Page 78 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

THINKING ABOUT CULTURE IN A GLOBAL ECUMENE

ideas. The intriguing relationship between news and culture was also some-
thing which I began thinking about during my Washington fieldwork, not least
when in early April 1968, after Martin Luther King was assassinated, riots
erupted in Washington as in many other cities, and I found my neighborhood
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surrounded one morning by the National Guard. How does the news of a
place reflect its culture?
Indeed the term ‘news’ is interestingly ambiguous. News can refer to some-
thing that has just happened, or something can be news mostly because we
simply have not heard of it before, and find it interesting and even surprising.
Certainly the news media are primarily oriented to the first of these kinds, to
‘hard news’, and foreign correspondents tend to take pride in, and be excited
by, being present when ‘history is made’. But that other kind of news has some
particular possibilities for foreign correspondents. A number of things may have
a long-term presence in a remote country without our learning of them, until
someone tells us. What newspeople describe as ‘feature stories’ are often of this
latter sort, and in this way become most like ethnography, the reporting of
anthropologists. I have met correspondents who have done stories on the
everyday activities and hardships of Samburu pastoralists in northern Kenya,
and on the informal economy of African city streets. These are the kinds of
topics anthropologists also choose, even if they report in other formats, to other
(smaller) audiences.
We may see that in an era of global interconnectedness, each one of us has
ideas of other areas of the world as parts of our personal cultural repertoires, as
indeed Kafanchan townspeople had when they brought up possibilities of
import–export businesses or study abroad in their conversations with me. But
how do we arrive at these ideas? There may be areas about which we form our
understandings on the basis of a wide range of sources – we know people from
there, we have even been there ourselves, we remember at least a bit of what we
may have learned about them in school. And then, in addition, there is the
news flow. But as I have become especially aware when I have considered the
efforts of foreign correspondents, there are other areas about which many of us
know little apart from what that news flow brings; Africa, for many Americans
and Europeans, is a major example. And here it becomes particularly important
to think about definitions of news, and priorities in reporting. The kind of
everyday life I experienced in Kafanchan may get into feature stories occasion-
ally, but much of the time the emphasis is on ‘hard news’, and ‘hard news’ tends
to be bad news: reporting on conflict, violence, disasters, or other kinds of
trouble. There is a classic line by one veteran foreign correspondent which
others in the craft are fond of quoting: ‘Whenever you find hundreds of thou-
sands of sane people trying to get out of a place and a little bunch of madmen
struggling to get in, you know the latter are newspapermen.’ (The bureau chief
for the Associated Press in Johannesburg said he had had this quotation under a
glass cover on his desk for years.)
The correspondents I talked with in Johannesburg have certainly had a

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