Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents

Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents. Ulf Hannerz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 233 pp. $20.00 pbk. For anyone who has ever wondered how international news is constructed and who decides what news we read, or don't, about Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, the most recent book by Ulf Hannerz, Foreign News: Exploring the World of Foreign Correspondents provides a wealth of answers. Foreign News is based on interviews Hannerz conducted during the late 1990s with more than seventy foreign correspondents, international news bureau chiefs, freelancers, and columnists in New York City, Johannesburg, Tokyo, London, and Stockholm. Hannerz's interviews are complemented by examples from articles published by some of the world's leading international news providers including the Associated Press, the New York Times, Reuters, the BBC, the LA Times, the Guardian, and the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter. The net result is a multi-layered analysis, one which not only provides a wealth of descriptions about the production of international news, but offers insightful observations about how such news fits into the larger perspective of information flows across cultures and globalization as a whole. Hannerz provides an outsider's perspective on the subject of international news. He is a professor of social anthropology at Stockholm University, and his approach stems largely from his earlier ethnographic field research conducted in the areas of cultural development, urban anthropology, and the anthropology of globalization. It is within this methodological framework that he examines the profession of foreign correspondence. Hannerz's explicit aim is to explore the repertorial patterns of international news and to unearth some of the approaches foreign correspondents use to develop stories. Along the way, Hannerz chronicles the basic living arrangements, professional news obligations, and working communities that influence foreign correspondents' lives. Foreign News is also about the social construction of knowledge based on the cultural and professional obligations of the "tribe" of reporters and editors who produce information about foreign places. Hannerz draws parallels between the aims and objectives of foreign correspondents and those of cultural anthropologistsnamely, both are concerned with the daily evaluation and processing of information about different places and peoples (the anthropological "Other") in order to make sense of events and cultures with which readers may never have had any direct experience. Through such comparisons, Hannerz raises important epistemological questions about how our knowledge of world affairs is constructed-and restricted-by the biases and constraints of international news reporting as well as about the role foreign correspondents play in the process of writing both "first drafts" and longer-term versions of history. …