Reporting from Imperial Frontiers: the Making of Foreign Correspondents a Century Apart

Asia Pacific Media ducatE or Issue 7 Article 3 7-1999 Reporting from imperial frontiers: The making of foreign correspondents a century apart C. A. Vaughan Rutgers University, US Follow this and additional works at: https://ro.uow.edu.au/apme Recommended Citation Vaughan, C. A., Reporting from imperial frontiers: The making of foreign correspondents a century apart, Asia Pacific Media ducatE or, 7, 1999, 37-52. Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/apme/vol1/iss7/3 Research Online is the open access institutional repository for the University of Wollongong. For further information contact the UOW Library: [email protected] Reporting From Imperial Frontiers: The Making Of Foreign Correspondents A Century Apart Changing markets and political and technological circumstances have altered both the likelihood and mode of reporting from foreign shore. Based on the author’s media experience and research into the background of the first American foreign correspondent in the Philippines, this article offers a historical perspective of two geographically and thematically linked forays in the field of international reporting. Christopher A. Vaughan Rutgers University, New Jersey, USA ust as teachers of fame-seeking broadcasting students must Jsometimes remind their charges of just how few of them will end up at an anchor’s desk, educators focused on international journalism must note the great distance between journalistic apprenticeship and what many consider the pinnacle of the profession, foreign correspondence. Recommending a patient and steady advance through the ranks of a major news organisation, however, often proves unsatisfactory to journalism students seeking to emulate the path I took to overseas reporting while still in my mid-twenties. To those focused more on experience than status and salary, however, I offer at least the encouragement that it has been and can be done. Changing markets and political and technological circumstances alter both the likelihood and the mode of reporting from foreign shores, so for historical perspective, I offer for consideration two geographically and thematically linked forays into the field of international reporting, the fruit of my personal experience and of my research into a significant predecessor in interpreting the Philippines for an American audience. ©AsiaPacific If anything unites my work as one reporter among many in MediaEducator the crisis-torn Philippines of the last half of the 1980s and that of John Issue No.7 Barrett, the first American journalist to introduce the then-Spanish July-December 1999 colony to a US audience in the waning years of the 1890s, it is the AsiaPacific MediaEducator, Issue No. 7, July-December 1999 37 CHRISTOPHER A. VAUGHAN: Reporting from ... primacy of the marketplace in determining how a reporter’s work will be both shaped and received. If there is a single most significant difference, it may be the way the respective eras’ journalism markets valued expertise about the colonial sphere. Drawn to the action promised by a change of rulers in a strategically located archipelago, the former diplomat and I shared a common terrain, national origins and markets, but took divergent paths. Barrett, well connected and animated by top-down power equations, functioned most effectively in the midst of the decision-makers he considered his natural peers. I found my niche concentrating on culturally oriented, human-scale stories largely ignored by the journalistic pack. Polar opposites in many ways, we both pursued the mandate of the craft to follow the action. When from a US perspective the news value of the Philippine theatre receded, we both departed, carrying away intellectual capital, experience and contacts that proved convertible in varying ways into financial and cultural assets. The degree to which opportunity and action have been intertwined with information monopolies and power relations on the Philippine frontier of American global ambition at the beginning and end of the 20th century will be explored in this article through the narrow lens of two young reporters’ experiences. It is hoped the altered context of the compared tales will shine through to illustrate the differences between the eras at the dawn and dusk of US hegemony in the archipelago and the roles of foreign correspondents in the American globalist project. When Barrett embarked on his Philippine odyssey, he was exploiting terra incognita. No American news organisations maintained bureaus in Asia. Today, as Stephen Hess’s extensive survey of foreign correspondents and international news (1996) reveals, foreign correspondence is well entrenched and is dominated by an experienced and elite corps of reporters. That corps also includes indeed, depends upon an interrelated population of freelancers, moonlighters, specialists and, sometimes, partisan zealots. My own narrative is one of modest but generally satisfying service among the burgeoning ranks of the regions foreign correspondents in the middle and late 1980s, supplemented by shorter stints in the early 1990s. It may be useful as a beginner’s guide, though in important respects it is as out of date as Barrett’s tale. Since news work occupied my full attention, changes in technology and the marketplace have been countervailing influences on aspirants’ prospects. The Internet has made distribution and communications considerably cheaper and easier, while the end of the Cold War, among other influences, has reduced even further the limited appetite for world news in the largest market, the United States. AsiaPacific MediaEducator, Issue No. 7, July-December 1999 AsiaPacific MediaEducator, Issue No. 7, July-December 1999 CHRISTOPHER A. VAUGHAN: Reporting from ... Specific circumstances rather than fixed verities guide the course of the news and the correspondents who follow it, but salient aspects of the trade become evident in historical comparison. The older story on which this essay will concentrate relates an enduring lesson about the importance of having a clear purpose and, to use words written by the editor of The Overland Monthly about Barrett, being astride a tendency. 1 The simultaneously impressive and Astride A cautionary tale of John Barrett, whose parlaying of government and business connections put him in a position before the age of 30 to Tendency affect one of the most significant alterations ever in the US global posture, illustrates how much the game has changed since the first wave of American reporters began traversing the Pacific a century ago. Barrett’s training consisted of a few years of stateside reportorial experience and diplomatic work in Southeast Asia, only one of which is likely to be on the resume of today’s potential correspondents in an age of professionalised diplomatic service. His progression nonetheless illustrates the possibilities and limits of the correspondent’s work and the importance of context in defining those parameters. Preparing students for specific contexts is well nigh impossible. The crises that create most opportunities for international reporting have very specific sources. Instructing students on the particulars of working as a foreign correspondent serves little purpose at the stage when most educators encounter them. As advanced training, however, I would recommend a course of study including foreign languages, world history, international relations, intercultural communication and, of course, a solid grounding in the basics of news writing and reporting. I encourage my students to find domestic contexts from immigrant communities, for example in which they can practice their craft. I counsel patience and perseverance and issue the standard cautions about dedication, goals, flexibility, language and intercultural skills, willingness to forego standard rewards and the importance of dumb luck. I point them toward Hess’s state-of-the-art worldwide survey of foreign correspondents (1996) and urge them to consider, as both inspiration and fair warning, his list of the various paths followed and divergent destinations reached by the plethora of writers at any given time to claiming the status of foreign correspondent. Searching for my own niche among Hess’s array of classifications (Hess 1996: 68-70), I find my younger self a hybrid, not quite fitting entirely into his expert or adventurer categories, but happy to lay claim to both identities and to recommend them to those would follow either road. My route to international reporting began, if earlier overseas living and an international relations degree are put aside, as a function of my position as The Miami Herald’s reporter for Miami’s Haitian community. In 1984, I experienced a taste of the correspondents life, travelling to Baby Doc’s Haiti with a political figure returning from exile. I had sold the story to editors using the metaphor of Benigno Aquino’s return to the Philippines and his immediate assassination AsiaPacific MediaEducator, Issue No. 7, July-December 1999 39 CHRISTOPHER A. VAUGHAN: Reporting from ... the year before. I practised the limited French that had helped me obtain the position, hobnobbing with the likes of pundit and raconteur Aublien Jolicur at Port-au-Prince’s Grand Hotel Oluffson, both made famous by Graham Greene’s The Comedians. I made good use of the intensive Creole training the Herald had provided me to interview the little people of Port-au-Prince and its hinterlands and to find my way to secret meetings with dissidents in hiding. Few other correspondents passed through Haiti in those days, so I had the country virtually to myself -- an ideal situation I always commend to shortcut-seeking beginners. Find a place off the beaten track and make it your job to bring its story to light. When it later bursts into wider view by dint of a coup, disaster or other foreign news convention, a claim to expert status based on accumulated experience, reading and contacts, however minor, might be parlayed into at least a follow-up assignment and perhaps more. Barrett, who based his Philippines expert status in 1898 on a single 1896 visit and 1897 article, is a classic case of such leveraging.

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