Page 350 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Parachute Journal sm: Internat onal News Report ng |

ethnoCentriC ParaChutes?
A key byproduct of news organizations’ reliance on parachute journalists is that we are often
invited to see a distant world in chaos through ethnocentric perspectives. Foreign countries
most frequently become news when they experience a coup, earthquake, or other such di-
saster. Amid such chaos, the highly paid, perfectly coifed network correspondent hits the
ground and calmly explains the catastrophe. Thus, while war, political scandal, famine, and
pestilence rage on with foreign-looking others populating the television screen, the white
American reporter can become the lone point of identification, as the rational observer pro-
viding viewers with a stark visual contrast between (foreign) chaos, and (Western) rational
order. Moreover, when parachute journalists are unfamiliar with local customs and culture,
they may prove poor interpreters of what both they and the camera witness, hence further
exacerbating notions of foreign irrationality, and continuing an age-old subjugation of for-
eign voices, whereby the West speaks for and on behalf of “the rest,” and whereby the
West is granted the power to make sense of and play cultural analyst to foreign nations and
peoples. Travelers in a foreign land commonly focus on difference, strangeness, and pecu-
liarity, as centuries of traveler’s tales have shown us, and so a perpetual risk for parachute
journalists is that they make foreign cultures seem yet more foreign. For example, in times
of war, divisions of “us” and “them” can be made all the more prominent when as viewers,
much of our only contact with “them” comes through reporters who have little cultural un-
derstanding of those featured with their cameras and interviews.

In a world in which news often develops where no journalists are present,
parachute journalism is an inevitability. Its various iterations unfold from cir-
cumstances guided primarily by the economics of news organizations. Even
where full-time correspondents are stationed, they cannot be everywhere at
once. A reporter schooled in the ins and outs of Jerusalem will likely discover
in Tyre a new situation for which previous reporting has provided little or no
preparation. The circumstances drawing journalists to a given locale often rap-
idly transform the setting and its significance, exacerbating the difficulty of op-
erating safely and knowledgeably.

FinDing onE’s LoCaL LEgs
The problem, while made more prevalent by the diminution of the foreign
staffing by news organizations in recent years, is as old as reporting itself. Re-
porters not based in a place have an increased likelihood of getting basic facts
wrong, drawing conclusions from insufficient evidence, and lacking historical
and cultural familiarity with the settings in which their stories are situated.
At the same time, the greater experience and sophistication of many corre-
spondents whose employers can afford to “parachute” them into a situation
can mitigate against such problems to a substantial degree. Purveyors of news
are likely to select their best-qualified reporters, often with previous foreign