Comparative Government

Sometimes, it takes going away for a while to see things clearly. I feel a bit like that was one of the effects of my trip to Cambodia: covering the federal government day-to-day sometimes means I'm so down in the weeds that it's hard to pull back and look at the American government clearly. But in Cambodia, I was staying with a group of young reporters, and the ways they interact with government officials and some of the stories they're covering gave me a new perspective on how the American government works.

First, their relationships with government officials and major politicians is infinitely more direct than it is here in the United States. These reporters have the cell phone numbers not of these officials' media representatives, but of the officials themselves. The leader of the major opposition party in Cambodia spends a lot of time on Gchat. That level of accessibility is unfathomable to me: here, if I want to talk to an agency head, I go through their representative, or catch them at a hearing, or a dinner, or an event. I think that having officials that accessible has benefits and problems--it certainly makes for colorful quotations for the reporters in Cambodia, but I also think it means they get less vetted and checked information sometimes. Dealing with intermediaries sometimes means it's easier to get reports or work that the heads of agencies aren't necessarily intimately familiar with, but that are important none the less.

And the Cambodian government itself is, well, a lot more ad-hoc than the American government. One of the big news stories developing when I was there had to do with the Cambodian air traffic control system. In the U.S. such a story might have to do with working conditions for air traffic controllers. In Cambodia, it turns out that the air traffic control system is run by a Thai company. Thailand and Cambodia have a deeply acrimonious relationship. And it turned out that a Thai employee of the air traffic control system was turning over Cambodian officials' flight details to the Thai government. This is the kind of thing that it's hard to imagine happening in the United States, if only because a) we've got a highly professional, competent, government-employed air traffic control workforce, b) we've got decent counterespionage and security systems in place. In other words, the whole event is a reminder that even though the American federal government has its problems, as a whole it's functioning and competent. And that's more than some countries can say.