MEDIA STUDIES

The end of the foreign news empire

STEPHEN GLOVER

Not so long ago all of our newspapers took foreign news very seriously. And not just the upmarket ones. The Daily Express, which only the other day dispensed with the services of its American stringer, had some 30 staff foreign correspondents as recently as the early Sixties. One of its foreign writ- ers, Rene McColl, was a household name, as famous in his day as the person who intro- duces the National Lottery draw is in ours.

Now only the Financial Times covers for- eign news with reverence, and it can be rather bland. I read its foreign pages when feeling especially virtuous and in need of self-improvement. The other broadsheets do their best but their hearts are not entire- ly in it. As for the tabloids, 'abroad' scarcely exists, save as that realm into which British people sometimes stumble, a world where a British housewife may happen to take her youthful lover.

What has happened? One explanation often cited is lack of money. Foreign news is very expensive. This is not the main rea- son, I can assure you. Most newspapers are more profitable than they were 30 or 40 years ago. The Daily Mail, if it chose, could have a correspondent in every major capi- tal, but it does not. Besides, new technology makes the whole business less expensive than it used to be, as we discovered when setting up the foreign pages of the Indepen- dent. A correspondent with a laptop com- puter in a flat is all you really need. Thirty years ago you would have probably had an office with all the trimmings, a telex opera- tor and other office personnel.

Another explanation put forward is the `dumbing down' of newspapers and broad- casting organisations. They have fallen into the hands of marketing men who believe that Ulan Bator is the name of the new West Ham striker. Here we' may be nearer the truth of things. There is an assumption even on our broadsheets that readers have intel- lectual problems grasping the concept of `abroad', even though they love nothing more than jumping into the Volvo and head- ing for Tuscany. As for women readers, they surely don't wish to bother their tiny heads with the composition of the French Cabinet.

There may be some truth in this view of things, though it seems to me to presume too much on our ignorance and insularity. But if we are less concerned than our parents and grandparents about abroad — less con- cerned, perhaps, than we were even ten years ago — why should this be so? Part of the answer is to be found in an enchanting new book by Richard Beeston. Looking for Trou- ble (Brassey's, £16.95) sets out only to tell the story of Mr Beeston's fascinating experiences as a foreign correspondent, but in the pro- cess it helps to explain why international affairs grip us less than they used to.

When Mr Beeston arrived in Cyprus in the early 1950s to work for a radio station, `Britain was still the dominant power' in the Middle East. So it was in Africa, where Mr Beeston was sent many times over the next 20 years, first for the News Chronicle and then the Daily Telegraph. In the Gulf, Lebanon and East and Southern Africa, Mr Beeston found himself writing about the dismemberment of Empire and its con- sequences. And this great story, inescapably interesting to many British readers, was intertwined with another irre- sistible drama: the Cold War. Mr Beeston ended up as the Telegraph's bureau chief in Moscow and Washington, but behind almost every war and coup he covered in Africa and the Middle East lay the same East-West conflict.

Mr Beeston is no dry-as-dust intellectual. He is a master of the amusing story, the concise anecdote that illuminates the whole. He can evoke the eccentricities of the dying Empire with the telling vignette. There is a Scottish acquaintance 'whose only vice, as far as is known, was playing the bagpipes in the bath.' Kim Philby's father (he knew Kim well, and many years later bumped into him at the Bolshoi) was `a rascally, outrageous old character who was probably responsible for his son's incredibly flawed and complex character'.

St John Philby

converted to Islam, became a close friend of King ibn Saud, abandoned Kim's mother Dora, took a Saudi slave girl as his second wife and became a successful businessman in Saudi Arabia. Like Kim, an outsider, he had a love-hate relationship with England, sub- scribed to the Times, was a member of the Athenaeum and, whenever possible, would watch a Test match.

Take no prisoners.'

He also brings alive the chicanery and chivalry of the old Fleet Street, describing how during the uprising in southern Congo in 1960 foreign journalists would change money at the black-market rate and slip across into Northern Rhodesia (now Zam- bia) to bank the proceeds.

On one journey back to Elizabethville the Daily Mail's Peter Younghusband and John Monks of the Daily Express found a newly arrived Baltimore Sun correspondent and a CBS cameraman being beaten close to death by a group of intoxicated Katagense troops at the border post.... When the group got back to Kitwe the Baltimore Sun reporter was in bad shape and had to be heavily sedated.

Younghusband and Monks filed their stories and then suddenly realised that their Ameri- can colleague was about to miss probably the best story of his career. Feeling sorry for him, in best Fleet Street style they wrote a sizzling story in his name and sent it to his paper. The Baltimore Sun splashed it, it was run by agen- cies in papers round the world and was even nominated for a Pulitzer.

Is this fact or fiction? It doesn't really matter. The anecdote tells a truth about newspapers, as does a probably apocryphal story about the Daily Express's famous cor- respondent Sefton Delmer, who described how he had walked through the smoulder- ing ruins of the Reichstag with Adolf Hitler.

Having dictated the story, surely one of the most dramatic of the century, he asked the news telephonist whether there were any queries. "Ang on Mr Delmer, I'll ask the news desk.' Long pause. 'The night editor wants to know how many fire appliances were at the scene.'

Sometimes this book makes one's heart ache for a vanished world, other times one's sides almost split with mirth. The point is that on the newspapers Mr Beeston worked for, foreign news was deemed to count for more than anything else. It no longer does. The main reason is that the inseparable dra- mas of the Cold War and the dismember- ment of Empire have died away.

Can anything be put in their place? I don't see Europe fulfilling the role in the near future. It is too disparate a story. The answer, if there is one, lies in the writing, as Mr Beeston's book wonderfully attests. Good writers can find their own dramas. That is what we once tried to do on the Independent's foreign pages. But this is the stuff of another column.