John Maxwell Hamilton

Associated Press, New York

November 10, 2009

            To begin, I want to thank the Associated Press and the Overseas Press Council for sponsoring this event for my new book, Journalism’s Roving Eye” A History of American Foreign Reporting.  I also want to thank Valerie Komor, whose idea this event was.  Tom Curley, the President of the Associated Press, is unusual among media leaders being at one progressive in thinking about the future and serious in remembering the past.  One of the greatest expressions of the latter is to hire Valerie, who has built an archive at the Associated Press that is worthy of the organization – and will help secure its place in history.

            As for my own book, which benefited from that archives, as good a place as any to start is with a story told by James Creelman of the New York Herald.  It appeared in his memoir, On the Great Highway, and relates what he describes as the first newspaper interview ever with a Pope – who happened to be Leo XIII.

            Here is what he wrote:

The Pope looked at me intently for a moment.

“You are not one of the Faithful?” he said.

“I am,” Creelman responded, “what journalism has made of me.”

            I like this story for lots of reasons.

            First, it conveys something of the élan of foreign reporting.

            Second, it reminds us that journalism is not static.  It is always evolving.  In this case, Creelman is introducing us to one particular invention – an American one really – and that innovation was the interview.  The interview was an effective way to “make news.”  In Creelman’s time many tricks were tried to make news, one of the most memorable being Henry Stanley setting out to find Livingstone in East Africa.

Third of all, I like the story because – typical of the wild sensational journalism of the latter part of the 19^th century – it is inaccurate.  In point of fact, the New York World had secured an interview with Pope Pius IX much earlier, in 1871.

            And finally I like it because it leads to an obvious question.  Okay, Creelman was what journalism made of him, but what made journalism – and foreign reporting? 

Journalists have done their part, and more than their part, to burnish the image of the “roving knights of the pen,” as the poem that opens my book put it. 

“The special correspondent must be ‘to the manor born,’” observed a Scribner’s author in 1893.  “He must be as sanguine as a songbird, and as strong and willing as a race horse.” 

The Chicago Tribune defined Foreign News this way in an encyclopedia for readers in 1928:  “What romance there is in the very words! If to this business of getting out a great daily newspaper there still clings any of the aura of romance which once surrounded all newspapers and all newspapermen, it is the foreign correspondents who get the greater share of it.”  

There is a temptation to write about foreign correspondents in such terms – the temptation is almost irresistible when correspondents themselves are doing the writing.

But the real history of foreign newsgathering abroad is one of a steady evolution.  And not every step has been a step forward.  There are all manner of men and women who have made foreign news for us.  Editors and publishers are one group.  Another is news makers, who are manipulated by the media sometimes and manipulate the news at other times.  Finally, there are readers and listeners and viewers, whose views of what is important shape what gets covered and how much.

Here are two figures who give us a sense of this history.

Colonel Robert McCormick, proprietor of the Chicago Tribune, assembled his correspondents in 1927 in Paris.  He asked who spoke French, German, or Italian.  Only one, Larry Rue, didn’t put up his hand when the languages were called out.  McCormick appointed him to the enviable position of roving correspondent.  “I don’t want my fine young American boys ruined by these damn foreigners,” McCormick said. 

McCormick, who had been in colonel in World War I, was nothing if not quirky.  He once cabled correspondent William Shirer to go to an old French farmhouse to look for binoculars the colonel had lost years before during the fighting.

One of the Tribune’s correspondents, Edmund Taylor, commented that messages from McCormick “seemed to possess a kind of cosmic irrelevance that suggested the indecipherable cliff-writings of some vanished civilization.”

One the other hand there was Victor Lawson, McCormick’s rival, one of the chief carpenters of modern journalism – and alas unsung.  Lawson was the proprietor of the Chicago Daily News, which deserves more attention than it has received for its innovations in profitable, responsible journalism.  And Lawson’s impact was far reaching in other ways.  Lawson and Melville Stone, his early partner, were major players in creating the modern Associated Press.  So esteemed was Lawson, Adolph Ochs kept a picture of him in his office.

Among other things the Chicago Daily News, fielded the first serious corps of foreign correspondents after the Spanish-American War.  Lawson’s idea was enriched by the novel idea that this corps should be peopled chiefly by Americans, who would write for Americans – rather than leaving foreign news to foreigners.

But true to the evolutionary nature of foreign correspondence, there were fits and starts even with the Daily News.  Lawson was frank in calling his fledgling foreign service “an experiment.”  In the beginning, he ran on-going column from London called “Queer Springs of Gentility.”

In time, the Daily News crusaded against the Tribune’s isolationist view of the world, often explicitly, as when cartoonist Cecil Jensen wickedly lampooned McCormick in a series of cartoons called “The Adventures of Col. McCosmic.”  In 1941, it ran a daily feature called “Famous Sayings of History.”  It consisted exclusively of silly things that McCormick said.

And so it has been since.  We have deeply serious reporters like Paul Scott Mowrer of the Chicago Daily News (who won the first Pulitzer Prize given in the category of foreign reporting), and we have had Robert Best, a UP correspondent tried for treason. 

We also have Richard Halliburton, who wrote about the world in a lo’the wonder way that was to shape the views of millions of Americans no matter how much sophisticates might sniff at him.  The New Yorker observed shortly after Halliburton’s Panama Canal swim – which incidentally I tried to recreate to understand him a bit better – that “Many of the paths of adventurous living have been surfaced with concrete, and mapped.  No matter where a young man might turn, he would find fresh tracks in the dust – the marks of Richard Halliburton’s boots; and he would find signposts pointing down side-roads to publishing houses.”

Not only is the soft underbelly of foreign reporting often ignored, but many of its pioneers are buried anonymously on the prairies of history.  Here are just a few whose place in the history of foreign reporting deserves more recognition than they have received.

·        George Kendall of the New Orleans Picayune.  His reporting on the Mexican War in the 1840s marked the beginning of the idea of speed in reporting foreign news.  Among other things, his paper sent out a boat with typesetting equipment to meet ships carrying his reports. That was his reports would hit the streets more quickly.

·        George Smalley of the New York Tribune.  He established the idea of a foreign bureau chief organizing and coordinating teams of reporters to cover events.

·        Vincent Sheean, one of most insightful correspondents in the years between the two world wars.  His book Personal History established a genre of interpretive foreign reporting.

·        Dorothy Thompson.  Thompson’s outspoken criticism of Hitler led to her expulsion from Germany and marked the beginning of routine journalistic expulsions – and worse – that continue up to the present.

·        Jack Belden, a dark brooding journalist whose war reporting for Time-Life was among the best ever.  He is largely forgotten because he dropped out of journalism and, really, out of life. 

I have tried to give these people the headstones that they deserve.

As fascinating as they people are, however, what count most are the lessons we can draw from the history they populate? 

            For a start consider two high water marks in that history – and what they tell us. 

            The first gets to the matter of the public’s interest.

The high water point of foreign coverage in terms of percent of foreign news in the newspaper occurred long ago – in the colonial period.  This was a time when there were no editors and no reporters, no emphasis on speed.  Colonial printers rushed down to the port to get collect letters sent by travelers home, who were the first foreign correspondents, and to off-load foreign newspapers, from which they lifted news.

Once newspapers began to be newsgathering enterprises with costly reporters and editors, foreign news generally declined.  Whereas Benjamin Franklin’s Philadelphia newspaper typically had a front page full of news, the average amount of foreign news in an American daily during times of peace is well under ten percent. 

The reason is simple.  Foreign news was the most expensive reporting and the least interesting to most people.

Curiously, despite all the hand wringing today about foreign news, the fact is that the amount in the average daily is probably a little higher than the norm.

            This is not to say that the quality of news reporting as not gone up or that foreign reporting has not excelled on some occasions.  And that gets me to the second high point – the years between the world wars.

This was a golden age, I think. 

Let me explain why.

First, there was lots of important news – the rise of communism and fascism, and the impending Second World War.  There was growing global interdependence, for if Americans did not want to be involved politically abroad in the 1920s and 1930s, they eagerly traveled for pleasure, commerce, and soul-saving.

But this was not all that made this a golden age: 

·        There were many outlets for journalists – newspapers, news services, magazines, books, and the nascent medium of radio.  Correspondents could make a good living as free-lancers.

·        They were an extraordinarily independent lot.  Many spent decades abroad developing expertise and had the latitude to search out news based on that expertise.  It was hard for the home office to be in touch because technology simply won’t allow it.

·        The cost of living abroad was cheap in many places.  A correspondent could pay for a year’s rent and food with the earnings from a single article in the Saturday Evening Post, which reached millions. 

·        And, finally, Americans were liked, which made it easier for them to move about and get access to foreign news makers.

I don’t have to belabor what has changed today. 

There is no Saturday Evening Post today.  It is very expensive to live in Beijing. 

Americans are not well liked abroad today.  American correspondents today are targets.

And technological advances make it difficult for correspondents to be quite so free as they were.  They now are never out of touch with editors.  This raises concerns that editors will be able to set their agenda based on what they think at home, rather than letting correspondents nose around on their own.  And of course the ability to report instantly means that reporters must – which can reduce the time for news gathering.

In this I am reminded of a story told to me about Marvin Kalb of his time in Moscow for CBS in the 1950s.  Because film had to be flown back home, he had time to do extra reporting for the voice over he could phone in.  Then, he told me, we could say “I know.”  Today, he added, correspondents more often say, “I think.”

The big question on everyone’s mind right now is the future, of course, not history.  But history gives us useful reference points:

Given audience interests, foreign news will be in short supply in mass media – as it always has been. 

But foreign news is not extinct and won’t be.

            We are entering a new era in which we will have more kinds of correspondents, some carrying the genes of earlier reporting:

1. Traditional correspondents will survive – and they will be in relatively elite media like the New York Times and in institutions like the Associated Press, which is maintaining its tradition of providing foreign news.
2. Modern bloggers and the Internet are akin to colonial letter writers and ships from which news was offloaded.
3. Specialized news media will give us quality foreign news.  Bloomberg has stationed far more reporters abroad than all of the traditional correspondents lost in the last twenty years.  It has an antecedent in the commercial newspapers of the early 19^th century.  These relatively high priced newspapers provided foreign news because they had an audience that made its living based on foreign commerce.
4. We will see more local reporters going abroad.  While we can lament the substitution of traditional correspondents for parachuting ones, some media with parachuting correspondents never before could do any foreign reporting at all.  To these parachute reporters are a plus on the balance sheet, not a minus.

We must remember that journalism is still a relatively new profession.  We should not be surprised that it goes through difficult transitions.  And when it excels, as history tells us, the reason will be entrepreneurs and visionaries like Lawson and Stone. 

In 1895, New York Sun editor Charles A. Dana, who had been one of Horace Greeley’s pioneering foreign correspondents, commented on the “comparatively new” profession of journalism.  “The most essential part of this great mechanism,” he said, “is not the mechanism itself; it is the intelligence, the brains, and the sense of truth and honor that reside in the men who conduct it and make it a vehicle of usefulness or, it may be, of mischief.” 

Also, colorful men and women will continue to make history to be put down in books by the likes of me. 

Many of these characters will be like James Gordon Bennett, the proprietor of the New York Herald whose idea it was to dispatch Stanley to find Livingstone.  Bennett later became angry because the successful news-making adventure also made his reporter famous. Associates remembered Bennett breaking into a rage when Stanley’s name showed up in the news.