Faced with covering a whole country, if not half a continent, the correspondents' first, essential task is deciding what is news – and then fighting for it to become a slice of the global newshole. This responsibility with crucial effects on the American public's awareness and understanding of the world often starts with AP, because of its agenda-setting role for other media, which is so strong that one study called AP “the de facto determiner of most of the international news that appears in the US press” (Hess 1996, 93), even though of course the cooperative cannot determine if and how its material is used by its members and clients. Gatekeeping decisions about what foreign news to publish rest with news editors and, increasingly, algorithms, under influences ranging from personal idiosyncrasies to ideology to readers’ preferences – so that nuanced stories provided by AP are sometimes ignored or truncated.

Journalists’ “news values” in selecting what to cover and publish have been criticized as enduringly too domesticated (focusing mostly on effects for the United States rather than actual foreign countries), too biased toward cultural proximity and economic and military strength (thus disproportionately focusing on developing nations’ “coups and earthquakes” only), and too willing to follow the old maxim that “if it bleeds, it leads,” with a growing exception for cute pandas, sexy celebrities, and such soft feature stories (for a review, see Chang et al. 2012; Westwood et al. 2013). A study of television news in 17 countries in 2008 found that U.S. public and private channels had a far higher percentage of hard news and a far lower percentage of soft news than other nations’, although they also carried a significant amount of “sensational” foreign news; it further found that American TV news mentioned three dozen nations only, the second-lowest total in the sample, and that the most covered countries paralleled U.S. foreign policy interests, with U.S. channels tying Taiwan's for the lowest number of “purely foreign” news percentages (Cohen 2013, 57, 316, 30). Although timeliness has also long been a criterion for newsworthiness, it assumes worrisome aspects in the digital environment's overarching quest for “immediacy” (Usher 2014), and its consequences are discussed in Chapter 11.