HISTORY OF THE PRESENT: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s.

HISTORY OF THE PRESENT: Essays, Sketches, and Dispatches from Europe in the 1990s by Timothy Garton Ash Random House, $29.95

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CNN's star foreign correspondent, voiced the thoughts of many in a recent speech blasting networks for chiming viewers do not care about foreign news. "It's just flat out not true," she said. "What Americans don't care much about is the piffle we put on TV these days. What they don't care about is boring, irrelevant, badly told stories, and what they really hate is the presumption that they are too stupid to know the difference"

Hear, hear to that. But as New York Review essayist Timothy Garton Ash points out in this new collection, Amanpour herself has been known to put one over on viewers--or so he believes. He recalled the Brandenburg Gate gathering last November for the 10th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. This was a pale echo of the original historic moment, Garton Ash tells us, a media event drawing a "quite small and quite subdued" crowd. The main attraction was the large screens set up for the occasion, on which the people could watch themselves.

"They watch themselves watching themselves watching themselves watching themselves, in a kind of eternal iteration," he writes. "Of course, television itself does not tell you that this is what is happening. When I go to be interviewed by CNN, their monitors seem to be showing a large, celebrating crowd behind us. And when, in the course of the interview, I tell Christiane Amanpour that I think the Germans have a lot to celebrate, she gestures at the people behind us and says words to the effect of `and so they are.' Thus does television create its own story."

Not to pick on Amanpour, whose work stands out for its intelligence and clarity, but everyone cuts comers from time to time, and that especially applies to foreign news coverage. The Mobius strip of people watching themselves watching themselves has a lot in common, actually, with journalism as it is all too often practiced--the smallest bits of information or insight being recycled again and again.

Declining foreign-news budgets mean that outside of The New York Times and a handful of other top papers, little serious foreign reporting or analysis gets undertaken. Serious foreign-policy specialists who both travel regularly and write for newspapers in the tradition of Walter Lippmann are almost an endangered species. That's not to say there are not skilled journalists covering foreign topics. Thomas Friedman, for example, writes deftly on foreign affairs for the Times, but has grown so enamored of globalism he has little time for writing that does not focus on economics.

The Washington Post has Jim Hoagland, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner, writing two columns a week. Hoagland did his time as a foreign correspondent and has credibility and insight. But most of his columns are written from a distance. Of the 99 he wrote over the 12 months ending in September, only 16 had foreign datelines. Inevitably, something is lost.

If Lippmann has any heir as both an original thinker and a restless traveler, it would have to be Carton Ash, a fellow at St. Antony's College, Oxford, and at the Hoover Institution. He argues, in the introduction to his new collection of essays, for the importance of the middle ground between scholarship and journalism. George Kennan dubbed Garton Ash's approach to writing "history of the present," and Garton Ash accepts the term--taking aim at the academic bias against real-world experience.

"AS the formidably learned German intellectual historian Reinhart Koselleck has observed, from the time of Thucydides until well into the 18th century to have been an eyewitness to the events described or, even better, to have been a participant in them was considered a major advantage for a writer of history." Of the recent notion that distance makes for better understanding, Garton Ash writes "this is actually a very odd idea: that the person who wasn't there knows better than the person who was"

He praises the thoroughness of many academic writers, and adds: "But they can also spend a life describing war without ever seeing a shot fired in anger"

Garton Ash has seen his share of such shots. Just as important, his industrious research over the years--and the stature he has gained--means he knows the people involved. While people like Vaclav Havel and Mikhail Gorbachev do not just know Garton Ash personally, they know his arguments and his sensibilities. As he tells us, Havel once gave a speech in Tokyo in which he repeatedly mentioned his "English friend," and took issue with Garton Ash's views on the need for intellectuals who become politicians to make a choice between one role and the other.

Unlike most journalists, Garton Ash has done the reading; he's done his homework, and, more often than not, he speaks the language. Unlike most historians, he writes with an immediacy and pungency that can be very effective, even memorable. Gushed Jan T. Gross in the New York Times Book Review a decade ago: "And how he writes! Over the years the author befriended members of dissident intellectual elites in East Central Europe. He traveled there frequently, had innumerable conversations and kept writing. I do not know of anybody who has learned these countries as well as he has."

When Garton Ash writes, in a 1998 piece on Germany, that "Boredom is an underrated factor in politics," many readers will not only shake their heads in agreement and smile--but also do their best to remember the line so they can cite it (or steal it). In 1990 he defended East Germans from the charge of Western intellectuals that they should vote differently and not support the former communists in such numbers. "Why the hell should they?" he wrote. "If you want to make another experiment, kindly perform it on yourself."

This is Garton Ash at his best, writing with both empathy and hard-won understanding, knowing the people and what they are really talking about, not just during television interviews. He's careful with facts, and maybe even more careful with ideas. He is, in short, someone whose approach and sensibility are completely at odds with all current trends in American journalism.

STEVE KETTMANN is an American journalist living in Berlin.