Does the world need foreign correspondents? Correspondent turned academic offers his view
It’s a question my Masters student will answer this week and it’s the focus for what I hope will be a lively debate between Professor Richard Tait and I before an audience.
Professor Tait, a veteran and well respected news exec, will argue in favour of; I have the unenviable task of doing otherwise. But it’ll be a nuanced fudge on my part.
In the past weeks sixty journalists, at the time of writing, have been killed in the Israel-Gaza conflict according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. It demonstrates the utmost urgency for considering this question against the deadly risks confronting journalists. See update here
Films such as Palestinian filmmaker @YousefHammash appeal to our humanity. ‘Think what it must be like for you’, is the refrain foreign correspondent Clive Myrie poses when last year we discussed his reporting styles and how to bring the story to the audience.
Aspirations
As a previous freelance foreign correspondent reporting from South Africa between 92–94 I can think of nothing else but to assert the need for journalists to inform people of issues beyond the horizons of where they call home. Yet there will be fresh detail, proposals for a post analysis of the profession at the moment, imagining where it might be in 2040.
My entry circa 1992 was indirect. I was an Applied Chemistry graduate in the late 80s who liked to write about International Affairs, but I lacked any clue or support about making it.
Every generation has its defining global story e.g. Vietnam, Eastern bloc breakup, Bosnian war. My interests in South African politics was the allure. Witnessing it and reporting it was an unfathomable dream. On television I watched the BBC’s John Harrison and George Alagiah, and on radio Elizabeth Blunt. How can anyone forget the scene of Blunt hiding under a table from Charles Taylor’s murderous forces in Libera. They were my lodestars.
But to do what they were doing required years of training, and some. I had five years of radio, combined with stints at network TV researching and reporting on programmes such as Newsnight and Reportage before I upped sticks to South Africa.
Once there, a fair number of outlets would receive my reports from reporting conflict, the economy, human interest and live 2-ways from terrorist activity. It would lead to an invitation to join Chatham House. Later I’d train journalists in Algeria, Egypt, Turkish-Syrian border, Russia and more, followed by a PhD.
Thus, I’ve been thinking of a new approach. One in which diversity of personnel, policy, education and technology, AI and the art of storytelling, and protection play an expanding role. My analogy is shaped around military strategy, which isn’t to say journalists should be militarised.
Imagine a world without news from outside the country you live in. Indeed many of us can live our lives without watching international news. It’s boring is the riposte from the non-engaged. Means nothing to me, is another.
Journalists are not sociologists, and sociologists don’t have easy access to airwaves to construct a succinct motive for listening to international information. Both professionals ought to construct that argument as repeating stories and commercials interleaving popular programmes.
Deconstructing international affairs at a level of localised interest can seem distant, but those stories are part of an interconnected system like a Newton’s cradle. Or otherwise to recite that old trope it’s like chaos theory — a butterfly flapping its wings and causing a hurricane across the other side of the globe.
Understanding what happens in one region of the world can expose you to possible outcomes in your own. Fascism, reported in Nazi Germany doesn’t wear jackboots, but you can see its footprint in the politics of the US and Britain today.
On the course I lecture, many of the leading correspondents in the West have provided insight into their craft. They include: Milton Nkosi, Alex Crawford, Prof. Richard Sambrook, Jeremy Bowen, Noel Phillips, Shaimaa Khalil, Clare Whitacker, Prof Hugh de Burgh and Clive Myrie, to name a few. I thank all of them for their time.
The revelation from evidence of international news is not that it bears little interest for many, but that it’s the way and where it’s produced that can often cause inertia. Not too long ago Vice.com and its features as I reported in 2014 could do no wrong. More recently, explainers; we need more explainers, is the headwind.
As a matter of urgency, there needs to be more protection for journalists; men and women at work, loving and doing their job. The photo in this post is me in Johannesburg 1994, two days before their election as a bomb is detonated causing death and mayhem.
In South African I had many scrapes in challenging scenarios, including a gun being trained on me. But that was a time when, whilst news gathering had its risk, the level of personal threat perceived or real rarely made me think I wouldn’t safely return home. Today, as we’ve witnessed the threat to journalists is unconscionable and deadly.
Does the world need foreign correspondents? It needs gifted women and men to report, interpret and distill from the morass of information and disinformation the truth. It needs them to help us know who we are and what we stand for when the answers may not always be clear.
Dr David Dunkley Gyimah is a journalist, creative technologist working with AI, and an artist-filmmaker. He’s the recipient of several international awards and a judge for the Royal Television Society Television Journalism Awards. More on him here.
