In the ranks of journalists, foreign correspondents have long had a special allure. “Foreign correspondents swoop into our imaginations with flash and gravitas,” writes John Maxwell Hamilton, author of Journalism’s Roving Eye: A History of American Foreign Reporting (Louisiana State University Press). The book, at 655 pages, is a roomy and engaging take on foreign news gathering, if not light enough for most traveling reporters to pack. Hamilton features not just correspondents, “noble and ignoble,” but also editors, publishers, and broadcast executives. His supporting cast extends to the news-consuming American public, who have often had to be lured beyond the local.
“All of the problems of journalism are magnified in foreign news gathering,” says the scholar and longtime working reporter. For owners, he says, it is the most expensive kind of reporting. For editors, its product is “the most difficult to second-guess,” given their distance from the scene, and for journalists, he argues, it is the “most demanding.”
Personalities abound in the text. But beyond the entertaining color, they exist as embodiments of the changing dynamics of foreign news, says Hamilton, professor and dean at the Manship School of Mass Communication at Louisiana State University. For his panoramic historical approach, the author mines memoirs and archives, blending them with quantitative research and material from interviews. He also includes excerpts for readers to sample the journo-speak of varied periods.
The scholar covers the colonial era to the present, with a special focus on a “golden age” of foreign correspondents between the world wars. Crucial also to the author is going beyond The New York Times and other usual suspects in accounts of foreign news gathering. He spotlights, for example, the Chicago Daily News at the turn of the 20th century as an early pioneer in foreign news services. And while Edgar Snow in China, Edward R. Murrow in the London Blitz, and David Halberstam in Vietnam are among many famous foreign correspondents discussed, the author is intent on recovering gifted reporters little known today. Among the most memorable are Jack Belden and Vincent Sheean, foreign correspondents of remarkable intensity in the field. Sheean, whose memoir, Personal History, became a best seller, was unafraid to bring his own analysis to reporting. Readers, writes Hamilton, “did not have to wade through a thicket of equivocations” when, for example, reading Sheean from Vienna in 1938 on Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, an article Hamilton excerpts.
Along with describing their daring and challenges in the field, Hamilton explores the clannishness, hard drinking, and dark playfulness of foreign correspondents, who have been prone to set up clubs such as the Pancho Villa Literary and Debating Society in 1916 Mexico and the Terrified Writers and Photographers in Vietnam. While foreign correspondents have certainly competed for stories, and even sometimes sabotaged one another’s work, they have also teamed up for efficiency, safety, news value, and even sanity, Hamilton observes.
Throughout the book, journalism’s desire to “annihilate time and space” in news reporting is tracked through successively rapid technologies, from the telegraph to the Internet and satellite phone. But it’s a development that has both aided and frustrated reporters abroad. Across the decades, the book reveals, foreign correspondents have asked variations of the same question: What has speed in reporting cost in depth of reporting? Today there is a another question. How has constant communication diminished the autonomy of the roving reporter? There are pros and cons, but as Hamilton points out, “this close supervision undermines one of the great traditions of foreign news gathering, correspondents’ ability to look under rocks that the home office did not know existed.”
Currently U.S. media outlets are shuttering bureaus across the world. Hamilton closes by examining strategies to keep foreign news alive in an era of cutbacks. Among several he describes are “foreign foreign correspondents,” often local journalists; “parachute foreign correspondents” dispatched for short assignments; and foreign bloggers such as “Salam Pax” of Iraqi war fame, along with nonprofit models and even potential government support. In hope, he concludes: “Not the End.”
The Spin of Spies
“Are the professions of spy and journalist really that different?” Yes, no, sometimes. The answers vary for a question asked by the editors of Spinning Intelligence: Why Intelligence Needs the Media, Why the Media Needs Intelligence (Columbia University Press). Operational methodologies certainly can coincide. There are epistemic similarities also, such as the pursuit of “known unknowns” in a Rumsfeldism that the book invokes. Yet the stakes are usually different. A journalist’s inaccuracy can warrant a correction, a retraction, or maybe a lawsuit. A false call in intelligence is likely to cost much more, muse the book’s editors, Robert Dover, a lecturer in international relations at Loughborough University, and Michael S. Goodman, a senior lecturer in intelligence studies at King’s College, University of London. Still, they write, this “ménage à trois of spooks, hacks, and the public is worthy of serious attention, because it is a relationship of such great dependences, synergies, and feedback loops.”
Dover and Goodman join 11 other contributors. Most are academics at British institutions, although several have or have had ties to the shadow world. Goodman, for example, is also the official historian of the British government’s Joint Intelligence Committee. He focuses on the intelligence role of the BBC during the cold war. Pierre Lethier is late of French intelligence but is now pursuing a Ph.D. in London in the slightly less cryptic realm of film studies. His essay is on two of Alfred Hitchcock’s lesser films, Torn Curtain and Topaz, and their director’s ties to intelligence. Of two journalists, one, Chapman Pincher, is a 94-year-old veteran of investigative reporting on security who cheerfully admits to some cooperation, including planting a false story that allowed Britain’s first H-bomb test to occur in the Pacific without the bother of a flotilla of Japanese protesters. The second, Gordon Corera, a BBC security correspondent, argues that Western intelligence is still not focusing enough on the power of Al Qaeda et al. in the information war.
Is the largely British focus of the book enough to excuse one academic’s misplacing of the star Washington Post reporter Dana Priest at The New York Times? No. But wince and continue to David Omand. In a lively essay, the King’s College academic who actually served on the Joint Intelligence Committee uses an imagined scenario of a government minister’s encounter with a TV journalist to trace the competing interests of intelligence and journalism in troubling times. In the end, he proposes some compromises. It’s a relationship too key to public safety, he says, “to be left to chance.”
