Foreign Correspondents' Barroom Talk   

Who Stole the News? Why We Can't Keep Up With What Happens in the World And What We Can Do About It
By Mort Rosenblum
John Wiley & Sons

Who Stole the News? Why We Can't Keep Up With What Happens in the World And What We Can Do About It
By Mort Rosenblum
John Wiley & Sons
298 pages; $24.95

Imagine sitting in a fly-ridden bar on the edge of big news somewhere halfway around the world. Daily stories filed, you and your colleagues are emptying a bottle of whiskey and recalling absent pals, recounting past exploits and rehashing what's wrong with the news biz these days.

Imagine, also, that someone is sitting there taking notes, and you'll have a pretty fair sense of the contents of Mort Rosenblum's new book.

An Associated Press special correspondent, Rosenblum has dashed around the world covering news for some 25 years. Building on his earlier book, "Coups and Earthquakes," he has written this volume as a guide to help news consumers understand how foreign news is made and what they can do to make it better. The result is edifying and at times amusing. But, like any boozy after-hours conversation, it's also full of insider gossip, weak in analysis and sometimes plain silly.

Listen in:

• Among the fine folks met on the rocky road to foreign news, there is Tony Horwitz of the Wall Street Journal and the "Hey-This-Is-Fun school" who "wrote us all into the ground" covering the Persian Gulf War, and the Washington Post's Jonathan Randal, who "is smart enough not to try predicting the future." And, oh, don't forget the Los Angeles Times' Mark Fineman, who Rosenbaum says was a jerk until the Washington Post's Bill Claiborne made a project of straightening him out.

• In the escapade department, as Rosenblum would put it, is his own story about filing an expense account from the Congo with this item: "Buying life in street, $25." Rosenblum paid off a gun-toting soldier who threatened him. AP approved the expense, Rosenblum says, but "that was in a more profligate time."

• Which gets us to that part of the conversation about who "stole" the news. The answer, Rosenblum says, is that the "grinches at the top have pushed aside serious reporting for stuff they think will make more money. They have sent fear through an industry built on courage."

Many journalists reading this breezy, anecdotal account will agree with Rosenblum about the decline in the quality of foreign news reporting and the dangers that poses for the United States.

Unfortunately, Rosenblum does not probe why, at a time when foreign events have more impact than ever on Americans, the media are eschewing foreign news. Owners worried about the bottom line is an old story. Rosenblum scarcely touches on the long list of complicated factors making a difference, among them the end of the Cold War and changing public attitudes toward news.

Also, Rosenblum's instinct for the glib leads him into factual errors. On the first page, for example, he suggests that in correspondent H.R. Knickerbocker's day reporters filed stories via pigeon. The day of the carrier pigeon, however, was Paul Julius Von Reuter's day, the middle of the 19th century. Knickerbocker was a reporter during World War II.

Rosenblum's solutions for getting the news back include such suggestions as these:

• Editors: "Each morning, while shaving or applying makeup, look into the mirror for a full minute and ask yourself for an update on your mission in journalism. Then go on to work."

• Consumers: "Get involved." Learn about the news business; "shop around for the best network news"; write letters to news organizations to tell them what you like and don't like. "Complain. Lobby. Explain."

The public should be more savvy about the news business and should complain to editors. But such remedies also should make consumers uneasy, rather as if a mechanic looked over their poorly running car, related the miracle of the internal combustion engine, and then suggested writing a letter of complaint to General Motors.

In the end readers will conclude that foreign correspondents' barroom talk is good fun, even informative, but not much more profound than talk at the neighborhood tavern.