The Correspondents
Understanding what triggers the desire to rush toward and cover a crisis isn’t an easy task.
Rome 2016
Stuffing a few shirts and some notebooks into a small backpack before jumping onto a plane to reach a spot that everyone else is trying to flee requires a perfect cocktail of idealism and delusion. The necessity of both parts of that mixture is why the typical foreign correspondent—the war reporter, the embedded journalist, the in-country stringer—is typically a young writer, full of romanticism and anxious to race forward even when good sense says to stop. This isn’t to discount the many experienced foreign correspondents who do crowd capitals whenever there’s a crisis, but even they will admit that the peak years come in the beginning.
Understanding what triggers the desire to rush toward and cover a crisis isn’t an easy task, nor are any of the potential solutions comprehensive. Human motivations are multifaceted and not easily categorized or reducible to discrete causes. In describing a motivation—or the spark that begins a war—at least we do know that any monocausal explanation is surely wrong. Yet we also know that there’s a moment of impulse. A spark that shoves someone into this rather peculiar profession. This is the catalytic moment when what’s been brewing inside someone in an unseen, mysterious manner finally bubbles over into a conscious decision to act.
If we are looking for commonalities that cause the spark, however, there are two books that cram the metaphorical back pockets of many foreign correspondents, and it doesn’t require much imagination to understand why.
Corker looked at him sadly. ‘You know, you’ve got a lot to learn about journalism. Look at it this way. News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead. We’re paid to supply news. If someone else has sent a story before us, our story isn’t news. Of course there’s colour. Colour is just a lot of bull’s-eyes about nothing. It’s easy to write and easy to read, but it costs too much in cabling, so we have to go slow on that. See?’
Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop represents the farcical half of the spectrum. His 1938 novel of mistaken identity follows a conflict in a fictional country that careens from a sappy, bumbling journalist’s pen. In its absurd humor we have the story of journalism as farce as understood by those who have chosen it as their profession, while, crucially, feeling a little ridiculous about their choice. The necessity of telling the vital story, of laboring to spread what must be heard, eventually begins to feel a little less vital. Journalists who quote Scoop have a humor that’s cynical, flippant, even a bit smug—it is the humor of the cagey veteran who still plies the trade but does so full of spite and disillusion at the lost, seemingly pointless, years they’ve spent reporting on all those most important subjects that have the least amount of readers.
Now I can concede that my observation about Scoop might be dated, and perhaps the quotes I’ve heard repeated from the novel are from a different generation of journalist, one that’s no longer at the forefront, with correspondents today needing a different writer to encapsulate what is sure to be an incoming cynicism. What I am still confident about, however, is that the other book in the back pocket of many young correspondents remains just as prominent today as it was in past decades.
I went back to my post on the roof with a feeling of concentrated disgust and fury. When you are taking part in events like these you are, I suppose, in a small way, making history, and you ought by rights to feel like an historical character. But you never do, because at such times the physical details always outweigh everything else. Throughout the fighting I never made the correct ‘analysis’ of the situation that was so glibly made by journalists hundreds of miles away. What I was chiefly thinking about was not the rights and wrongs of this miserable internecine scrap, but simply the discomfort and boredom of sitting day and night on that intolerable roof, and the hunger which was growing worse and worse—for none of us had had a proper meal since Monday.
Compared to Scoop’s satire, George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia is direct and solemn and takes itself seriously through a tone that is, well, aslant to the contemporary tendency. And this earnestness about such a vital struggle is part of its appeal to so many young idealists. It is Orwell’s account of the Spanish Civil War, one of the many wars before the War, though perhaps the most proximate or consequential contest in Europe—with its revanchism, nationalism, proxy battalions, and, most crucially for those modern readers with dilated eyes, its quick shift from the local to the international.
And many of the early chapters involve the labor of sorting through the endless factions, and to cataloging all the national and ethnic and ideological boundaries—each of those elements separate, except when they’re not. For readers unfamiliar with the book, this isn’t the Orwell of high school English, the Orwell of the more straightforward and accessible novels 1984 and Animal Farm. In Homage to Catalonia we have a muddier story, and we have a more steely, determined, and partisan Orwell, a writer with an agenda and a clear enemy.
It is not a nice thing to see a Spanish boy of fifteen carried down the line on a stretcher, with a dazed white face looking out from among the blankets, and to think of the sleek persons in London and Paris who are writing pamphlets to prove that this boy is a Fascist in disguise. One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting.
Of course reading a story about the Spanish Civil War is a bit like listening to an arson investigator explain the minutiae of a fire that took a house, then a block, and eventually a country. Orwell labors through every detail of the inferno, with a meticulousness that can only come from the idealistic. He has a story, and the doggedness to ensure that the facts are heard. This book motivates so many young correspondents because it contains all the great elements of youthful passion: a clear division between all that’s good and all that’s certainly not, the awareness of the coming tragedy, and a tone of earnestness on every page that most of us, alas, outgrow.
When I flipped through my copy this morning, I noticed a passage that I underlined years ago in Lionel Trilling’s 1952 Introduction, a date that’s all the more arresting when read today:
But the Spanish war lies a decade and a half behind us, and nowadays our sense of history is being destroyed by the nature of our history—our memory is short and it grows shorter under the rapidity of the assault of events.
Orwell left the battle after being shot through the neck and targeted for capture and execution by Soviet agents. By the time he fled the country, he was disillusioned by his own side, although the chaotic and contradictory nature of the war also permitted him to more clearly see the coming struggle and draw the appropriate lines that few others saw. Many were against Fascism, many were against Stalinism, few were against both. To contest one side was to join the other, yet this wasn’t a binary that Orwell accepted, leaving him in a rather lonely position.
Between these two books there’s a slight tension, and it is the tension of the ideologue and the fatalist, it is the tension of those who never stop dreaming and those who can’t ever sleep. Perhaps this tension is necessary, as a world of either extreme would be a horror. A good newsroom will calibrate between these competing impulses—not straying too far away from the most romantic of possibilities, while still remembering that the result of most crises is simply a bigger crisis. So there should be some skeptics in every room who are cautious when the dreamers get a bit too cocky and start tearing down fences. Yet, at other times, there’s a cold and patient resolve that comes from the awareness of clearly drawn lines—when absolutely everything you value is set against absolutely everything you hate.
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