Foreign News by Ulf Hannerz

Author:Ulf Hannerz [Hannerz, Ulf]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, Language Arts & Disciplines, Journalism
ISBN: 9780226922539
Google: CXCHkyeHsW0C
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2012-04-26T03:17:14+00:00

5

Routines, Relationships, Responses

Some kinds of activity just seem to involve uniquely individual enterprise and talent, although at least behind the scenes, they really depend greatly on the participation of many people, organized into complicated patterns of interaction. Scientific awards exemplify such celebration of individual achievement. Every year, for example, several committees are at work trying to make plausible the singling out of one researcher, or at most two or three, to receive a Nobel Prize, dramatizing progress in some field of scientific activity. Often it is generally understood, however, that the achievement has involved a great many people, each one climbing on another’s shoulders; sometimes they achieve eventual consensus on who should be on top, but in the meantime some of the participants may engage in more or less unbecoming struggles to reach there. In his seminal book Art Worlds (1982), the sociologist Howard S. Becker has pointed in a related manner to the way imageries of art often emphasize individual creativity, whereas a collective structure of activities and relationships is actually altogether indispensable for artworks to come into being and become available to publics. There is a division of labor, much of it not very visible and in part quite mundane, behind the masterpiece.

The news business, too, and foreign correspondence specifically, has an inclination to foreground individual skill and success. The real stars of recent times have been television reporters like CNN’s Christiane Amanpour or BBC’s John Simpson—roaming around the world, from one hard-news spot to another, their faces appearing time and time again on the screen against the background of one dramatic scenery after another. Radio voices are not quite so readily identifiable; and most readers may pay little heed to who is who in print news. Ethan Bronner, Boston Globe Middle East correspondent, whose stories often appeared on the paper’s front page, humbly reminded himself that his own parents began to pay attention to newspaper bylines only after their son became a journalist. American print journalism has its annual round of Pulitzer Prizes, though, and probably just about any country with a well-established, reasonably sizable, and independent media industry has its own counterparts to them.1 It is not really just a matter of honor, either. For individual award winners, the receipt of an award may tangibly affect their market value, and as one foreign editor remarked, if the management seems to waver in its commitment to foreign news gathering, cutting it down is more difficult if it earns a prestigious prize now and then.

Furthermore, when they write about their craft, the correspondents are a bit preoccupied with themselves, or they portray some fairly undifferentiated communitas of parachutist peers. The preceding chapters, however, have already offered some of the evidence for a more elaborated conception of the network of activities and relationships that are routinely part of the correspondent’s existence. The purpose of this chapter is to map some further aspects of the everyday social matrix of foreign news work: forms of cooperation and support, but also sources of conflict or minor irritation.

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