in the "The End of the Foreign Correspondent?" thread, El Oso »&#8230 [...]

I went looking for it today, and I’m pretty sure that I’m not coming up with it. She prounounced it “Mee-Morandum” every time. Nothing under the spelling “mimorandum.” “Memeorandum” does produce a “memorandum.com.” This is, indeed, a news aggregator. But it’s limited to the USA, limited to politics, and as of right now, has much more hard right content than left (although there’s some stuff from the left, but I had to search to find it).

Somehow, I don’t think that this is what she was talking about. Can any of you point me to the real site?

Thanks.

Richard

I would make some further points:

1) the ‘traditional’ sites he lists are nothing more than low budget, low quality local English language newspapers of which there are many and not many are very good, if we are to judge them by the standards of objectivity, balance and a clear division of opinion and fact (this includes all the UK press incidentally)

2) the IHT, to which I subcribe daily, is by far the best general interest offering out there if you are interested in international news, and it is available in the USA, although its owner the NYT, likes to keep this deliberately quiet so as not to harm sales of the NYT national edition.

The IHT has access to the entire NYT foreign correspondent network (all rivalled by a handful of other newspapers: FAZ in Germany, Le Monde (more emphasis on Africa), the WP, and of course the two business newspapers the FT and the WSJ. The Times of London for example has I think about only 10 full time fully staffed, permanent foreign correspondents last time I checked and I’d bet a dollar that number has decreased, not increased.

In addition the IHT has its own excellent network of foreign correspondents all over the world, including in Washington. Chris is SO out of touch on this newspaper mentioning people like Art Bloody Buchwald, who is DEAD.

John Vinocur is still stirring it up but people like Vicki Shannon (Technology) and James Kanter (European business) are new role models.

Reading the IHT is as close to travelling the world in half an hour than any other media and it hands down beats the NYT or the WP for foreign coverage.

3) Chris also completely failed to understand the point of a foreign correspondent.

It isn’t someone who can be parachuted into an international situation like that dreadful woman who works for CNN International and come up with a blistering yarn (all these people do is recycle the prevailing line among parachuted in correspondents like themselves, stringers, and fixers). A proper foreign correspondent is someone who lives in the country, for several years, and does their reporting not by consulting netvibes every morning Mr. Crampton, but getting out there and hitting the phones and working the streets and their contact books and finding out wha the hell is going on. This is what the NYT folks excel at, as do those of the IHT.

4) Where they differ to bloggers is that, even if they havent lived in the country they report all their lives, they have lived there long enough to know who is who and what the hell is going on. Secondly they have immediate and top level access to any number of senior governement, political, ngo, security and business contacts, as well as a good feel and understanding for the person on the street.

John Vinocur in Paris can pick up the phone and get a personal conversation, off the record, with the French prime minister or president for example, or one of their senior aides. Few, actually I doubt any, French bloggers can.

When are people going to understand that most bloggers are just like you and I, and if you live in the USA how qualified are you to report to the world the news in the USA. Do you have access to the White House, the CIA, the heads of Fortune 100 companies. I seriously doubt it. Hence we like mainstream media foreign correspondents, not forgetting, last but not least, that if they work for a newspaper like the IHT they are objective, trained journalists, who speak the language and who are there to assemble facts, not push their views, and are trained not to mix fact with personal opinion in their reporting.

I think the entire nature of Chris’s debate on this topic was lamentably ill-informed and out of touch, which I have to say is not something I ever much find to be the case.

I’ll conclude by advising anyone to subscribe to the IHT at http://www.iht.com and find out that foreign correspondents are alive and well and in one hell of a lot better health than the current or projected blog scene.

As Crampton did manage to remember to say about his job and his employer, a paper like the IHT is better than spending hours trawling the net because, with the normal reservations anyone would have about any corporate owned institution, you can TRUST it.

How do you keep people from gaming the system by giving higher accuracy or fairness ratings to sources that produce views or outlooks similar to their own?

I’ll let the site do the talking. Check us out at http://www.newstrust.net

Brendan, I know I sound like a broken record (now, that expression really dates me!) , but is there any possibility AT ALL that the ROS blogging sw will get updated with sw that will let us edit/delete our postings? Plenty of other blogs and discussion groups have this, how hard can it be?

This is a distinction without a difference. Both rely on attracting large numbers of readers or viewers, and that depends on content.

In both cases the publication or network has to supply what the readers or viewers want in order to stay in business. If people are not willing to pay for newspapers that maintain foreign bureaus, or if they only buy those newspapers based on their sports or lifestyle coverage, then eliminating the foreign coverage makes good sense.

Personally I read The Economist – it’s intelligently written, very detailed, full of charts and graphs, with lots of numbers and data. It heavily features foreign coverage. It also has virtually no lifestyle, sports, gossip, or other fluff. But its total paid circulation is only 450,000 compared to about 4 million for Time Magazine. This should give you an idea of how much people demand intelligent, detailed foregn coverage. (i.e., not much)

This is a distinction without a difference.

In either case the publication or network has to supply what the readers or viewers want in order to stay in busin

This is a distinction without a difference.

In either case the publication or network has to supply what the readers or viewers want in order to stay in busin

The problem with having the locals report on their own subjective experiences is toofold –

1. They are too wrapped up in it to be objective. How many of the citizens of Bahgdad blogging about this stupid war are NOT Sunni, Shiite, or Kurd? Outsiders are often keener observers than locals – Who has EVER done a better job describing Americans than Alexis de Tocqueville?

2. Locals have no perspective. The foreign correspondent who has reported for decades from wars and conflicts and disasters around the world in different nations and cultures and over the changing background of time and geopolitics can speak to the great human universals in these things.

Far be it from me to defend religion, but even I think this is a little unfair to God.

Americans send their children to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. They send them to pointless wars to learn geography and foreign customs and to help them develop the strength of character that comes from spending life in a wheelchair or missing a few limbs. Being left physically and mentally broken in a nation too burdened by war debt to help much brings out their inner resourcefulness. We hate our children. We resent them for their youth, their strength, their vitality, their idealism. This is how we punish them for those sins.

Oh and I mentioned Baghdad Burning earlier.. which I do like.. but I actually meant to point to the videoblog Alive in Baghdad.. they are what I see as a true correspondent.

On the other hand Baghdad Burning is so bitter that she has not been posting since the hanging of Saddam. And who is to blame her? But still we need to know what is going on. And even if she was blogging- she is not out there in the street telling you how big the hole is ( you could fit a sedan into it).

This business about language barrier is a red herring. ( Chayes learned Pashtun btw!) and of course it would be great if FC’s did not need a translator- but gee whiz….. the alternative is to have a native who does not know English or us that well, how to talk to us, tell the story.

I agree about Ahmad Rashid, Rami Khouri and add Fawaz Gerges. These are extraordinary people, two not strictly foreign correspondents.

Notice how many women ( with flowing scarves) are out there risking for the story. Add- Sheila McVicker and Christianne Amanpour, Deborah Amos, Deborah Sontag (was for years-the NYTimes from Israel) to the others mentioned above.

as for the news, people concentrate too much on the minutia as if it meant anything. listening to yet another bush or iraq story isn’t convincing anyone of anything. i knew bush was retarded years ago, if i skip a day or news i doubt i’ll miss something that will convince me different. same with iraq, yet another iraq is a f*ck hole story? of course americans skip it and go watch something silly or a puff piece instead, they aren’t into masochism after all.

you could argue the most f*cked up places in the world like in the middle east and in the gaza/west bank get too much news. tuned into al jazerra/cnn/hamas tv or whatever 24/7 feeding the anger -> terror news cycle. that the media is such a force for good is questionable.

It says it all, isn’t it? That’s free press for you…

I think even in Soviet Russia the ratio was more reasonable.

As requested on air, here’s some of the sources I read to follow international news.

More traditional:
http://www.thelocal.se/RSS/theLocal.xml
http://www.jp.dk/rss_english/

Good aggregators:
http://www.zonaeuropa.com/index.xml
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/atom.xml

http://www.zonaeuropa.com/blogroll.htm = wide ranging blogroll on Asia.

I know this is hard to admit even for NPR folks and our beloved journalist host, but it is important to make it clear that very few journalists are really experts in foreign countries. Their studies of history, ancient and modern, are usually slightly better than the tourist guidebooks overall and clustered around thumbnail studies related to their assignsment.

MORE PROBLEMATIC, they rarely speak the languages of the people in the country they are living in. They have to rely on interpreters and translators. (And you can look up Ambrose Bierce’s definition of what they do to shape their mediation to see the problem.)
And to cap it all, they will rarely admit that their sources are mediated through this language filter. I keep l;ooking for the Iraq reporters to own up to the language barrier they face, but omit in their attempt to look like an “expert.” This is faux expertise, and the first draft of history has little hope of real clarity or depth.

As an expert on South Asia, I have seen this play out from every angle, having helped journalists from the most presitigous news organizations get oriented, witnessed how they live in various bubbles (e.g. 5-star hotels) that with ignorance of the local language keeps them from reality on the ground.

One of our greatest stupidities as a nation and in our culture is not taking advantage of the true expertise we possess, and accepting the surface knowledge of journalists as barely above the typical American tourist.

Your analysis is all wrong. Just ask yourself, what is the product of media as an industry? What it paid for? The answer is, it’s not content (to sell to consumers), it’s audience (to sell to advertisers). What GE wants from it’s subsidiary NBC is much more important that what we want. And this is everywhere…

Well, OliverCranglesParrot, if you want to bomb the hell out of Iraq(n), would you really be interested in wide knowledge (and appreciation) of their cultures here in US?