good evening and thank you for joining another spj International Community I see talk I am naresa young Professor of instruction at the ew script School of Journalism at Ohio University in beautiful Athens last week I found a news release that shows based on journalist resumés Ohio University is the number six School in the country for putting forign correspondence in the field I am teaching a foreign correspondence course this fall and took students to Germany in May for an international mass media class before we start and as people get logged in there are some housekeeping items we need to take care of please use the chat feature to let us know where you're from put your name and uh where you're watching from there so we can see uh who's with us tonight the format today is going to be simple the guest and I are going to have a conversation and we want you to be participants in that conversation so if along the way you have a question for our guest please use the Q&A function for questions the chat feature is to introduce yourself and tell us where you're watching from the co-chairman of the International Community the multi-talented Dan kisy and I will keep an eye on that window so we can bring your questions into the conversation Dan will also be keeping an eye on the chat window in case you have any questions about spj the internet interational Community or have technical issues he will also be posting links and information related to the IC and our discussion just as a reminder this conversation is being recorded and will be placed in our YouTube channel welcome again to those who just got logged in our guest tonight is John Maxwell Hamilton he is literally the man who wrote the books plural on ways for journalists to link local and Global events one of those is journalism's robing eye a history of American News Gathering abroad John is the author of eight books including his latest French 75 a history of a popular drink that came out of World War I unfortunately due to the virtual nature of this conversation we can't serve French 75s do the audience but John can help with a recipe in his book he is a longtime journalist and public Serv John is the Hopkins P Brazil professor in Louisiana State University's manship School of mass communication go Tigers a global fellow at the woodro Wilson International Center for reported domestically and abroad from the Christian Science Monitor and ABC radio he was a longtime commentator for Marketplace broadcast nationally by Public Radio International his work has appeared in the New York Times The Washington Post Foreign Affairs Politico the financial times and the nation he also had a distinguished career in the US government and at the World Bank John is a Marine Corps veteran of the Vietnam War he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in journalism from Marquette and Boston universities respectively and a doctorate in American civilization from George Washington University I could go on but then we wouldn't have time to actually talk with John I am honored to have been given a special dispensation to call Our Guest Jack so Jack thank you for being here thank you very much for having me I look forward to U hearing the questions that are asked and do my best to answer them let's Jump Right In you wrote in journalism's roving eye all the problems of Journalism are magnified in foreign news Gathering you note the cost of having foreign correspondents and the inability of editors back home being able to second guess those correspondents as they would with a local beat reporter because they do not have the same level of knowledge of the events being reported with the economic situation in the news media the way it is and if foreign coverage is so expensive why should news outlets invest in foreign news Gathering well before I actually answer the qu the main question you asked let me let me give you two unsolicited uh comments that may help uh put this in context first of all if we're looking at crises in American journalism today the greatest crisis we have we face is the absence of adequate local news and we have lots of communities that are not being covered well and that's perilous I think for the functioning of our democracy it has to be it has to be a first order of problem that needs to be addressed uh the second thing that I should say and I will come back to is that there are lots of reasons not to cover foreign news I'm going to go into those at the end of my answer to this question but I think it's important to keep in mind that it is indeed very expensive and uh it ranks rather low in terms of uh audience interest the reason it's important is that first of all our involvement in the world has become greater and greater uh this is not a Brand New Concept back in 1924 Paul Scott ma the first journalist in went a pull of surprise for foreign news he was a European correspondent for the Chicago Daily News uh used the term interdependence to discuss what was happening in the world today and how Americans were entwined with the rest of the world it's not a New Concept at all but it is a concept that becomes more and more uh more and more of what it is every year uh we now know that when people get sick abroad we get sick we know that there's hardly anything that happens in the world that doesn't somehow resonate back in the United States in fact conceptually if you think about it um there was a way to think about foreign policy many many decades ago where you could fancy that the best way to proceed was for you to to win in Arguments for you to be the dominant power but in the world is inter twined as the one is today your weakness actually or the weakness of other countries becomes your weakness in other words if other countries can't handle their health problems or if other countries are destroying their environment the consequences of those things actually come back to the United States uh there's no escaping that I also think it's more important uh for another local or domestic reason and that is so many Americans are uh thinking in terms of America First also on old idea but one that has a lot of uh cache with Americans today now having said all that let's talk about why you wouldn't do it or what what the reasons are that get in the way of of having foreign news coverage you've outlined Thea the the issues of cost and that certainly is a case is the case uh but there's also uh there are also other ones one is that uh poll show that Americans do not really pay attention to foreign news the way the the way we would want them to do if we cared about foreign news now I admit many po polish when people answer polls they often say they do care but in practice we know that the readership of stories from abroad tends to be rather low and it has always been that way historically in fact after every war foreign correspondents in the last century wrote articles about how it was too bad that foreign news was falling off but in fact the real way to look at it was the wars increased the amount of foreign news and it was so the the additional coverage of the greater coverage was anomalous it wasn't the fact that foreign news was falling off that was strange it was that there had been more foreign news and of course the reason there's more foreign news in the case of Wars is very simple foreign news are really foreign news is really a local story it's about young men and now women who go abroad and fight for the country and whose lives are at risk and those those stories become very tangible to uh American audiences and much more immediate they also have a more immediate direct sometimes impact on the economy so uh the the idea of foreign news being a short supply is not new the idea of a lot of costs existing is not new and uh and there's a third thing that's important it used to be in the case of networks for example that they spent enormous amounts of money to have large cores of foreign Cor respondence if you think about that it's very impractical uh how many foreign news stories could actually appear in a half an hour newscast every week night not many and yet there were numerous bureaus abroad and of course some of those bureaus could dispatch a report from Rome to cover a story in Africa and so forth parachute journalism is not a new occurrence but there was a there was a very high cost and a very limited and a very limited utility but but there were two reasons that that was supported by owners of networks one of them was that they felt like those foreign outposts were for them a sign of the greatness of the news organization and I might add that also applied to newspapers newspapers like to and Publishers like to get all the reporters to come to Paris once a year and meet and have a grand dinner because the publisher could feel as though these were his empathies abroad and there was a great psychic reward that came from having uh foreign reporters the um in the case of networks in addition they had very few competitors when it came to foreign news footage today you can get foreign news footage you can buy it from all kinds of vendors as it were but in the days when CBS News and then and NBC News uh ABC was a late Comer to this was were providing foreign news they were the only ones that had it so in that sense it it was a plus in terms of advertising your ability uh as a news provider today nobody can claim that they have exclusive control over foreign news coverage in fact now what you can do is just get on your computer and see all that you want so those those two CH those as a result of those two things uh the need to have the the value of having a foreign uh a foreign report or foreign core of foreign correspondence diminishes somewhat and uh of course the costs are great and we see that networks have have it has decreased for networks and it's also decreased for newspapers in the case of newspapers of course is another aspect and that is that um newspapers don't have the um marginal income the marginal revenue to pay the high cost for foreign corresponden you know the Baltimore Sun the Philadelphia inquire uh the Boston Globe they never had big cores of foreign correspondents they had Boutique cores that had half a dozen journalists in them and they could send them around and it was it was another badge of honor for them but now they can't afford to do that the costs are just too high and in order to attract readers they have to do a better job of having local news this by the way doesn't get in the way of my point earlier that we don't have enough local news many newspapers are out of business altogether anyway to some it all up uh foreign news is expensive and many of the reasons to have foreign to maintain foreign news bureaus today uh are even stronger than they were before thank you uh we want to remind folks if you have a question uh for Jack please put that in the uh Q&A box for those of you who have not logged in to the chat box to tell us who you are and where you're watching from we certainly hope that you'll do that so the you'll feel included in this conversation I'm moving on to my next question um this is a difficult time for journalist safety in the US let alone the world we've just celebrated the release of Wall Street Journal reporter Evan gerscovich and radio free Europe Radio Liberty journalist alsu Keva who were part of a prisoner exchange with Russia Austin Ty a freelance American journalist was abducted in Syria in 2012 and his where abouts remain unknown what can journalists news organizations and the public do to increase pressure on governments that are holding journalists without cause I know Wall Street Journal was very active uh in uh sharing information and making it known about uh Evan's situation well again let's start with a little history about how we got into this fix uh in the last century up to uh I guess the Cold War we'll say American journalists had a huge comparative advantage they weren't we had our moments of imperialism for example against the span Spanish uh in the Spanish American war and according the Philippines Guam and some other outposts but our record uh was a much shorter record of imperialism than that that belonged to the Germans the French the British and uh and so as a result and the Spanish and and as a result we were we were perceived in a more positive way in countries abroad that had been victims of colonization uh one way to think about this is the case of Edgar snow whom I've written a biography of and therefore I know something about snow uh was the man who interviewed Malon the first Western journalist the first foreign journalist to interview ma uh ma at the time was held held up in ban which was way off in the distance and uh many people thought the red the the the red the Communists were red Bandits but they didn't even really have ideology and they decided in the mid1 1930s uh at the same time that the Japanese were making incursions into China that they wanted to be known on the public stage and snow was the one that they picked or allowed to come up and interview out uh they could have there's there's no way they would have picked the German no way they're going to pick somebody from Japan that's for sure uh they picked an American because Americans seem to be uh emblems of democracy something else to say about snow that helps put this in perspective too it was a lot easier to be a foreign correspondent in those days than it is today uh I I went back and actually looked this up yesterday in anticipation that this question might be asked you know when Edgar snow so his first article for the Saturday evening post which was uh an extremely important magazine at that time they had to lay on extra cars and Railway railway trains had to lay on extra cars to make sure the copies of the magazine were delivered around the United States uh I remember very well as a boy uh that the Saturday post is one of the primary magazines that we uh we my parents subscribe to when snow published his first met article for them he got $750 which may not seem like a lot today but it was actually worth quite a lot then and even more when you think about what it cost him to live in Beijing he paid in every month $35 for food and rent that's all he paid uh costs were very low living abroad and so here was a guy and many others were in the same boat who represented a a a huge number of magazines and newspapers that were able to go abroad and were able to get stories I would argue that the Golden Age of foreign reporting was the time between the wars which is often thought of as a time of isolationism but in fact many Americans were going abroad it was just the Americans government didn't want to be involved politically but emotionally culturally and even intellectually there was great deal of involvement overseas well what what do we have today well we have today journalists who are American journalists who basically have uh a bullseye on their backs now American are seen as being just as bad as any other imperialist Nation uh the I they're not seen as doing anything that's helpful to uh the most terrorist organizations and so the result of that is that you can score more points from a propaganda point of view from killing a journalist and doing things that we consider and are atrocious beheading journalists like did the case of Daniel Pearl and abducting them and as had happened has happened often in the case of uh Putin he can arrest somebody more than somebody numerous people and actually what what does it cost him not much in fact he he gets leverage in terms of getting back his own people I can't remember any case in the Soviet Union up to World War up to the Cold War where any American journalist the where the Communists took journalist prisoner uh State prisoners I don't think there's any case of that today there's I think Putin sees that there's no cost at all and so that's a very changed circumstance what we need to do of course is uh we need to put the pressure on uh foreign countries to return journalists but we also have to recognize and I don't like saying this that there's also an incentive to capture journalists if you can use them as a bargaining chip um and and a big paper like the Wall Street Journal has a much better chance of getting somebody back than say a freelance American journalist who doesn't represent a media organization that has a vested interest in him or her coming back so I don't I don't have I don't have a Panacea for how we apply pressure uh I think we're going to see more journalists being captured uh the only other thing I would say on this topic is uh we are doing a better job today than was ever done in up to the 1980s in terms of of educating journalists and training them to avoid being captured uh and to uh uh come out alive when they're in difficult uh circumstances including War you know there's a there's a one journalist I admire particularly even though he was a very complicated person emotionally and that was Jack Beldon everybody's forgotten Jack Beldon he was really maybe the greatest War correspondent of the 20th century he put himself in all kinds of dangerous situations he wrote incredible stories about uh what Japanese soldiers I'm sorry what Chinese soldiers were were enduring uh in fighting the Japanese during the 1930s he he wrote two fabulous stories for the for Life Magazine covering himself being shot and then uh recovering uh and he wrote a book called still time to die which deals with much of this but as I say Beldon had suffered great psychological uh hardship what we today would call PTSD and that was never diagnosed and nobody at time life when he eventually went to work with them really understood what it was uh and they didn't do much to take care of it uh even though I mean they took care they they took care of his physical wounds but not his other wounds I'm not sure how much help they could have given him he ended up at the end of his life being pretty much down and out in Paris uh to borrow a fra phrase from George Orwell but um we we do do a better job of repairing journalist but you know I don't I don't see uh that it's profitable for me to come up with solutions that I don't see I think we're I think this is now a a serious problem for American journalists and if the answers were easy Austin TI would be home point point taken point taken that's a nice way to put it uh based on your experience and knowledge what is the international story that US News organizations are missing in terms of sending foreign corresponden or picking up and uh Distributing news uh from those countries right so I think one thing uh that is important to say is that even though some news coverage has dwindled that is network coverages and what it once was isn't as rich and extensive uh with on the spot reporters um even though news day and uh the Philadelphia inquire do not have cores of foreign correspondents like they once did there's a lot of very good reporting going on and uh some of it's from traditional news providers uh the New York Times reporting in Ukraine has been exceptional the Wall Street journal's reporting has been exceptional it's been courageous and by the way dealing with those people who have been imprisoned as well as those people who cover Wars they put themselves at tremendous uh risk and we really we really should honor uh in fact I've written about this in a column I write for Real Clear Politics we should really honor these people who have who who uh suffer as a result of their dedication to providing news uh they're heroes in my mind um there's also news that's coming from sources that didn't exist before uh uh Bloomberg News more than accounts or more than compensates in terms of sheer numbers for all the foreign correspondents that have been uh taken out of the field uh they have hundreds abroad now they don't necessarily have the same brief to do uh investigative journalism all they do do some of that but there are a lot of people abroad who are doing work to cover the rest of the world and and we have found that a lot of organizations and individuals who are in in places to know and find out the news are actually supplying it for us and that's that's very good uh so I think we still have pretty good coverage of the world pretty good coverage generally uh do we have enough in that you have to look at it though in sort of two ways how much is there out there and how much is it actually consumed by average Americans in other words the average American can't read Bloomberg the full Bloomberg report because it's too expensive for example um so then okay the question becomes what's what are the stories that need to be covered and I or you say story but I would say stories I think one of them and of course I have a special interest in this is helping a readers viewers listeners understand um why what's happening abroad has an impact on their's lives you know I did an SBJ project now more than 30 years ago 35 years ago that tried to show how you cover foreign news locally and I got money from Ford and Carnegie and others to help me go around the United States and show how this could be done I work with papers and as the recent point out I wrote a couple of books on it and many articles but we we have to do more of that and uh and some of that can be done locally that was the point of that project but it also could be done by Foreign correspondents who need to who need to be mindful of how they how they explain why it matters which of course journalists and editors do more of now they put headlines on why does it matter well I think we need to do we need to really emphasize that in foreign reporting why does it matter uh that's the first thing I would say the second thing that I I would point out is that uh I think a story that needs more coverage for more Americans and this directly addresses the concern I have about Americans turning inward is how our influence abroad is dwindling or slipping you know it's hard to overstate how the unit how strong the United States was at the end of the Cold War uh I'd have to go back and kind of rack my brain to remember but you know I think uh the I think we were responsible for about 50% of world G&P at the end of the war that's pretty uh amazing and yet the impact or the the share of the world's impact on our G&P was relatively small in other words whatever we did had an enormous impact on everybody else and what others did had a less impact on us than we had on them that's that's not a sustainable that's not a sustainable economic model and of course we don't have it today uh and and in fact where we could dictate what happened abroad in another time we can't today uh there are too many other powers that are strong and have national interests that are not always aligned with us and we have to find ways to work with them as constructively as possible I think Americans need to understand why this why we need to do this and part of that is to understand that it's not possible to go it alone in this world we have to go to we have to work for Collective Solutions and so call that a uh call that a story I I would call it a series of stories I would call it a mindset you know journalists do a very good job uh these days um thinking of news as packages foreign reporting it used to be foreign correspondents would go abroad and they had a relatively high level of autonomy uh some of the stories are even hilarious when for example and this happened with more than one newspaper but the one I've always liked best is three of Baltimore Sun reporters all assigned themselves to go cover a un conference in Geneva and they all showed up and saw each other there that's very inefficient uh and is not going to happen today because foreign deaths do a much better job of controlling and uh and marshalling their forces overseas so that they can have them do stories that are packages where somebody specializes uh covers one aspect of a story in Italy and somebody else covers it in France and somebody else covers terrorism in Germany and they put it together into a story that is more coherent and makes more sense uh and that and that's that's a big plus but I think there's something else here that we have to keep in mind and and and I think by the way that technique can be used to cover stories to show how various sets of issues have an impact on the United States I would offer however another way to think about this which is the the fact that journalists can be so easily managed from from the foreign desk in newspapers also has I believe limited their ability to go out and find stories on their own that aren't uh ordered up by Washington or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles and I think there's a lot to be said for journalists who are given enough uh freedom to go and actually nose around and find out stories that people don't know are important yet now it's kind of hard to say what that story would be because by definition of Stories We don't know uh but that's sort of the flip side of the packages and I want to throw that in as an example and then I'm going to I'm going to raise a final Point that's complicated but uh I think it's one that illustrates a problem that foreign reporters have so and that's the Ukraine now because I'm going to say tell the story in a way that sounds like I might not be supportive of helping Ukraine which I definitely am I'm going to start out by saying that when the Ukraine the war in Ukraine started I actually volunteered to go over and participate with the government with the Ukrainian government and their military now I mean obviously I'm too old to be a Marine combat officer anymore but I do know how to live in combat and uh and that's number one and number two I know how the world Works how the mil how War works and number three I do have some skills that could be useful for the uh ukrainians to help tell their story okay so much for that but having said that I think we need to we need to understand a difficult problem that this war presents for us on the one hand as I see it we need to make sure we cover it and we need to make sure people understand what Ukraine is enduring and what the consequences could be for Ukraine to lose on the other hand I think we need to also recognize that uh how do I put this that there's a that there's a a penchant for Americans and American journalists to impose ideas about other countries as if they are going to be like us this happened in China during the 1930s and 40s when everybody said oh the Chinese Communists really aren't Communists they're just agrarian reformers and of course they weren't agian reformers at all they they were marxists who had a Marxist agenda well uh I I think we need to recognize that we don't have any guarantee what a uh a Ukraine that was that prevailed in the war would actually look like you know it has a long history of corruption uh one of the reasons that zalinsky has been so successful at marshalling International support is because he's such a great communicator and honestly I think the way to talk about it is propagandist uh there's a martial law is imposed there isn't anything like free media uh in uh in Ukraine and uh and so I think we need to recognize that you know when the war first started I was I was talking to a journalist actually at a wedding who um was a friend of my sons who is um who was covering Ukraine and I said you know we ought to be careful about propaganda and he immediately went back and told my son your father is really you know against Ukraine well you know I don't think that's true but I think it is true that we have to ask what do we what happens after this is all over and that's a difficult Balancing Act is it really true that journalists should only uh cover one side of the story which is the side we want to win or do we need to get people to think about what needs to be done to make sure that when we invest all of this effort in Ukraine we get an outcome that we can be proud of and we can't of course impose our system on another country but we have to be asking ourselves to what extent are we enabling or or are are we contributing to a situation where it may not be an outcome that we like uh that's a complicated thing to do in foreign policy and in foreign reporting but I think it ranks with uh fairly high in terms of importance um who was it who said that the first casualty of war is the truth yes well that's true and as you know I wrote a book on government propaganda so I have a special interest in it yeah and if you look back at us history we don't always have a very good track record of picking our friends um Afghanistan in the 1980s is a great example uh for those in the audience who may be interested and folks please put something in uh the Q&A we don't have any questions yet and we want you to be part of this conversation and ask uh what you will uh meaning of life we'll we'll do in another session but things related to John's career and foreign correspondents please we know you have them please put them in uh the Q&A for those in the audience who may be interested in becoming a foreign correspondent what's your advice to them I'm especially thinking of my students and I encourage them especially to put something in the Q&A so I know they're paying attention well I've always felt that one of the best ways to be a foreign correspondent one way one viable way of being a foreign correspondent is to be is to freelance and a lot of great journalists began as Freelancers overseas but I add two um caveats to that the first is you shouldn't be going overseas until you've been trained to be a journalist that means you need to work at a newspaper I went overseas as a for freelancer but I worked in the Milwaukee Journal before I went abroad and I learned a lot about how to be a journalist uh and the second thing that we now have to recognize is that journalism is as we've already discussed perilous and so the idea of just going over as a freelancer is not always a good idea and really has to be thought about especially in countries uh where the danger levels are fairly high so the first thing I'd say is at least get some training some real serious training and then the second thing is to um to to think carefully about whether it wouldn't be better to work your way up through the AP uh or find a home at the Wall Street Journal near times and Bloomberg and so forth there are places to get training special training uh the puler center which does a good job of covering foreign news and getting stories out and distributing them uh is a place where they where young journalists can get a chance to um uh get some experience overseas in a in a setting they actually have people who are monitoring what they do and can help them grow in the job there's also a very good scholarship program from the overseas press Foundation uh which is I think right now is seeking applications or will be soon uh that's a place to go uh and then of course another thing to do in college is to have study abroad programs take study abroad programs uh like the one that you did nesa getting students overseas and getting them comfortable with living abroad um but guess that's my advice worth all right thank you so much we do have a question uh from one of our audience members what are your thoughts on how foreign correspondents have handled reporting in the conflict between Israel and Palestine the other War that's going on it's hard to it's hard to find a country that's more difficult to write to provide coverage that is not going to be heavily criticized by one side of the other than is the case in Israel um it's just very very difficult it's and and because the emotional level the emotion levels are so high I I can't say that I made an exhaustive study of uh coverage but I can say that I felt there has been coveries that look to me as if it were balanced and uh try to give uh a picture of both sides and their grievances do I think it's perfect no of course no coverage is ever perfect um and and I and again you know the qu what I read is in a few places I don't read what every Americans reading and so I I don't know that I can speak to whether the average American has is getting a a good clear picture of what's going on um so I guess that's the best I can answer that question thank you Jack uh oiza adaba has a question here uh do you have any experience with news gathering in or about Africa I only did one story in Africa I went to do a story I spent a month in Tanzania uh which was quite interesting and I spent a lot of it writing about development this was many years ago it was in the 1970s writing about development and also uh I spent a whole day with Julius deri who was the first president of the country and uh of course was there George Washington I went up to his house uh by like Victoria's family house and spent a whole day with one of the best interviews I ever had actually he was very engaging he had been a um he was he was an intellectual president uh and he was very witty and uh and he he handled the interview very well in fact one of the things I asked was him I kept asking about political prisoners of which he had some and finally and I give names you know like what about this person what about that person finally became impatient but also just said You Know Jack everything we do with political prisoners we've learned from the British I always thought that was very amusing and the second thing is I pressed him on the fact that he had this idea of ujat socialism where he wanted to create a socialist country but some of these things weren't working and so he started creating quazi uh private organizations peristal I guess you could call them and one of them was a soap company and so I was digging in on the Soap Company question and he said 'you know he said with a kind of a grin on his face you can't have socialism without soap uh his point being that yeah I have to do what works you know I we have to get so to people uh uh so he was a very interesting character and uh I learned a lot but that's my only experience in after just one okay just to follow up uh oiza has a website that covers news about Africa to help fill in some of those coverage gaps and she uh is an spj International Community member based in New York city so for those who may want to uh take advantage of her expertise we wanted to share that with you uh we have a question that's that's good that's very good I look at it um we have a question from Olivia Gillian uh The Stereotype that Americans are uneducated loud disrespectful and Etc what advice do you have for establishing credibility abroad and building relationships with communities who may be hesitant and we've talked about how America is no longer necessarily the good guy on the world stage and as a followup what can we as journalists do to immerse ourselves in their culture and history while staying objective yeah those are good questions so let's see uh first of all there is tension between being expert and being able to translate what you see into stories that um make sense for or resonate with the average American uh the Chicago Daily News I'm going to go back to that and I'm gonna go back to Paul Scott M uh The Daily News I would argue is the um is the most important is is the first modern American newspaper and with with high ethical standards and and um and high Ambitions they had the first core of foreign correspondents but the list of things they did goes on and on uh it was a great newspaper in its day there were various reasons it didn't survive one was it was an afternoon paper and there are others uh it won prizes all the time and the owner was a penny paper by the way and the owner a very interesting character Nam Victor Lawson you know wasn't unhappy to run this the the lead story on the front page being the Chicago baseball score but he had some of the best writers in the country and reporters like Paul Scott Mau would get inside stories on the in second page or third I can't remember which it was where they would basically as ma said I would write as if I was writing a story for other diplomats I pretty high level stories um and he was abroad for many many years and and was respected overseas I'm not sure that's the best kind of reporting and by the way he was a very good Sho leather reporter uh in addition to these longer thoughtful pieces that he and other members of the staff wrote uh but there is this tension between local and and uh between reporting for your a audience and knowing so much that you start becoming so expert you're talking to just other experts and uh one way to combat that of course is to have reporters abroad for a while and then bring them back home uh not have them spend their entire life overseas uh the other thing that that needs to be done however and has been done is more investment in those reporters to make sure they speak the languages and are culturally immersed the New York Times is not going to send a reporter and neither are many other newspapers to Russia if they don't speak Russian I mean to be stationed there permanently they're just not going to do it the same thing applies to China two languages that are not the easiest for Americans to learn that's a long way from when Colonel McCormick once assembled all of his uh foreign correspondents in one room and went around the room and asked them what they spoke and only one of them said he only spoke English and Colonel McCormick said that's great that's the kind of reporter I want I don't want them to get too involved overseas well that's obviously Preposterous you can't do a good job reporting if you if you don't know how to deal with other countries but so there is this balance that we need to have uh certainly students who want want to go overseas as I just already said need to get experience and study Foreign Relations as a minor if they're journalism student and go abroad on study abroad programs and embrace the idea of traveling overseas uh so I think I I deal with I've dealt with that part of the question but let me go on to the what I think is the other question how do you how do you learn to deal in other countries and I think this this pie this observation applies to all journalism but uh that doesn't make it any less relevant for working overseas where maybe it's even more important to journalism is is gotcha journalism maybe has a place but that doesn't it doesn't have a place in foreign news in foreign news your job is to try to understand why people are doing what they do you may not like it I think that even applies to terrorist organization we have a lot to learn about why terrorists are terrorists and what kind of infrastructure is put up and what kind of interests exist to make them into terrorists uh that we have to condone it but we have to understand it it's a difficult story to do for obvious reasons uh access to the information being one of them but we need we need to try to understand other people and their motivations when we report about them rather than necessarily just being judgmental that's uh I think the first thing and that means being empathetic means being a I mean these are very obvious things it means being a good listener uh it means spending time with people overseas not spending time with other Americans who are just like you uh there are there are some journalists who have acquired an incredible ability to do these things one was vinc Sheen one of the great journalists of the 20th century who was almost I know this will sound crazy had psychic powers of of discernment he actually decided to go to India at one point because he believed and I know this because I read his diary written extensively about him he believed the Gandhi would be assassinated by a Hindu which is what happened now there aren weren't a lot of people the time saying oh yeah that was going to happen he just had this incredible he was incredible uh and he was there right there when gandi was assassinated so uh you can put that down to unusuals psychic powers but in the case of people like um Shen he did spend a lot of time overseas and he did and he was able to draw a lot of good judgments so we try to have this balance between being expert and still being in touch with people at home and I think that's always a constant balance and also when you when you are overseas doing doing the best you can to actually understand other people without just judging them um thank you let's backtrack just a moment for those in our audience who may not know who current col McCormick was will you please enlighten us so Colonel McCormick was part of the family the medil family that owned the Chicago Daily News yeah Chicago tribute sorry his family owned the New York daily news and some other papers uh but he's the one that became the publisher and he was a very quirky guy to say the least um he tried to Institute he did Institute his own idea of how certain spellings for American words that were different that sounded moronic uh uh and um he he was a great rival the paper was a rival of the Chicago Daily News but a much lesser newspaper until the 1960s 7s uh because he was so heavy-handed uh and he was very right he was very Republican and that also bled into the newspaper but he also had some very great foreign correspondents uh William Shire and uh and other people like that uh thank you Jack we have question from kayn picket other than War correspondence what are some of the most important types of reporting that foreign correspondents cover so that's a great question so obviously Wars are important um foreign one of the difficulties of being a foreign correspondent is that you really have to be able to cover almost anything you have to cover politics you have to cover conflict you have to cover culture theater art uh you have to cover the environment you have to know a lot about a lot of things you'd have to be able to uh be your own little mini Newsroom as it were and uh that's one of the reasons why being a foreign correspondent has always been one of the most more most gloried jobs that on the one hand you were abroad you weren't right next to your editors although we may be they may be more closer today than they were in the past they still were not in The Newsroom uh which did give them some autonomy and uh they were paid well they were the first to get regularly get by Lines by lines were very rare but foreign correspondents because the investment you had in them they became personalities and so they became lionized uh and the best ones uh were able to write lots of different kinds of stories uh I I think the kinds of stories we need to be looking at today that are important are are ones this is my own PR predilection I realize it I've always been more interested in stories that explain what's happening uh and try to and try to provide context so people can understand events better and so there are trade stories we need to think about that are um uh that are important uh I think clearly environmental stories are important uh migration stories and uh Refugee stories are very important uh uh you know I hadn't said this in the earlier my earlier list of stories that need to be covered but one that really needs to be covered and it is being covered but we can do more and more on it is try to understand why so many countries believe that democracy isn't necessarily a very enviable system of government you know in the past 30 40 years ago even countries that transgressed and were autocracies uh or uh you know tyrannies would say they were Democratic in some way you know they would try to say what they were doing was Democratic now many countries feel that saying you're Democratic why would we want to be Democratic like you like look what happens in your country I mean how Democratic is it to have people invade the capital building or deny that elections were won were were lost when they when they were and and so uh but that's not the reason this that's a reason for us to be criticized but it's not the reason why countries are choosing more authoritarian governments and I think we need to know more about that it's it's it's not true as as many political scientists used to say that democracies never fight with each other that's I'm afraid that's an oversimplification but it is true that govern that the rule of law and adherence to certain kinds of norms do help us get along and as a result of that we need to understand what it is that's making countries decide that they don't care about these Norms or don't think that uh don't think the democratic government is really a viable way to operate because it loses a common language for us in dealing with those countries we need to know much more about that and while we can decry what they're doing we need to understand why it is that in so many countries the people think this is okay or are willing to accept it I ran across a quote that said a country that has uh Democratic or Republic in its name is usually neither um we have a question from Mildred W how much should foreign correspondents involve themselves in the stories they are reporting on such as providing help to a suffering family in a war zone and how objective uh or how should objective reporting be reconciled with moral or ethical obligations well you know I have a friend who uh Peter copelan uh who was a very fine foreign correspondent in Washington bureau chief and by the way wouldbe journalists should read his Memoir um because it's very good it's a very good Memoir and uh Peter tells a story of one of his reporters when he was a bureau chief Peter covered a lot of Wars but one of his reporters who was covering covering the war in Iraq and decided and told and he was embedded and his view was that he would be with those reporters but he would never carry a gun he would never do anything to be involved in the war and one night they were all he was out there with a tank unit and the tank unit said to him you're going to have a turn turn and watch you know well the rest of us sleep and he said no I won't do that well um I think that's a bit far-fetched I think if you're one of those guys you better serve your term but I don't necessarily support the idea of picking up a gun unless your life is immediately threatened and I think that being embedded does have certain present certain problems of being too involved with the war although a ground level view of what goes on is also important um that's sort of one way to look at this another way is there are certain moments when people are in distress and as a human being you have to help them that doesn't mean however that your job is to color the news in a direction that they might favor um it's one thing to be humanitarian but it's another thing to write stories that are propaganda under that that are purposely propagandistic and so I think you know I think you have to decide while you're on the ground uh how you try to draw that line but I will say having said all that I will I will say something else that I think uh adds complexity to this I think there is a lot to be said for journalists and particularly foreign correspondents to sometimes write in the first person now the school of Journalism that I grew up in you know was you never you never talked about yourself in the story it was a famous Story Once about how there was a fire in the AP headquarters in New York and when the AP covered the story they never talked to any other reporters they never qu quote any other reporters about what happened they only quoted the fire department well you know but but it's a good rule in many ways because it's a reminder that you're supposed to be an observer not a participant uh but it is also true that you are an observer and you are a creature of How You observe and what you see at any given time and sometimes it's good to say this is what I saw this is what I saw and this is how I saw it the way a scientist doesn't experiment you know I did it this way at this time I did this these were the ingredients I added in other words we evaluate the the value of the experiment by trying to understand the conditions under which it was done and um because everybody exists in a certain place at a certain time under certain circumstances all of those things can have an impact on what you what you see and how you report it not because you're biased per se not because you have an agenda but because that's what you see and that allows the reader I think to say okay I understand Jack Hamilton saw this at that point and it makes uh it it adds a level of credibility I think to the story now having said that I think you could go even further and I go back to Vincent Sheen whom I admire so much Vincent Sheen was a very emotional guy he had nervous breakdowns once in a while um and he was in uh Austria when the Nazis took over and it's called the AAS and he was there and he covered it and he covered it for the New York Herald Tribune uh shean oftentimes worked as a freelancer but he worked for the herald which was a pretty was a respectable basically Republican newspaper and he um this story was on the front page by a person who was a contract reporter for them now not a staff member was a lead story under his by line and at the end of it he I I wish I had marked that I could read it to you but at the end of it he says something like this there are a lot of people that thinks what's happening here is just kind of a you know a few dissidents who kind of support the Nazis but I want to tell you that in the time I've been here the last weeks and having and I can't and I cannot and I I have I have observed something else I can't give you a source for any of these things but it's what I've seen and it is that the na the Nazi national socialism appeals to a wide range of people disaffected youth people out of work even some intellectuals and the only way this will end is in World War that's an incredible story that's an incredible story he said it with great Authority he told you what he knew what he didn't know how got it in a in a condensed sort of way now I don't think I'd want every one of my reporters going out and pontificating on every story so I understand the pitfalls of that but uh you want people who have the capacity to size things up for you and there are other ways it could have been done perhaps more in accordance with the way with our standards of how we source and how we frame stories uh but there's a lot to be said for somebody saying here's here's what I found out here's what it looks like to me thank you so much um we have a traditional last question that we want to ask but Dan has put in the chat a link we promised you a recipe for French 75 uh and how you can get that from John's book uh and there are some variations on that so uh we want to keep our promise uh on that front um the um traditional last question for these talks uh is this what does press freedom to mean to you Jack if you'll close us out with that please right so I know that when you ask this question you generally expect uh and get py uh comments designed to be quotable about the joys of working in a country that allows free speech and I I will not deny that I relish the opportunity even in my my 70s now to continue writing and Reporting and thinking about what's going on and be able to express myself on it but I also think to be honest that I think we have to be careful about platitudes right now uh large members numbers of the public have their doubts about journalists and how well they use their rights to cover the news of course they confuse some journalists with people who have a specific agenda they're not journalist at all they just present themselves journalists but nevertheless they have concerns there are members of the Supreme Court that are making noises that they think we should reconsider the First Amendment and there are liberals like Tim woo the um the uh Columbia University lawyer law professor and also uh somebody who's been in both the Obama and B administrations working on social media issues uh who has raised the question of whether the First Amendment really fits conditions as they exist today he argues that technology has made information very plentiful so it's not scarce anymore and that the first amendment was created to deal with scarce information and make sure that that information could get out now he says the scarcity is enough listeners who can hear the news because they're always being interdicted by false news and uh it's an interesting concept I'm not saying I buy it completely but he does call for enforcement mechanisms and it may call cause call for some rules and regulations about how we manage speech I'm not saying I buy these but I don't see how we can ignore that we'd face a world in which these become very important questions uh there are people in the Supreme Court whose idea of what the first amendment should be I'm I'm almost certain are at odds with mine but I can imagine that we can f that we need to find mechanisms to deal with uh transgressions of foreign speech I had a professor a Chinese Professor who once used to we always used to say freedom freedom that's great but freedom to do what and I think we have to ask ourselves what Freedom how are we using that freedom all right uh want to thank those of you who submitted questions and made our conversation uh possible and more interesting please join me in thanking John Jack Maxwell Hamilton for an interesting and fascinating conversation if you want to be informed of future IC talks be sure to subscribe to our newsletter Dan has posted the link in the chat box you can also drop us a line at the email address Dan has put in the chat uh box again many thanks to Jack and to each of you for joining us this evening be careful stay well and May the journalism be with you good night thank you thank you Jack