Through Their Eyes: Foreign Correspondents in the United States

Contact: Whereby the home office gains on correspondents

Contact Whereby the home office gains on correspondents 77 Contact between foreign correspondents and their home offices has expanded at a dizzying pace. “The CNN effect” was followed by something that could be called “the Google effect.” Besides the quick and cheaper technology that has made interaction between distant reporters and editors possible and affordable, there is now so much more information, instantly available, that has to be weighed for its news value. Quite suddenly the world of Korean television correspondent Chang Choi and his colleagues in Washington looked less comfortable . According to what Choi told us in 2002, The previous correspondents, before CNN was dominant in the world, they could sometimes lie to the editors. [They might tell their editors], “We can’t do that. There’s no material on that.” But now with the Internet and CNN and all the information fed directly to our headquarters, with our foreign news department watching the video clips or all the information on the Internet . . . or they type in the keyword “Korea” on New York Times and all these stories come up on the screen. We correspondents are very concerned about that situation.1 More than one in four of the full-time correspondents said that their most recent story had been requested by the home office. Two in three had discussed the story with the home office before writing it, and nearly half had discussed the story with the home office after writing it. (Seventy-seven percent said that that was typical.) They also sent an average of eighteen work-related e-mails outside the United States every week, and some sent as many as eighty. The 20 percent of our survey respondents who were part-time correspondents had less continuing contact with the home office, although they reported that about the same percentage of their stories was suggested by editors. Correspondents from virtually every country said that the leash between home and field was getting shorter. The rate of shortening was not equal, however. Europeans were held on the shortest leash, and the most tightly held were the French. Reporters for U.K. organizations told us that 22 percent of their story ideas came from London. The figure for German stories was one in three (33 percent). But nearly half (47 percent) of the French stories were requested by the home office. Complaints from the French correspondents were common. A magazine writer said that her editors’ stereotypes “affect the choice of stories they would like me to write.” A wire service reporter said that her “home office often wants stories confirming stereotypes about the U.S.” A TV reporter said that his editors call for stories that “are more stereotypical” than he wants to write. A newspaper correspondent said that her editors “tend to like stories that show the extremes of American society—violence, political correctness, antiabortion movement , etc.” The CNN effect, as applied to foreign correspondence, is shorthand for the impact of global media outlets on editors in the home office, who dictate what their correspondents should be covering by what they themselves see and hear.2 Only a few of the correspondents that we interviewed said that they were beyond its pull, usually for special reasons of experience or tradition. Concluded John Parker, Washington bureau chief of the Economist: In talking to my colleagues, I think I’m a real outlier. I have a totally different experience from them. . . . We are completely trusted. . . . We phone up every week and say, “This is what we’re going to do,” and they print it. They’re not copy editors as it were—just making sure the commas are in the right place—but when it comes to the analysis of the U.S. from us, they leave us alone. . . . They almost never—in fact, I can’t remember the last time they asked us to write a story which we hadn’t suggested anyway, let alone asked us to write a story we thought actually completely stupid. My impression 78 CONTACT from talking to my colleagues is that every day they’re asked to write stories they might not otherwise have done.3 Henry Champ, a veteran Canadian Broadcasting Corporation correspondent , claimed that his long-standing relationship with his editors was symbiotic: “I’ll be headed to the White House. I’ll phone, as I did yesterday...