Foreign News

Are the foreign correspondents of American newspapers incompetent ? Ayes and nays ring out in united dissonance. Editor and Publisher, trade paper of newspaperdom, took an attitude which moved editors to defend their correspondents. Herbert Bayard Swope, Executive Editor of The New York World, led the editors, ejaculating: "One would think . . . that America lacked trained observers in Europe and elsewhere! Surely ... a false impression! All of the great American newspapers maintain groups of able correspondents abroad, who are thoroughly equipped to do the job, as best it can be done. . . . These writers are, primarily, collectors of facts. The interpretations placed upon their expositions are made by men schooled in that branch of journalism--editorial writers." The Detroit Free Press was drawn into a similar dispute by an assertion of The Manchester Guardian that: "For four years the American press, though supremely well posted upon such matters as the oats of Papyrus, has told Americans extraordinarily little about the realties of post-war Europe."

The Detroit Free Press passed the following animadversion: " Every capital in Europe is being combed for news by American correspondents representing several news associations, and a greater number of individual papers than ever were represented in Europe before. These correspondents have supplied this country with accurate information, and it is possible for them to write with a detachment unattainable by European journalists because their country is not entangled in the troubles and dangers they describe."

The fact of the matter is that all views are apt to be exaggerated, and the foregoing are no exception to the fact. Undoubtedly Europe is well- covered, but the slogan of foreign correspondents seems to be: "What does the American public want ?" These fact-collectors are governed accordingly. If any big movement takes place, such as the French occupation of the Ruhr, the foreign correspondents are less concerned with fact-gathering than they are with construing the importance and probable effect of what occurs. The function of a correspondent is to write a factual narrative of events coupled with pertinent comment from others; in no sense should his despatches infringe on the sacred domain of the editorial writer. It is because of this fact that the European news in American journals is so often contradictory.

For example, not long ago Manhattan journals printed authoritatively that Germany had ceased passive resistance in the Ruhr. Actually no such thing had occurred and did not occur until a fortnight later. Another journal recently received a despatch from its foreign correspondent to the effect that Queen Zita was living near Vienna. The truth was that she had not budged from Spain.