International Journalism (Journalism Studies: Key Texts) by Kevin Williams

Author:Kevin Williams [Williams, Kevin]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781446292440
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2011-08-10T04:00:00+00:00

The generalist approach is defended by many in the profession; generalists are able to represent more effectively their audience, seeing the world through their eyes, which specialist knowledge might impede. However, as Dorman and Farhang note, such an approach coincides with the profit-making objective of the media. Specialists cost money and training correspondents to become expert is a costly and time-consuming activity.

The foreign beat

* * *

Covering foreign news abroad varies according to the medium one works for. Print, radio and television correspondents have different problems and pressures to struggle with. However, the daily routines of all foreign correspondents are dominated by common features. Most bureau correspondents are responsible for vast areas. Labels such as the ‘Middle East Correspondent’ or the ‘Africa Editor’, or today the grandiosely entitled ‘World Affairs Correspondent’, indicate that foreign correspondents are responsible for reporting vast areas that are characterised by a diversity of countries, cultures, peoples and languages, to say nothing of political and social systems. The geographical distance that correspondents have to cover simply to get around their beat is daunting in places like Africa, which are beset with a variety of natural, man made and infrastructure obstacles (see Boafo, 1992).

During the 1980s most American and European TV news channels covered Africa from Johannesburg in South Africa. Not only was this as geographically remote from many parts of the continent as they were from Europe, it was also the only African country run by whites only. Robert Terrell (1986) noted that the ‘overwhelming majority of US journalists stationed in South Africa are upper middle class whites’ and as a result ‘isolated from South Africa’s majority due to class, cultural, economic, racial and political factors’ (Terrell, 1986: 23). Living in separate housing, immersed in white society and unable to converse with many black people owing to their inability to speak the languages used by black and coloured South Africans, they were subjected to ‘procedures of assimilation’. Those who resisted were ‘ostracised’ and US editors seemed unwilling to post black journalists in South Africa. The appointment of African-Americans to postings on the continent did not necessarily produce a better state of affairs. Keith Richburg, who was based in Nairobi for the Washington Post, expressed relief that he was American and his ancestors had found their way to the US (cited in Hannerz, 2004: 34). Restrictions on reporting are not only a matter of geography and distance. They are also a product of ‘culture, class, color and consciousness which are harder to detect’ (quoted in Rosenblum, 1993: 138).

Most foreign correspondents are based in capital cities. Full-time foreign correspondents cover the United Kingdom – and Europe in some cases – from London which for many years had the second-biggest concentration of foreign correspondents after Washington DC (Morrison and Tumber, 1985). This is mainly for practical reasons. Capital cities in most countries offer the comforts that most correspondents demand, particularly after a long day in the field. Capital cities also supply correspondents with what they need to keep their editors at home happy – a regular supply of particular types of stories.

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