The Hazards and Risks of Foreign Correspondents. Could We Do Without Them?
[Please note the following interviews with leading foreign correspondents took place before current events]
Soldiers who’ve experienced combat can often return to civilian (civvy) street piqued by its normality, even surrealism. One minute you’re in a theatre of war fighting for your life, the next you’re pushing a shopping trolley in a supermarket watching two people wrestle over who’s taking the last broccoli.
This listlessness was piquantly captured in Katheryn Bigelow’s film The Hurt Locker (2008) as the main character James confronts the daunting cereal aisle back home. It’s all too much and he signs up for another tour of active duty.
It’s a scenario reminiscent of the work of foreign correspondents and the parallels between civvy street and how the lure of the field are ever present, even when you’ve hung up your mic, or note book.
Thirty something years ago, I had my first taste of it, reporting from a country a matchstick strike away from civil war. Its future uncertain and whether it could shed its inhumane Apartheid skin.
The image above was taken on the eve of the historical election when a 220 pound bomb was detonated in South Africa’s capital, Johannesburg, in the city centre killing ten people. My two-way with the Caribbean Service here.
The photo below was captured seconds after an armoured car slowed down as one of the occupants, a member of the South African Defence force, trained his gun on me.
I’m in Soweto standing in front of hostels surrounded by barbed-wired fences. Violence occurs here when rival political parties clash with each other. I’d travelled to South Africa as a freelance journalist because I wanted to become a foreign correspondent.
I’d had about five years of broadcast experience, working in radio, researching on the BBC’s flagship nightly news programme Newsnight and reporting on current affairs on BBC Reportage, as well as eight years living in Ghana where I’d witnessed coups, necklacing, and street justice. I was prepared for the worse.
In Ghana, I’d been caught up in bloody exchanges from factional armed forces when I was wearing a school cadet uniform in public. Soldiers started handing out guns with live ammo to anyone who looked like they’d support them.
Testing Times
What drew me to South Africa was the detection of holes in broadcast narratives. For a country that was predominately Black, they were very few Black reporters. Did that matter? I believed I could offer other insights, and not solely on one race. My endeavours got me into various contested spaces.
One moment I was deemed coloured (a race designation in South Africa), then I was African when I spoke my mother’s tongue, and then I was British. The latter yielded diametric responses. I’d engage Afrikaners with Rugby. They were keen to get back to international competition to take on the Brits.
Another time, it nearly caused me severe injury. After two beefy Boers in the Orange Free State got over their amazement that there were Black people in Britain, they threatened me, as a Brit, for being responsible for concentration camps where their grandfathers perished.
My curiosity took me to Katlehong — then the murder capital of the world on a night patrol, the Cape Flats where gangsters roamed openly, and into the fluid shape-shifting world of politics and commerce. These were some of my early reports for the BBC World Service and African Service. Many others would follow.
SA ’s potential civil war was captured in this documentary “The Bloody Miracle”, and many other docs at the time.
Growing up Ghana, and partly in foster care in the UK, taught me a few things. Be mindful of your surroundings, keep your counsel, be cautious expressing your thoughts, and seek out genuine people who could help you and you them.
On my first day in South Africa it was put to the test as I was invited on air, on the SABC radio’s flagship current affairs programme. There they probed me about what I thought of South Africa.The years that followed I’d work for Channel 4 News, this time as a producer, often with Jon Snow.
With my freelance reporting hat I’d further test the international correspondent’s métier as a filmmaker/ journalist on the Syrian border, Tunisia, Lebanon and Egypt to name a few places. I’d be interviewing senior policy makers and personnel such as James Woolsey, former head of the CIA, which I produced for my own international platform viewmagazine.tv.
In Syria, a group of twenty-somethings who’d become filmmakers made us all weep at the atrocities they’d witnessed or were visited upon them by government forces.
Today, as an academic, I teach Masters students on a programme that provides them a framework for becoming international correspondents, alongside training professional journalists and storytellers. My last major assignment was training journalists in Russia in my practice of cinema journalism. This was before the war (see video below).
The next generation of foreign correspondents ( I prefer the term International Journalists) are needed more than ever to make sense of the interconnected-at-peril-world, a point emphasised by one of the UK’s most decorated international correspondents Sky’s Alex Crawford speaking to my Masters students and I.
There’s much work to be done. Not entirely because of the steep learning curve — which eventually gets tested in the field — but that international journalism faces many challenging fronts itself.
Professor Richard Sambrook whose book “Are Foreign Correspondents Redundant? The changing face of international news” is the lodestar. He explains the changes: the economics, geopolitics, diversity and technology that has impacted the profession, and what needs to happen.
Writing in the Evening Standard Roy Greenslade, then Professor of Journalism at City University in London noted the end of an era. The days of the somewhat romanticised foreign correspondent had passed. He cites Sambrook as support.
The khakied, flak jacket, gin-in-hand image has waned but that doesn’t mean the end of personnel reporting on international stories. Today, this includes video journalists, journalists who come from the country being reported, and more diverse journalists in the field such as the award winning Noel Phillips, ITV’s North America Correspondent.
Phillips is one of, if not the UK’s youngest international news correspondent for network news.
The events in the last two weeks (and the Russia-Ukraine war) bring into sharp focus the need for renewed discussion about the work of International journalists who risk their lives.
Just how invaluable is their work? How and where is it accessed by audiences? How does it impact your life in any way? These may appear naive questions, but they frame one of four questions my students will be required to answer making a cogent evidenced-based case.
Here, the BBC’s Jeremy Bowen, a veteran award-winning journalist in the field speaks briefly of the significant changes he’s witnessed over the years.
International Affairs
In many ways these elite journalists provide talking points that direct conversations on account of their stature, platforms, amplification and operations. For the unqualified in the field, including arm-chair reporters, not fully on top of the dynamics of international comms, it’s evident how much more harm than good can occur.
I refer to international journalists as elites. That doesn’t mean domestic journalists aren’t. Elite ascribes how deeply these journalists have trained and secured admiration in their field. Today, they come from many areas, and outfits, and are chosen for their ability to practice journalism at its highest level requiring truth, integrity, a search for impartiality etc.
No coincidence then that when the BBC released its promotional video addressing its credentials on reportage it featured international journalists exclusively.
The international journalist with a sizeable platform has the pressures of international affairs and its ramification on their shoulder. It was always so, dating back to proto international journalists as travellers in the 16th century. Back then they had carte blanch.
In today’s networked world, a slip of an unverified fact travels around the world potentially wreaking havoc before apologies might follow to assuage the effects of that error.
They seek to weigh up their words carefully and with candour should it play into the hands of those looking for public relation wins. Language and verification that matter for all journalists have immediate repercussions in the international arena in inflaming already tense conditions.
Yet, however good present day international journalists are, the complexities of a story playing out on many fronts invariably means whatever they’re covering (for reasons of time and story angle) leaves other areas unreported. Networks have never come clean on this to their viewers.
Former Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger summed it up as
“… a partial, hasty, incomplete, inevitably somewhat flawed and inaccurate rendering of some of the things we have heard about in the past 24 hours — distorted, despite our best efforts to eliminate gross bias — by the very process of compression that makes it possible for you to lift it from the doorstep and read it in about an hour…”
A story, framed by its angle is almost always incomplete but any admission of this is seen as a failure, and consumers now more semiotically literate demand more.
This isn’t the correspondent’s fault but the nature of story form in 2023 and before. By 2030, AI will/should have transformed this with systems thinking approaches helping to produce a story on the ground, offering annexed explainers and predictive computation to frame likely lines of enquiry from the stories. It will also mean a different type of engagement from viewers.
OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) already plays an integral role in journalism and has been transformative. Last year as a reviewer for Google’s EU news fund, I got to talk to companies like Airwars and find out what’s on the horizon where OSINT in realtime, could boost the capabilities of the reporter, with a team of data analysers.
As a journalist you are the first and last line that mediates the truth, offering interpretations which guide the reader, listener or viewer to make informed judgements. Furnish the consumer with verified facts packaged with the craft skills of storytelling. There are experts at this, and then those wading into scenarios with lead heavy feet.
There have been many courageous moments to pay homage to this chapel. There have also been those that like a bad apple affect the cart.
Over the last fifty years and some, particularly in the last twenty years comms from governments and businesses have become adept at darker manipulative arts in the psychology of words and manipulating the mind.
For international journalists their wisdom, experience and insight from travels provide ways to cope with this hypernormalisation. But we’re at a point when, just as public relation firms advise on getting one’s message across, academia and the journalism industry must combine deeper innovative associations to find ways of cutting through the noise for the consumer.
These aren’t easy challenges. Some journalists are showing themselves to be more adept than others. Timothy Snyder’s book On Tyranny: Twenty lessons from the Twentieth Century awaits my students.
Outside of legacy media, on Social where people can get their news without the ethics and codes of conduct, there are Gordian knots that don’t have an answer as yet.
Back in the early nineteen twenties with the launch of radio, engineers brought news to the newish BBC management. Symmetrical comms could work in which a receiver and sender could exchange conversation in real time. The BBC DG John Reith is reported as saying the public aren’t ready for this. CB Radio would be that innovation that went onto become an industry in itself. Some eighty years later the DG’s concerns are writ large.
Once a place for a twenty something coders to bring people together with the ambition of connecting everyone, and indeed there have been enlightening stories, social responsibility was abrogated, and hence what’s fomented sometimes resembles a bear pit where hate, disinformation and propaganda spew forward.
Unfettered free speech is all good in theory. But guardrails are required within civil society. In a TikTok film on BBC3, TikTokers may pursue stories with little reckoning of the impact it could cause those in the circle, or not, of the story. Their opinions assign guilt to those simply for the way they look.
For these reasons international correspondents have the bit between their teeth. Vigilant as ever, mindful of contributors and interviewees who have the potential to deliver measured reasoning and responses, or otherwise sow further distress and division. And then there’s the ability under strain to make it look so effortless.
Research, research, research says Afua Hirsch, herself a former Guardian International News Correspondent, and recipient of several awards.
And then that indelible quality which is rarely spoken of but regularly surfaced during my conversations with some of the industry’s best International reporters and academics.
It’s the quality to keep a steady head, to be resilient and show determination wrapped around empathy, Emotional Intelligence.
How would you feel, if your circumstances were so dire asks the BBC’s award-winning Clive Myrie. One of the world’s most awarded video journalists Raul Gallego Abellan, behind films like The Virus | Fly On The Wall, wants you to feel the story as he does.
Are international reporters needed? What do you think? The fractured world we live in calls on new thinking, their protection, renewed and reinforced covenants between their audience and governments, and greater appreciation of their oath. The alternative question is what would the world be without them?
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Dr David Dunkley Gyimah is a reader at Cardiff University who specialises in storytelling, tech and entrepreneurilism. You can contact him here Gyimahd@cardiff.ac.uk
More on his background here.
You can follow me here on on Twitter ( X) at Dr David Dunkley Gyimah
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