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Foreign Correspondents
I see that England is chiefly peopled by suffragettes, impecunious
aristocrats, and four or five amazing society ladies, 'Fashionable
Beauties', whose names and antics are recorded, and whose photographs,
taken over 25 years ago, do steady service very regularly. I wonder
if it ever occurred to the gentlemen who send these Sunday cables
that there must be some other people over there to conduct the
gigantic export trade of Great Britain, to manage her cotton mills,
to maintain her mercantile fleet carrying seven-tenths of the
world's good, her shipping yards, and a navy that has been heard
of at times?
Alfred Harmsworth
Commenting on the way Britain was reported
in American papers, and thus identifying the
tendancy of nearly all foreign reporting
to prefer caricature and stereotype
to complicated reality.
c1903
A foreign correspondent is someone who flies around from hotel
to hotel and thinks that the most interesting thing about any
story is the fact that he has arrived to cover it.
Tom Stoppard
in 'Night and Day'
Covering Africa is 80 percent logistics and 20 percent reporting.
John Borrell
1983