The Vanishing Foreign Correspondent
By John Marshall
On December 29, 1930, The Chicago Tribune advertised a global scoop from Tribune reporter William L. Shirer, who had flown hop-scotch for 6½ days from London to Karachi to cover a revolt in India; then, as a guest of Afghanistan’s crown prince, he rode into the country on horseback through the Khyber Pass and reported news of Nadir Khan’s enthronement before it was known even in Europe ‒ crucial to events that would bring that part of the world toward another great war.
“Only by spreading its own writers over the world can the Tribune make certain of information uncolored by propaganda or external prejudice. Far-flung, experienced, its staff ensures reliable news from foreign countries,” The Tribune said.
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In the American foreclosure on accredited news reporting, a chief casualty has been the foreign correspondent – those who gather, research and dispatch news from away. These reporters were far and near, posted over the globe to locales romantic, wretched or in-between. They were assigned to city hall and statehouse bureaus. They roamed the rural stretches and urban landscapes to collect the stories of people and their communities.
These outer correspondents were once essential to the newspapers that employed them. The late Whitley Austin, legendary editor of The Salina Journal, often scanned the newsroom with a faint smile at reporters’ vacant desks. It meant they were away, collecting news.
Publications and broadcast networks believed in having their own reporters at the scene; they would explain to constituents the significance of events across town, across the state or over the globe. This was once as important for The Journal and The Hutchinson News as it was for say, The New York Times, if by a smaller gauge.
In the early 1970s, I was frequently out of The Journal’s newsroom for days at a time, combing central and northwest Kansas for the people and events integral to the life of town and region. I traveled the long stretches of rural school bus routes, walked the fields during sugar beet harvests, marveled at the swarming flights of bees near the honey plant in Jamestown. In Phillips County, the bachelor immigrant Dane Hansen had made a large fortune in lumber, oil and agriculture, and left it in trust for the town of Logan, soon home to the splendid Hansen Museum. In the hamlet Wells, there was Lawrence Pacey, last of the one-room school teachers.
Fritz Mendell, The Journal’s chief photographer, once met me in the far western Smoky Hills with his Hasselblad; we had permission from a country preacher to photograph his vibrant prairie church, its magnificent stained glass, during Sunday service while I made notes. We were welcomed to the pot luck afterward.
Politics and sports were a common impetus for reporters’ travel, but there was more to this land that drew the settlers. Over time, stories were rooted in the cohesion of people’s common background, their close personal associations. The measure of a life was not how long one could enjoy it, but what one did with it. Reporters told about this.
The local story was often abroad. In the early 1970s we sold more than wheat to the Russians. ThermoFlex, a Salina company, shipped vaulting poles to the Soviet Olympic team. Wilson and Company, the engineering firm, was heavily embedded in Saudi Arabia. The Rev. Mike Spangler, a Salinan and Presbyterian, was in Moscow for two years (1974-76) as pastor to American and British worshipers. His wife, Merry, and daughters (ages 3 and 5), were there, too. Their cramped apartment near Lenin Hill was bugged, and less than glamorous.
Helsinki, late October 1973: the U.S. Ambassador to Finland, V. John Krehbiel, stood on the embassy grounds overlooking the cold gray Baltic, blinking away tears. This was a day or two after the Saturday Night Massacre, Richard Nixon’s infamous Watergate purge. Krehbiel, then of California but from a strong Hutchinson family, was heartbroken to realize that his friend, the president, was a crook after all.
We told these stories and more. The traveling correspondent – in Logan or Moscow – made connections in living circumstance, threading a continuity of meaning between home and away.
This was practice until about 30 years ago, when newspapers and networks went “corporate,” and board rooms came to believe that shareholders were more important than consumers. Foreign correspondents quickly became expendable.
We still need them, from Marquette to Moldova, as a source of information “uncolored by propaganda or external prejudice,” as The Tribune had said. The distance between needing them and having them is now greater than ever.
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