To determine the amount and kind of news about foreign countries available to most small-to-medium-sized mass media in the United States, foreign dateline stories of the Associated Press Interbureau (IB Blend) and the United Press International state wire were content analyzed for two weeks of consecutive days and two "constructed week" samples from the first six months of 1979. The research was part of a UNESCO-sponsored study involving research teams throughout the world. The findings revealed that both wires carried significantly more and longer stories about less-developed countries than about more-developed countries. In addition, the bulk of the sampled stories concentrated on political and military activity and crime. Economic matters, international aid efforts, social services, culture, scientific and medical achievements, and ecological issues such as energy and pollution were all but neglected in the coverage of both less-developed and more-developed countries in favor of more "official" news from governmental and military authorities. The findings suggest that basic questions of news value among Western editors and reporters may be more fundamental than those raised by the current controversy about the amount and kind of coverage of foreign nations. (Author/FL)