United States to our readers,” said Yoav Karny, who writes a weekly column on the United States for the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz.

“My mother, 6,000 miles away in a suburb of Tel Aviv, can watch the same programs I’m watching--CNN 24 hours a day, C-Span, ‘Nightline,’ ‘NBC News.’ There’s even some PBS. So now, to translate ‘Americanness’ to Hebrew, you can’t just report the event; you have to try to make sense of all these pieces of the American puzzle you see on TV.

“Americans don’t realize the awe with which their country is held in the remotest village of Kurdistan, how indispensable it is in the minds of people. So, I don’t share the notion that America is bankrupt and headed downhill. I still find a greater amount of dynamism here than anywhere else, and I think the continued greatness of America rests in the abundance of self-correcting mechanisms in your system.”

Some of the “Americanness” in the nation’s culture and political structure is incomprehensible to foreigners. Karny, for instance, finds it difficult to explain a judicial process in which judges are nominated on the basis of their political outlook rather than their legal ability. A Palestinian journalist wonders why dinner guests keep telling their hostess how delicious her meal is, even if they don’t like it. An Italian, Ennio Caretto, bureau chief for La Repubblica, notes that the powerful U.S. lobby system would be “considered very close to corruption in most serious European capitals.”

And what is a Frenchman to do with George Bush’s two-word response when asked during the last presidential campaign how he would do in a debate against Michael Dukakis? “Jose Canseco,” Bush said, meaning he would hit a home run like the Oakland Athletics’ batting star.

“And how do you explain 10 people jumping on some poor person every Sunday and thousands of people cheering?” asks Fouzi Asmar of Al Riyadh, a Saudi Arabian daily. “Don’t get me wrong. I love the Redskins. But the only way you can explain the spectacle of football is to tell your readers that Americans love to win.”

To help foreign correspondents make sense of America--and to report official policy--the U.S. Information Agency, the informational arm of the government, runs the Foreign Press Center on the eighth floor of the National Press Building.

It arranges interviews, provides live broadcasts of government briefings and holds a weekly White House briefing exclusively for foreign correspondents. Among the guests who have spoken to international journalists there this year are Gen. John R. Gavin, supreme allied commander for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, Sen. Richard Lugar (R-Ind.) and Surgeon General Antonia C. Novello.

“We’re obviously an arm of the federal government, and we’re not going to surface a problem, but if someone queries me about something, I’m going to be as open and candid as I can be,” said Col. Robert Stone, the Pentagon’s press representative at the center. During the Gulf War, he was fielding an average of 45 queries a day.

Even journalists from Europe are stunned by the openness of the American system, the accessibility of government officials and the amount of information available in Washington, a city where having information is tantamount to having power. For David Zenian, who reported on the Middle East for United Press International for 20 years and is now director of the Armenian Information Service, it sometimes seems too easy.

“You don’t have to stand on any rainy corners for information in Washington,” he said. “People aren’t scared to talk. They aren’t in hiding. Reaching the White House is no big deal. If you have a question, you can find someone on the other end of the line with an answer. If you miss a State Department statement, someone will fax it to you 10 minutes later, at their own expense. The danger is, though, that you’re apt to rely on your telephone too much, rather than the eyeball-to-eyeball contact that was essential to doing business in the Middle East.”

Still, despite the accessibility of news sources, foreign correspondents say they have neither the clout nor the prestige--nor in most cases the handsome salary and expense account--that American journalists enjoy when based abroad. No one leaks information to them, and scoops are all but unheard of.

Whereas leaders in the Third World are apt to make major announcements through the Western press because their own media may be government-controlled or unreliable, if the White House wants to leak a story, it doesn’t call in the correspondent for Nigeria’s Guardian or Poland’s Trybuna. It leaks the story to a U.S. publication or network.

“The Bush Administration is quite efficient at controlling information, and it’s clear government officials don’t want to be seen by their colleagues as being associated too closely with Japanese reporters,” said Yoshihisa Komori, bureau chief for Sankei Shimbun (circulation: 3 million daily). Japan, with about 80, has more foreign correspondents in Washington than any other country.

Komori went on: “You get the feeling they really don’t take you seriously. We realize that they don’t read our papers and our readers don’t vote for them. But you wish they’d realize an enormous number of people do read what we write, and that affects America’s relationship with Japan.”

For many correspondents, Washington can be an invitation to laziness, with information spoon-fed and two excellent home-delivered newspapers, the Washington Post and New York Times, that make tempting candidates to rewrite. But Washington, most say, reflects surprisingly little of America itself and can be suffocating with its atmosphere of self-importance. Some of those who do travel the United States write as insightfully as the best American journalists reporting on their own country.

Over the desk of Xan Smiley, bureau chief for the Sunday Telegraph of London, hangs a 6-foot-long U.S. map with 60 or 70 blue pins, scattered from California to Florida, marking the towns and cities where he has overnighted. After a recent trip to Sen. Tom Harkin’s hometown of Cumming, Iowa, he wrote in his profile of the candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination:

With characteristic farmyard bluntness, Tom Harkin, the Democrat’s angry, craggy-faced, bloody-minded, left-wing Iowan aspirant for the presidency, bashes George Bush’s economic policy: “Bullshit! Bullshit! Bullshit!”

Most Americans think bad language is unpresidential. But Mr. Harkin’s class-war exclamations -- even though they offer no specific alternative except slashing the military budget and spending the money on education, infrastructure and social services -- are resonating among the growing number of Americans who feel poor, sour and frustrated.”

Smiley’s articles, like those of many of his peers, often mix commentary with reportage and assume something American reporters abroad would dare not: that his readers have more than a superficial knowledge of the country he is writing about. The implications of that assumption are shared with visiting foreign journalists during the indoctrination George Krimsky gives at the Center for Foreign Journalists in Reston, Va., outside Washington.

“One of the main things we tell them is, ‘It is likely as not the man on the street in America is not going to know where your country is,” said Krimsky, president of the nonprofit, professional assistance center.

“ ‘Don’t let that debilitate you. Don’t spend all your time in this country being angry because someone doesn’t know if Uganda is in Africa or Sweden. This is a country that has historically been insulated from the world. We may be a nation of immigrants but when the immigrants hit these shores, they forget. This is a geographically illiterate society, and you’ll have to accept that as part and parcel of America.’ ”

The Top Ten

Japan fields the most U.S. correspondents, but Europe is also well represented. Number of U.S.-based correspondents Japan: 300 Germany: 150 Britain: 130 Italy: 125 France: 100 Brazil: 80 Spain: 60 Canada: 60 South Korea: 35 Soviet Union (former): 35 Source: Estimated by the U.S. Information Agency’s Foreign Press Center.