Foreign Correspondents: Too Much Crusading

Writing with the authority of long service as a foreign correspondent for the New York Herald Tribune and The New Yorker magazine, Christopher Rand made no secret of his disapproval of the performance of his colleagues. While watching the overseas press corps cover a war in Asia, Rand became convinced that “the crusading or bellicose tradition of U.S. journalism goes badly with foreign reporting.” On their foreign beat, he wrote, the crusaders seemed “more eager to put on an act than to right wrongs. Or perhaps they had fallen into mere hostility for its own sake. It seemed to me that some reporters out from the States were happiest when they had a devil to chase−when they could see a story in terms of someone’s malfeasance.”

Vietnam? Santo Domingo? No, Rand was writing about reporters in Korea, and about the press corps that had covered the earlier Communist takeover in China. Originally published in a 1954 issue of Nieman Reports, the magazine put out by Nieman Fellows at Harvard, Rand’s comments have been reprinted in Reporting the News (Belknap; $6.50), an anthology of such essays selected by former Nieman Curator Louis Lyons. Spanning almost 20 years, most of the articles now seem dated. Rand’s modest faultfinding is as contemporary as the latest dateline.

“By role,” wrote Rand, “a foreign correspondent is a commentator or analyst, not a crusader.” What he needs is judgment, and historical perspective−attributes that are all too often lacking, fn China, Rand recalls, even the ablest of the reporters seemed to spend just about all his time exposing corruption in he Nationalist government. While “you needed to know that various officials were grafting, and you needed to say so at the right times, you didn’t have o make a sensation of it as it was only a detail in the chaos of the times.”

In Korea, when “a medium high American officer was relieved of his command for what, so far as I could tell, was incompetence and nonperformance on a blatant scale, some of the homeside boys took this up and made him a martyr, ranting in paragraph after paragraph about the sins of the ‘top brass.’ I thought there was an air of needless controversy−professional hostility−about those reporters.” Almost as if he were looking forward toward Vietnam, Rand concluded that the reporters were indulging in the same sort of “perfunctory muckraking, or imitation of crusading,” that they thought of as so large a part of their job at home.