This TED Talk features journalist Lara Satrakian, recorded live at TED at NYC 2017.

Five years ago, I had my dream job.

I was a foreign correspondent in the Middle East reporting for ABC News.

But there was a crack in the wall, a problem with our industry that I felt we needed to fix.

You see, I got to the Middle East right around the end of 2007, which was just around the midpoint

of the Iraq War. But by the time I got there, it was already nearly impossible to find stories

about Iraq on air. The coverage had dropped across the board, across networks, and of the

stories that did make it, more than 80% of them

were about us. We were missing the stories about Iraq, the people who live there, and what

was happening to them under the weight of the war.

Afghanistan had already fallen off the agenda. There were less than 1% of all news stories in 2008

that went to the war in Afghanistan.

It was the longest war in US history,

but information was so scarce that school teachers we spoke to

told us that they had trouble explaining to their students

what we were doing there,

when those students had parents

who were fighting and sometimes dying overseas.

We had drawn a blank,

and it wasn't just Iraq and Afghanistan,

from conflict zones to climate change

to all sorts of issues around crises in public health.

...