Page 353 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

| Parachute Journal sm: Internat onal News Report ng

part of that skill set is working with others who can bridge gaps in knowledge,
access, and language.
While not inexpensive, coverage by parachute correspondents is generally
much less costly than maintaining full-time correspondents in many loca-
tions, where salary, lodging, transportation, and staff support frequently require
supplementation with full-time security. Many locations are considered hard-
ship postings, and elite journalists are less likely to wish to remain in them for
extended periods, reintroducing the element of lack of familiarity with each
successive replacement. There is justification for bringing in an experienced
reporter from another location to provide either periodic or crisis reporting.
Research can be quickly assembled to provide background for a given situation,
but it takes significant climbing of learning curves to gain the hard-earned ex-
perience of choosing the right vehicle and driver; disassembling a telephone and

John Barrett: ParaChute Journalist BeFore
there were ParaChutes

The practice of stationing foreign correspondents anywhere but in a very few important
European capitals did not exist before the twentieth century, but reportage from around the
world found its way home on a regular basis. When journalist-turned-diplomat John Barrett
passed through the Philippines aboard an American ship following the outbreak of Asia’s
first indigenous nationalist revolution against Spain in 1896, the archipelago and its nearly
8 million inhabitants were completely unfamiliar to U.S. readers. Barrett, addressing the rela-
tively sophisticated readership of the North American Review, warned in 1897 against heed-
ing advice from a breed of commentator increasingly ubiquitous amid the ever-growing
news media: “Our commercial interests must not be kept from the conquest by the reports
of retired manufacturers who have made their own fortunes at home and report impressions
gained by superficial observations of leisurely travel; by correspondents who come in by one
door, as it were, and go out by the next.”
Praising the islands’ “inexhaustible and varied resources, which at present are only partially
developed,” Barrett pronounced the Philippines “a fit land for rebellion and insurrection,”
claiming that “the spirits of air and earth alike nurture unrest.” His list of first impressions,
trade statistics, and generalizations about the “lazy” but “gentle, polite and hospitable”
Filipinos pointed to a certain covetous embrace of the milieu’s value. Noting that Manila’s
battlements would be no match for American naval weaponry, he dismissed the inconve-
nient fact of the revolt as an unthreatening trifle, claiming without the benefit of having en-
countered the rebels in person that “it would appear to be only a question of a few months
before the flame of revolution is reduced to a spark.” Within a year, U.S. troops would be on
the ground on the main island of Luzon, and within two years they would be mired in a grisly
guerrilla war that would in time bring thousands of U.S. casualties and uncounted hundreds
of thousands of dead Filipinos. By then, Barrett had moved on to new adventures.

See John Barrett, “America’s Interest in East Asia,” North American Review, March 1896.