The Pulitzer Prizes for International Reporting in the Third Phase of Their Development, 1963-1977

INTRODUCTION THE PULITZER PRIZES FOR INTERNATIONAL REPORTING IN THE THIRD PHASE OF THEIR DEVELOPMENT, 1963-1977 Heinz-Dietrich Fischer The rivalry between the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. having shifted, in part, to predomi- nance in the fields of space-travel and satellites in the upcoming space age, thus opening a new dimension in the Cold War,1 there were still existing other controversial issues in policy and journalism. "While the colorful space competition held the forefront of public attention," Hohenberg remarks, "the trained diplomatic correspondents of the major newspa- pers and wire services in the West carried on almost alone the difficult and unpopular East- West negotiations to achieve atomic control and regulation and reduction of armaments. The public seemed to want to ignore the hard fact that rockets capable of boosting people into orbit for prolonged periods could also deliver atomic warheads to any part of the earth. It continued, therefore, to be the task of the responsible press to assign competent and highly trained correspondents to this forbidding subject. They did not have the glamor of TV or the excitement of a space shot to focus public attention on their work. Theirs was the responsibility of obliging editors to publish material that was complicated and not at all easy for an indifferent public to grasp. It had to be done by abandoning the familiar cliches of journalism in favor of the care and the art of the superior historian .. On such an assignment, no correspondent was a 'foreign' correspondent. The term was outdated. Those who wrote about the painfully long, detailed, and gloomy conferences on which the fate of civilization rested could not escape the feeling that they addressed the whole world. They had to live with their problems and do the best they could. No electronic device such as Telstar would bring their stories to them, neatly tailored in minute-long packages between patent drug commercials, and no world statesman would be able to exert his magic to bring about a sudden, easy, and simple solution."2 It can hardly be ascertained how many representatives of this additional type of correspondent operated among the total number of American foreign correspondents. In 1 Cf. UNESCO (Ed.): Communication in the Space Age. The Use of Satellites by the Mass Media, Paris: United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, 1968, pp. 25 f., 155 ff. 2 John Hohenberg: Foreign Correspondence. The Great Reporters and Their Times, New York - London: Columbia University Press, 1964, pp. 428 ff. XX Introduction any case, a study of the publishing house McGraw-Hill concerning 84 countries in the world and published in 1963, shows a clear tendency for a numerical increase in the U.S. foreign press corps. "Over the last thirteen years," the report runs - in consideration of a former study "the number of American correspondents has increased ... Our 1963 census shows that there are now 515 American foreign correspondents (of U.S. citizenship) overseas reporting for American media of all kinds. This is an increase of 222 correspondents over 1950, or roughly a 75% jump ... The total of 515 does not include the foreign national personnel who supplement our American foreign correspondent population, and our census thus went ahead to count them, too. We found there were 718 foreign nationals reporting for American media ... These foreign nationals are crack newsmen in many cases, and many of them are making lifetime careers serving as reporters and deskmen in the big wire service bureaus abroad, as number two or three staffers in bureaus of various publications, and as the sole link with many foreign countries in their capacity as string correspondents - usually for a group of American publications or services. Above all, a rough total does not tell how our foreign correspondents are deployed about the surface of the earth, so we have broken them down by areas, and cities within countries. In all, there are 1,233 correspondents (both U.S. and foreign nationals) representing U.S. media. This will show that while we have, indeed, had an increase in the number of correspondents, perhaps too many still are concentrated in major metropolises - particularly London and Paris - while important smaller countries go uncovered."3 Using the figures, the UPI had qualified 291 staffers as foreign correspondents, the AP had 268, while Time-Life had 63, the New York Times 45, McGraw-Hill 28, Newsweek 14, U.S. News and World Report 13, Christian Science Monitor 12, Fairchild 12, Chicago Tribune 12, New York Herald-Tribune 9, Baltimore Sun 8, Chicago Daily News 7, Washing- ton Post!Los Angeles Times 7, and NBC 21, CBS 19, ABC 8.4 Regarding the geographical distribution of the total of 1,233 overseas correspondents for U.S. media, no fewer than 626 were located in Europe, 255 in Asia and Australia, 229 in Latin America, 64 in the Middle East and 59 in Africa.5 "Our census shows," the report deplores, "only 20 foreign correspondents of U.S. citizenship on the entire continent of Africa, and of these two are in the far northern shore, at Morocco, and four are on the southern tip, in Johannisburg, leaving really only 14 to cover the interior of this immense land. In addition, we found 39 locals of foreign nationals working for U.S. media, which gave a total manpower in African news coverage of 59. Still, this is not much compared to the 626 correspondents for U.S. media in Europe. The problem of covering Africa is frightening. There is no hub of the wheel such as Paris or Geneva might be for Europe. If you take a spot with the most datelines during the past year, probably Leopoldville, and decide to put a permanent staffer there, you commit a man (and probably his family) to a difficult life in a tropically hot city with innumerable hardships with every chance that he may go months without another breaking news story. If you go the other way, and pick out a pleasant place for him to live, say Nairobi in Kenia, you have no greater chance of news stories, and when they do occur 3 John Wilhelm: The Re-appearing Foreign Correspondent. A World Survey, in: Journalism Quar- terly (Minneapolis, Minn.), Vol.40/No.2, Spring 1963, pp. 147f. 4 Ibid., p. 150. 5 Ibid., p. 151. Heinz-Dietrich Fischer xxi somewhere else in Africa, he will be the last man there inasmuch as air flights to other points are not conveniently scheduled and visas are nearly impossible."6 The increase of the American foreign media corps between 1950 and 1963 presumably was mainly due to the increase of the number of radio and TV correspondents, which was growing all over the world, and not so much to the small group of diplomatic correspondents. Indeed, their specific functions7 differed in part from those of regular correspondents. In 1963, Cohen tried a differentiated reconsideration of these functions, using as an example the national and foreign press corps accredited in Washington, the communica- tive ability of which had been examined in the mid-thirties for the first time.8 "The foreign affairs reporter in Washington," he explains, is "a man of long experience in the field of international affairs ... Almost all of these reporters have been foreign correspondents at some point of their careers, or have significant foreign reporting experience while stationed in this country, or have lived or worked abroad extensively before they took up foreign affairs reporting ... A reporter of public affairs lives a bifurcated professional existence: he is a reporter of a passing scence, in ways that he does not always understand or accept. This duality is evident in almost every phase of his work. He holds two sets of conceptions of the role that the press plays, or should play, in the foreign policy-making process - one set involving him only as a neutral reporter, providing information that enables others to play a part in the fashioning of policy; and another set that defines his active participation in the policy-making process. The first set of role conceptions relates the reporter chiefly toward the public participants in the process; while the second set relates him toward the official policy-making level."9 It is not known if the jurors bore in mind this differentiation when they evaluated the press materials which had been produced under various conditions, and which were submitted under the common label "International Reporting." In view of the international political constellations of 1963 there was no need for the Pulitzer Prize committees to worry about an interesting theoretical discussion like the one of Cohen. For it was in the very year of publication of his book that grave political events occurred, requiring not so much the diplomatic background reporter but the old type, the prototype even, of a foreign correspondent, that is the war correspondent who suddenly was in demand again when things escalated in Vietnam. "Unhappily," Hohenberg describes the surprise effect of this development, "the American public paid no attention to the [press] warning and the American government, from 1961 on, began to increase its support for the South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem with funds, arms, and troops disguised as 'advisers.' When the handful of American correspondents in Saigon tried to write about American involvement, however, they were harassed and maligned and told brusquely by the American military to 'get on the team.' The showdown came when Diem's regime hailed its building of strategic armed hamlets against the Vietcong as a great success and orchestrated a series of victory 6 Ibid.

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