Writing History from the Cannon's Mouth
by Dick Polman
MAY 28, 2009 TAGS:
As the newspaper industry continues to suffer the effects of slow-motion strangulation, let us pause to mourn the imminent passing of those intrepid reporters who have roamed the globe in the spirit of Huntley Haverstock.
Huntley is the iconic figure of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic, Foreign Correspondent. Sent to Europe to “dig up news” about the gathering war clouds, Huntley winds up as a radio guest while the Nazi bombs fall on London, introduced by his host as “one of the soldiers of the press, one of the little army of historians writing history from the cannon’s mouth.”
The way things are going these days in the news business, with the steady slashing of foreign bureaus and the erasure of jobs once deemed to be the profession’s most prestigious, the foreign correspondent might soon become an extinct species - nostalgic grist for a Hitchcock DVD or an exhibit at Washington’s Newseum.
The most credible stats chart the downward spiral. A recent Harvard study reported a 25 percent drop in the number of U.S. foreign correspondents between 2002 and 2006, and that was before the seriously ailing Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun and Newsday shuttered all their foreign bureaus. Arguably more disturbing is a 2009 survey of newsroom executives sponsored by Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism; 64 percent of these executives say they have cut the space devoted to foreign news over the past three years, and 46 percent have cut the reporting resources for such news.
I’ll cop to a bias in this story, because I reported from London and western Europe for three years in the early ’90s, back in the day when my employer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, thought nothing of spending $200,000 a year to keep one person posted abroad. So I mourn the incremental demise of foreign correspondents, as do so many colleagues who have worked overseas.
As David Zucchino – who, as an Inquirer scribe, covered apartheid in South Africa, famine in Ethiopia, the bombing of Marines in Beirut, civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, and the seige of Chechnya – says today, “You need foreign correspondents slogging their way to the story … the kind of stuff that you can’t get from bloggers or commentators.”
By the way, The Inquirer once boasted of six foreign bureaus; today, it has none. It’s sadly ironic that, at a time when the globe seems smaller than ever, when developments in Pakistan or China or India can ripple across our borders, the steady decline in the ranks of seasoned professionals who can report and explain those developments virtually guarantees that Americans will know increasingly less about the foreign cultures that could shape their lives.
Clearly, the newspaper industry’s chronic ills – exacerbated by the recession and the Internet (which now hosts the classified advertising that was once print’s lifeblood) – have put foreign correspondents on the endangered list. The current business model, such as it is, does not support such expenditures.
When I was based in London, the paper paid a prodigious tab for my travel. I would be in northern Scotland, say, covering a massive oil spill, and an editor would call to say that I should immediately fly to Marseilles to cover a breaking story about tensions between native French and Muslim immigrants. I’d line up a translator ($750 for three days), and my overlords back home never flinched.
Carol Morello, who covered the Middle East for The Inquirer back in the late ’80s, recalls the time when the paper spent in excess of $10,000 just to keep her in East Beirut for two weeks so that she could report on the daily lives of the people being shelled by the Syrians. Another time, while reporting a dangerous story from Somalia, she had to hire a driver and gunman to take her four blocks to the place where she was to file her story; round trip, the tab was $600. The paper paid it.
Part of what the money financed was the adventure, the sheer romanticism of the job. Huntley Haverstock, played by Joel McCrea, lived the life with typically cinematic brio – witnessing a Nazi-staged assassination in Amsterdam, tracing the shooter to a nest of spies in a windmill, foiling two attempts on his own life, surviving the crash of a plane shot down by a warship, falling in love (naturally) – but non-fiction correspondents all have intrepid tales to tell. Morello made it to Beiruit only after flying to Cyprus and hopping on a hydrofoil.
Zucchino, writing in Iraq for the Los Angeles Times in April 2003, traveled with an American battalion, in a convoy of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, until they entered Saddam Hussein’s palace. For days he was the only reporter on the premises, filing stories on how Saddam and his cronies had managed to dominate Iraq for so long. He saw $760 million in $100 bills. He saw Saddam’s Saville Row suits. He saw the creatures of Saddam’s private zoo, and he recalls how the U.S. soldiers tried “to feed a live sheep to an emaciated lion that was too weak to kill it.”
Most important, he was glad that he and other correspondents were on the ground, providing details and context, so that readers back home didn’t have to rely on U.S military handouts. Which was the point of such excursions.
Only a handful of newspapers – primarily The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal – are still in a position to support these correspondents. But it’s not correct to place all the blame on the industry’s current financial spiral. Newspaper executives have slashed the ranks of foreign correspondents not just because of the expense, but because they also recognize that readers generally care more about the crossword puzzle than about whether they’re getting a nuanced staff-written story from a foreign hot spot.
Maybe it’s the buffer of the oceans, or perhaps it’s just an ingrained parochial impulse that explains America’s indifference to foreign news. Most readers tend to care only when a story abroad directly affects them – and when they can essentially read about themselves. While I was based in London, an editor at home urged me to find stories that would gauge foreign reaction to American stories (the O.J. Simpson trial, the dominance of American movies). When I asked why, the editor sighed, “Just trying to keep the customers satisfied.”
So it’s no surprise that the demise of the real-life Huntley Havestocks has barely resonated. No doubt there is an assumption that the traditional work of foreign correspondents –what former Boston Globe traveler Pamela Constable has described as taking “the time and space to portray an alien world in detail” – can somehow be taken up by ill-paid foreign stringers and bloggers and Twitterers.
Granted, they have proved valuable on certain breaking stories; their contributions were crucial last November in Mumbai, the financial capital of India, where terrorists killed 195 people. But it’s questionable whether “real-time citizen journalism” (as fans call it) can explain and anticipate foreign developments with the nuanced complexity that such work requires.
Maybe in some future decade, a new business model will spawn a new kind of foreign correspondent. But in the meantime we will know less, and, with a few rare exceptions, the intrepid trench-coated scribe will survive only in reel life.
First Photo: Still from Hitchock's Foreign Correspondent
Second Photo: Kate Webb, War Correspondent who died in May 2007
Third Photo: Poster for Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent
Huntley is the iconic figure of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 classic, Foreign Correspondent. Sent to Europe to “dig up news” about the gathering war clouds, Huntley winds up as a radio guest while the Nazi bombs fall on London, introduced by his host as “one of the soldiers of the press, one of the little army of historians writing history from the cannon’s mouth.”The way things are going these days in the news business, with the steady slashing of foreign bureaus and the erasure of jobs once deemed to be the profession’s most prestigious, the foreign correspondent might soon become an extinct species - nostalgic grist for a Hitchcock DVD or an exhibit at Washington’s Newseum.
The most credible stats chart the downward spiral. A recent Harvard study reported a 25 percent drop in the number of U.S. foreign correspondents between 2002 and 2006, and that was before the seriously ailing Boston Globe, Baltimore Sun and Newsday shuttered all their foreign bureaus. Arguably more disturbing is a 2009 survey of newsroom executives sponsored by Pew’s Project for Excellence in Journalism; 64 percent of these executives say they have cut the space devoted to foreign news over the past three years, and 46 percent have cut the reporting resources for such news.
I’ll cop to a bias in this story, because I reported from London and western Europe for three years in the early ’90s, back in the day when my employer, The Philadelphia Inquirer, thought nothing of spending $200,000 a year to keep one person posted abroad. So I mourn the incremental demise of foreign correspondents, as do so many colleagues who have worked overseas.
As David Zucchino – who, as an Inquirer scribe, covered apartheid in South Africa, famine in Ethiopia, the bombing of Marines in Beirut, civil wars in Angola and Mozambique, and the seige of Chechnya – says today, “You need foreign correspondents slogging their way to the story … the kind of stuff that you can’t get from bloggers or commentators.”
By the way, The Inquirer once boasted of six foreign bureaus; today, it has none. It’s sadly ironic that, at a time when the globe seems smaller than ever, when developments in Pakistan or China or India can ripple across our borders, the steady decline in the ranks of seasoned professionals who can report and explain those developments virtually guarantees that Americans will know increasingly less about the foreign cultures that could shape their lives.
Clearly, the newspaper industry’s chronic ills – exacerbated by the recession and the Internet (which now hosts the classified advertising that was once print’s lifeblood) – have put foreign correspondents on the endangered list. The current business model, such as it is, does not support such expenditures.When I was based in London, the paper paid a prodigious tab for my travel. I would be in northern Scotland, say, covering a massive oil spill, and an editor would call to say that I should immediately fly to Marseilles to cover a breaking story about tensions between native French and Muslim immigrants. I’d line up a translator ($750 for three days), and my overlords back home never flinched.
Carol Morello, who covered the Middle East for The Inquirer back in the late ’80s, recalls the time when the paper spent in excess of $10,000 just to keep her in East Beirut for two weeks so that she could report on the daily lives of the people being shelled by the Syrians. Another time, while reporting a dangerous story from Somalia, she had to hire a driver and gunman to take her four blocks to the place where she was to file her story; round trip, the tab was $600. The paper paid it.
Part of what the money financed was the adventure, the sheer romanticism of the job. Huntley Haverstock, played by Joel McCrea, lived the life with typically cinematic brio – witnessing a Nazi-staged assassination in Amsterdam, tracing the shooter to a nest of spies in a windmill, foiling two attempts on his own life, surviving the crash of a plane shot down by a warship, falling in love (naturally) – but non-fiction correspondents all have intrepid tales to tell. Morello made it to Beiruit only after flying to Cyprus and hopping on a hydrofoil.
Zucchino, writing in Iraq for the Los Angeles Times in April 2003, traveled with an American battalion, in a convoy of Bradley Fighting Vehicles, until they entered Saddam Hussein’s palace. For days he was the only reporter on the premises, filing stories on how Saddam and his cronies had managed to dominate Iraq for so long. He saw $760 million in $100 bills. He saw Saddam’s Saville Row suits. He saw the creatures of Saddam’s private zoo, and he recalls how the U.S. soldiers tried “to feed a live sheep to an emaciated lion that was too weak to kill it.”
Most important, he was glad that he and other correspondents were on the ground, providing details and context, so that readers back home didn’t have to rely on U.S military handouts. Which was the point of such excursions.
Only a handful of newspapers – primarily The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal – are still in a position to support these correspondents. But it’s not correct to place all the blame on the industry’s current financial spiral. Newspaper executives have slashed the ranks of foreign correspondents not just because of the expense, but because they also recognize that readers generally care more about the crossword puzzle than about whether they’re getting a nuanced staff-written story from a foreign hot spot.
Maybe it’s the buffer of the oceans, or perhaps it’s just an ingrained parochial impulse that explains America’s indifference to foreign news. Most readers tend to care only when a story abroad directly affects them – and when they can essentially read about themselves. While I was based in London, an editor at home urged me to find stories that would gauge foreign reaction to American stories (the O.J. Simpson trial, the dominance of American movies). When I asked why, the editor sighed, “Just trying to keep the customers satisfied.”So it’s no surprise that the demise of the real-life Huntley Havestocks has barely resonated. No doubt there is an assumption that the traditional work of foreign correspondents –what former Boston Globe traveler Pamela Constable has described as taking “the time and space to portray an alien world in detail” – can somehow be taken up by ill-paid foreign stringers and bloggers and Twitterers.
Granted, they have proved valuable on certain breaking stories; their contributions were crucial last November in Mumbai, the financial capital of India, where terrorists killed 195 people. But it’s questionable whether “real-time citizen journalism” (as fans call it) can explain and anticipate foreign developments with the nuanced complexity that such work requires.
Maybe in some future decade, a new business model will spawn a new kind of foreign correspondent. But in the meantime we will know less, and, with a few rare exceptions, the intrepid trench-coated scribe will survive only in reel life.
First Photo: Still from Hitchock's Foreign Correspondent
Second Photo: Kate Webb, War Correspondent who died in May 2007
Third Photo: Poster for Hitchcock's Foreign Correspondent
RELATED CONTENT
COMMENTS (1)
Latest News Delivered to Your Inbox - Sign up with our site and you will get the latest news about people and subjects that interest you.
S V wrote on May 28, 2009 8:27am
question: what about news services like the AP and Reuters? As I understand it (correct me if I'm wrong), they have correspondents all over the world who file stories that their organizations then syndicate to newspapers and websites all over the world, and they're not directly dependent upon the sale of printed papers or magazines. I don't know how fast these things can appear in an outlet that pays for them, or if they're too expensive. Could a model like that provide quality foreign coverage, or does it also suffer from the underlying problem of there being too much content and readership, with too little ad revenue, online? (How to make lots of money off the tons of readership on the web while keeping it very low cost is a whole other issue..) Also - one of the problems with big-time print newspapers which has driven so many people online to these much-derided bloggers is that they have often simply printed "U.S military handouts", government press releases, and un-checked anonymously sourced tidbits from the government almost verbatim as if it could be assumed to be true. For example, just take a look at the reporting on the runup to the Iraq War and the "War On Terror" during roughly 2002 - 2005 what is considered the paper of record and gold standard for American journalism, the New York Times, or much of the reporting that involves police or the drug war in major papers. We're all susceptible to our own biases and to popular preconceptions, but that's why we need journalism that's as thoroughly investigated as possible. There are magazines that do a great job on this front (Atlantic Monthly, Economist etc) but I suppose they are inherently more profitable than daily newspapers. Personally, I'd be willing to pay for a daily news website like that. But then again I get all my news online from various sources for free... [Report Comment]
