Foreign affairs
Sir: Andrew King (Letters, 6 April) usefully reminds journalists that the squabbles of their trade often bore readers. Nevertheless the recent changes to the Observer raise an issue that is of interest to buyers of newspa- pers, namely the quality of foreign cover- age.
Shaky economics and shrinking post- imperial horizons have reduced the press's capacity, and appetite, for reporting the world. But under the Observer's last two short-lived editors foreign coverage was further damaged by two attitudes that infect other papers too.
Attitude One is that foreign news is bor- ing. Abroad is therefore treated as a source of what the trade calls 'human interest' sto- ries, the sexier the more horrifying, or the funnier the better. Random readability replaces an attempt (on readers' behalf) to make coherent sense of the world.
The old solution — to appoint knowl- edgeable correspondents with the writing skill to seduce readers — is expensive, but also runs counter to attitude Two. The ideal of the modern 'news executive' is a world peopled with stringers and journos on short- term contracts. They are young, therefore hopefully malleable and, equally important, cheap. They are expected to write what they are told (thanks to modern communications they can be controlled 24 hours a day) and to put up with being rewritten if they do not file what the executive wants. The result may not be an honest product.
The Observer's new editor, Will Hutton, is surely aware of the problem, but the only remedy at his disposal may be the integra- tion of the Observer and Guardian foreign coverage. The snag is that the Observer's view of the world isn't, or wasn't in the days when it had one, the same as the Guardian's. This matters, because only a third of Observer readers also read the Guardian. It also raises the question whether Guardian correspondents on duty seven days a week will want, or be able, to produce their best writing for a Sunday paper to which they have had no reason to feel particularly loyal.
Mark Frankland 11 Delvine Road,
London SW6
Previous page
