From Pigeons to News Portals: Foreign Reporting and the Challenge of New Technology

1. Introduction: The Challenge of Technological Change in Foreign Affairs Reporting

 1 introduction The Challenge of Technological Change in Foreign Affairs Reporting DAVID D. PERLMUTTER AND JOHN MAXWELL HAMILTON We live in an age where, as Thomas M. Disch put it, science fiction is the “dreams our stuff is made of.” Every year brings a host of new gadgets that change the methods of communicating with each other and how we interact with our world. Perhaps as remarkable is how quickly innovative technology, from ATMs to podcasting, is integrated into our lives, or at least those of the true avant-garde of the high-tech age, young people and professionals. In the case of the former, a recent study reported that upwards of 80 percent of fifteen-year-olds use instant messaging and a majority have their own Weblog. The latter, journalists, have in just the past decade wielded new devices that significantly alter the way they cover and present news. For example, seventy to seventy-five cases of gear were needed for a television crew to cover the Afghanistan war in 2002.1 Eighteen months later, when America invaded Iraq, a television correspondent required only seven cases to transmit a report, live, to the United States. While we may now readily accept that reporters can broadcast from satellite-connected and video-enabled cell phones hanging on their belts, it is quite another thing to grasp the implications. These are elusive. They unfold slowly, with many false starts and considerable resistance even from those who use the technology most. Interestingly, many of the journalists who are quick to deploy new generations of equipment complain they are doing their jobs less well. Policy makers fret that our wired world is more difficult to manage. Audiences may feel overwhelmed by the data explosion. This book is an exploration of implications. In it, we examine ways that people have used radical and new media technology—from satellites and cell phones to digital convergence and the Internet—to affect the 2 creation and content, economics and logistics, delivery modes and venues , amount and style of coverage, and accuracy and reliability of foreign news and in turn its influences on public opinion and government policy making. The emphasis will be on what is happening now, with an attempt to predict future trends. Our focus is America, for the practical reason of needing to limit the scope of the book to manageable proportions and because we are interested in the issues raised by media technology for the special set of conditions surrounding the United States’ place in the world. Our conceit is to assess the validity of basic “truths” long held about foreign affairs and the news media. Every U.S. journalism school teaches a similar set of skills, codes, values, assumptions, and standards that define and delimit the ethical and successful news worker, whether domestic or foreign correspondent. Likewise, similar assumptions govern theory and practice among professionals—in media or in public affairs work, in government or among nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). We think, however, that both independent amateurs—from bloggers to eyewitnesses with their cell phone cameras—and news workers alike are overturning many of our social, economic, and managerial paradigms. We hope here to survey, appreciate, and demystify the new foreign correspondence. We are not, however, technological Pollyannas, assuming that new media are always the deliverers of virtue and wisdom. Technological innovation is inevitable, and mastering that change for the better requires asking tough questions. It is not enough simply to register that, for example , the lighter toolkit of modern foreign correspondents makes them veritable one-person, “live from ground zero” news networks. We want to explain how the minds of news workers are evolving in line with their gadgetry. Likewise, it is not sufficient to simply document that ordinary citizens can now, via their cell phones and blogs, become “citizen foreign reporters” with worldwide audiences. We show how such “new news” mechanisms affect the way the public conceives of an entity called “foreign news.” Thomas Paine once proclaimed that the American Revolution was not just a political upheaval but a metaphysical leap: “Our style and manner of thinking have undergone a revolution more extraordinary, than the political revolution of the country. We see with other eyes; we hear with DAVID D. PERLMUTTER AND JOHN MAXWELL HAMILTON 3 other ears; and think with other thoughts, than those we formerly used.”2 We think...