This article is part of a continuing discussion, with Oscar Moralde.

I had a very frustrating conversation with a Chinese woman once. She was a bright, intelligent person, web-savvy (she was a computer programmer), and on her way to Redmond to work at Microsoft. We began talking about the news, and I may have said some disparaging things about the reliability of the Chinese media. What surprised me was the sudden vehemence of her reaction. She was quite offended by the insinuation that the Chinese media was not trustworthy, and countered by telling me that the Western media was just as biased and unreliable. “How do you know that what they say is true? So how can you say that what the Chinese media says is not true? Maybe it’s not always completely true, but the West is just as bad.”

I admit, my response was not the most reasoned or intelligent. I may have just spluttered a few denials of her counter-accusation (weak denials, as I immediately thought of Fox News), and could only feebly assert that I, as a foreigner, could reliably tell her that the news that she watched was not as truthful as the news that I watched. While indubitably true, it sounded inane and arrogant even to my own ears.

Censorship aside, what the Chinese media lacks most are independent points of view. The opinions heard on various talk shows, news outlets, and op-ed pieces are generally all from a fairly narrow set of viewpoints—the illusion of debate, in many ways. For example, is the Dalai Lama soul-crushingly evil, or merely a child-eating demon? Diversity of thought is not overtly encouraged here in China.

Unfortunately, the United States may be headed in the same direction. I don’t mean that the government will start censoring articles, but rather the diversity of viewpoints might be disappearing. The slashing of budgets and the elimination of many journalist positions is creating a problem that we may not even be aware of: homogenizing news.

As Oscar pointed out, local journalists serve a very important role on the ground in the painstaking process of breaking a hidden story. They provide important human interest articles on local events that would not be covered in a national newspaper. Local reporters are more in tune with their surroundings, and are better able to pick up on the subtle nuances of what they are hearing.

Most people would agree, the genius of democracy is in its tolerance of many different points of view. But when everyone is coming from the same general point of view, there isn’t going to be very much diversity. For example, if we only have one journalist on the ground in a certain area, then all the information that we get will be coming through his or her take on events. And as anyone who’s ever compared news reporting on events can tell you, the impression that you walk away with depends a great deal on how the person presents it. A “resounding defeat” in one person’s report may be a “heroic stand” in someone else’s.

I met the Desperate Italian a few months ago, who characterizes himself as “an Italian journalist who loves his country, yet can’t stand what his country has become.” He cites the complacent and insular (even racist) attitudes of many of his fellow Italians as one of things that he deplores. One of the most telling things about the attitude toward the world that his country holds is his job: he alone is in charge of reporting on… Asia. And he works for a major Italian newspaper. That staggered me when I heard it. How could one man be expected to cover events from all of Asia? How much information will simply slip right by his limited time and attention? And how much nuance will he be able to get reporting on local events when he doesn’t even live in the same country?

Is the United States heading in the same direction? The recent trend of news companies suggests that we are. Unless some way is found to turn around the news services, we will see a significant fall in the quality and quantity of journalism—and that may result in increasingly insular and isolationist attitudes on the part of the American people. The last thing that we need for the future of America is another isolationist period. As any traveler abroad can tell you, the worst thing about America is often American tourists. Without quality, nuanced news reporting for people to read, what can we really expect from the future?