My failed SSHRC application for PhD funding from a few years ago. The topic still really interests me, and with all the time in the world I’d look into it further. Robert MacNeil’s got a number of excellent books on his experiences abroad. Matthew Halton’s personal papers are just sitting at the National Archives. There are abundant resources to provide the nuts-and-bolts of this fascinating subject.
I propose to study Canadian and American foreign correspondents living and working outside of North America during the Cold War (c. 1946-1980s). I will examine the texture, the mundane details of their daily lives to investigate the various tensions at play in the lived experience of foreign correspondents. How do Canadian and American correspondents view themselves, their role, and each other? What is the nature of the correspondent’s relationship to their home country, and to the host country in which they live and work?
The experiences of foreign correspondents do not fit easily with the majority of studies of journalism. Concentration upon the discourses and institutions, and industry apparatuses that uphold the journalist – what Todd Gitlin describes as the ‘frame’ – depersonalizes the experiences of journalists in this field of inquiry. Even sociological works purportedly about the ‘people’ behind the news, such as those by Weaver and Miljan and Cooper, tend to flatten the complexities of life into static demographic characterizations. Michael Schudson, on the other hand, compared autobiographies of individual journalists of different periods to show how journalism is a “historically specific, historically created activity.” Similarly, I will use the experiences of individuals – as expostulated by memoirs (published or unpublished) and the abundant archival papers of a variety of foreign correspondents – to interrogate the historical conditions and cultural tensions shaping their lives and work.
What little academic study that has been undertaken on foreign correspondents has focused upon an almost romanticized type of journalist, those whom former Canadian foreign correspondent Peter Worthington calls the ‘firemen.’ Flying in for short periods to cover crises or major events, the ‘fireman’ (also known as a ‘parachuter’) calls upon “instant makeshift expertise,” to give colour to, not understanding of, the event in question. War correspondents are the most commonly seen ‘firemen.’ Even Mark Pedelty’s book, perhaps the best academic study of foreign correspondents, relies exclusively upon the El Salvador war to make more assertions about a general foreign correspondent culture. While important and applicable in a limited way, such studies are marked by an emphasis on the exceptional – the wars and history-making events foreign correspondents report on – rather than the wider, more mundane lived experiences of foreign correspondents I seek to investigate.
I am most interested in another type of foreign correspondent Worthington describes, the residential correspondent, which has not yet been the subject of a sustained study. Whereas ‘firemen’ drove themselves at a frenetic pace, living the lifestyle of a hard-drinking masculinity, residential foreign correspondents lived an unexceptional life, with its everyday patterned routines. Residency, suggests long time Canadian correspondent in Moscow David Levy from his own experiences, is an integral aspect of being an effective foreign correspondent. Understanding the character of a people and a place was the first step for foreign correspondents to fairly and legitimately report upon a place and to gain the trust of the people.
Worthington argues that Canadian residential foreign correspondents such as Gordon Sinclair – when there was no pressing story – were granted a remarkable level of editorial autonomy to wander and file stories as they saw fit. Thus, in coming to understand a locale, the conversations foreign correspondents heard at the grocery store, or an official’s comment at a cocktail party could change the direction of a particular story, or provide impetus to a human interest story to expand upon, understand and show consequences of larger political issues, policies and events. Likewise, as Robert MacNeil noted in his autobiography, the constant flow of visitors and socializing at one’s own family home offered added opportunity to discuss and debate the issues of the day. It would also be interesting to compare and contrast such a study – with its emphases on family life – with existing studies about the heavily masculine newsroom culture described by many scholars.
These ways in which newswork stretched into all elements of the foreign correspondent’s life do not conform to the characteristics of newswork detailed in the innovative and important ethnographies of newsrooms by Gaye Tuchman and Mark Fishman. As Barbie Zelizer points out, such works have often taking a narrow view of journalism by only considering “newswork from the moment at which an event was approached by a journalist.” My study would instead examine the daily lives and experiences of correspondents to illustrate how social life, home life and family life also affected the gathering and reporting of news.
The most interesting aspect of the personal lives of foreign correspondents is the ways in which they became individuals beyond borders. On the one hand, the experience of living abroad could bring one’s home country more sharply into focus, as Robert MacNeil said of his time reporting from England, that “it was curiously easier to feel Canadian.” On the other hand, foreign correspondents both competed and collaborated; they worked together and socialized, and thus formed an international community. Worthington notes that correspondents devoted “a great deal of time and talent to interviewing one another” to gain understanding of the issues they covered. Foreign correspondents from different origins influenced how each other reported their stories.
Therefore, I would seek to demonstrate how the work of foreign correspondents is an internationalized profession. The journalistic profession as described by existing journalism scholarship would be reassessed in a number of ways. Foreign correspondents never regarded themselves as truly objective witnesses to history. Instead, foreign correspondents regarded their strength over the ‘unbiased’ wire service reporting to be their personality, which they freely injected into their reports. An integral aspect of their jobs was their ability to provide nationalized interpretation for the audiences at ‘home.’ I will investigate the implications of this interpretation, demonstrating the tensions between the national character of journalism and international character of the work of foreign correspondents.
Journalistic practices and values have been shown to be nationally conditioned according to the unique political, ideological and cultural circumstances and broadcasting policies of the nation-state. Foreign correspondents certainly had to conform their newswork to the nationalized norms of the broadcasting news outlet. If they worked for a number of outlets in different countries, as many foreign correspondents certainly did, they could produce a number of almost contradictory stories about the same event. At the same time as reports bent to the conventions of the country of broadcast – and not all foreign correspondents shared the nationality of their news outlet employer – foreign correspondents also had to adjust their nationalized assumptions about newswork to the local circumstances and news culture of the host culture of wherever they were stationed.
For foreign correspondents, newswork did not begin or end with the report as broadcast. Newswork extended into all aspects of work, social and family life abroad, and these personal experiences allow reassessment of journalism studies. An international figure within a largely nationalized profession, more than any other type of journalist, the foreign correspondent must be investigated as an international community of individuals. Therefore, in its broadest implications, my dissertation will seek to interrogate how Canada and the United States are understood from beyond their borders by their citizens and by each other.
