And veterans might be aching still from those overseas assignments when they lugged kilos of books, notes, maps, guide manuals, and research printouts through Third World airport customs, and invariably up steep stairways of hotels and rooming houses without elevators.
These hunched over veterans are retiring now in unbridled envy of today’s foreign correspondents. Though their ranks are vastly diminished in numbers, these reporters whisk through international airports to their hotels assured of instant access to the knowledge of the world in photos and billions of words, all attainable through tiny computer chips in their paper-weight laptops.
Besides speed and storage space, the technology has multiplied the reporters’ source base a million-fold. Spanning the virtual boundaries even of rigid police states, social media can put journalists in touch with otherwise unreachable contacts, some working in the bowels of the National Security Agency.
Herein, of course, reside the contours of new possibilities for journalists at home and abroad. Some of these key contacts, with proper vetting, can be maintained as “fixers” and local stringers. With due diligence, a network of reliable sources can be structured, refined and maintained in countries where news may sporadically break out over time.
As a longstanding practice, foreign correspondents are often foragers feeding off the plates of local reporters.
“Usually arriving late for a breaking story, frazzled, and with the wrong language” as I wrote in a Columbia Journalism Review article on the subject, “these skilled swashbucklers find themselves hampered abroad by the bluntness of government tyranny and lacking contacts and the subtleties of culture that back home allowed them to master the journalistic access so vital to prying out information for vital stories.
“Thus the work of the foreign correspondent, no matter how determined, is invariably indebted to the digging of local reporters.”
Journalists might explore this rich vein these days with handy apps and social media. This technology could expedite the design of a refreshingly updated modus operandi for extracting creditable journalism in a timely fashion from difficult out-of-the-way places. And it can be done with a meager outlay of travel and expense money—as demanded by media firms nowadays.
Another method of judging the efficacy of the technology upon today’s journalism is to calibrate its effect upon a chief target of the craft: government.
Serving as a watchdog of government has long been a cardinal goal of the news reporter since the drafting of the First Amendment.
“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government,” Thomas Jefferson went so far as to say, “I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”
Functionally, the co-existence of the media and government in the U.S. over the years has often resembled a funicular, two cable cars straining against each other, neither quite free to go its own separate way.
As for the influence of the Internet on government, we have witnessed some rather dramatic disruptions. The Wikileaks case, stirred by Army Private Bradley Manning, rocked the military establishment; just as the NSA was fleeced of its intelligence files by Edward Snowden.
Both cases involved the massive dumping of classified and undifferentiated government documents into the public domain.
Each protagonist was enabled, in part, by media in the execution of what the U.S. government considers criminal, if not treasonous acts. Manning was court marshaled, convicted, and sentenced to 35 years in prison. Snowden remains a fugitive abroad in Russia.
In the wake of these two scandals, the U.S. government does not dice words when assessing the effect of the impact that high-speed communication technology has visited upon its intelligence operations.
“The Internet,” said Secretary of State John Kerry recently, “makes it much harder to govern.”
Heavily involved in the negotiations with Russia over Snowden, Secretary Kerry limited his critique to the Internet, minus the enabling hand of the media, old and new.
"Ever since the end of the Cold War, forces have been unleashed that were tamped down for centuries by dictators, and that was complicated further by this little
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“Were it left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers, or newspapers without government, I should not hesitate a moment to prefer the latter.”