Abstract
To paraphrase Marc Bloch, the good historian knows that wherever she catches the scent of human flesh, there her quarry lies (The Historian’s Craft, 1953). By this and a host of scholastic benchmarks, AP Foreign Correspondents in Action, World War II to the Present certifies author Giovanna Dell’Orto, associate professor of journalism and mass communication at the University of Minnesota, as “the good historian.” Dell’Orto immersed herself in the world of Associated Press (AP) foreign correspondents through dozens of mostly face-to-face interviews with reporters who bear witness to human flesh amid destruction, despair, and death. Her methodology is superlative—grounded in the literature of oral history, transparent (Dell’Orto discloses that she worked for AP variously from 1999 to 2007), carefully cited, and coherently organized around twelve procedural themes. She yields to AP’s Terry Anderson to encapsulate the job: “The AP . . . is more than just a news organization. It is a social structure with values, and those values center around good journalism, objectivity, fairness, maintaining the highest standards you can at what you do.”
Those who fully process this dense monograph will find a seminal treatise on the postwar foreign press. Timelines thread across chapters, delineating changes in communication technology, institutional–government–press relations, gender roles, and war coverage from Korea and Vietnam to global terrorism. Dell’Orto’s mining of new lodes of journalism history enriches this and future studies. The author’s modesty in favoring others’ words is commendable, but Dell’Orto’s voice is so clear in places, I marvel at the possibilities of a future narrative history on select subjects.
But Dell’Orto’s purpose is neither biographical nor chronological. She strives to explicate process—no small feat—and succeeds admirably. Given the highly individualistic nature of an AP correspondent’s job, the task does not lend itself to quantitative analyses. Addressing this research question requires human interactions, which is laborious and draining in terms of transcription and emotional material. Subjects were scattered globally. Still, Dell’Orto applied sociological method effectively in developing an intellectual framework that reveals decades of evolution. Dell’Orto sought out reporters and spent an average two hours each asking questions designed to produce original evidence. The author cross-ruffed hundreds of hours of research into themes that reveal how the AP processes world affairs into deeply human stories, as in this excerpt by Mort Rosenblum:
Vultures too full to fly perch along the Ganges River in grim contentment. They have fed on perhaps more than half a million bodies since March. Civil war flamed through Pakistan’s eastern wing on March 25 [1971], pushing the bankrupt nation to the edge of ruin. The killing and devastation defy belief.
AP’s hardline standard of verification contrasts sharply with the freewheeling variations of each situation. Adaptation is the common thread—to locales, circumstances, technology, danger, and audiences. The one reliable attribute exhibited by AP’s “aliens” is their own resourcefulness as intruders into others’ worlds. The process involves getting there, getting up to speed, and getting to know locals or reliable fixers; sifting meaningful from obvious facts; and cultivating/protecting sources who risk imprisonment, retaliation, and death. The job comes with baggage, personal and institutional, that each correspondent must shed, and risks: weighing journalistic responsibility against danger, sacrificing personal glory for team success, avoiding the label “spy,” and trusting bureau editors to post the story. Examples fill each chapter: on language barriers (the nuances of North vs. South Korean), predicting big stories (the Soviet Union’s collapse in 1991), cultivating sources (the Pulitzer Prize–winning report on the massacre of 400 civilians at No Gun Ri by U.S. soldiers early in the Korean War), perceptions of Americans abroad (the incarceration of Terry Anderson by Hezbollah militants in Beirut). Dell’Orto also highlights the eyewitness role of AP correspondents, such as Kathy Gannon’s courageous coverage of Taliban-ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, or firsthand testimony by Malcolm Foster and Eric Talmadge on the 2011 Fukushima earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear meltdown. The chapter on audience reveals the necessity of putting the reader in the setting, as when Niko Price tromped thigh-deep in mudslides while describing the unbearable stench of decaying flesh in the aftermath of Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua, 1998.
Dell’Orto’s depiction of how an AP correspondent faces each individual challenge calls to mind the linguist in the film Arrival, who must establish rapport and trust with intelligent but mysterious aliens, decipher quirky communication symbols before they dissolve and disappear, using exacting scientific standards, while displaying mutual respect. By delving into AP’s history, Dell’Orto reveals how every correspondent is regularly challenged to establish rapport and trust, decipher alien language, and report it according to exacting journalistic standards while displaying mutual respect. Dell’Orto, as the journalistic “linguist,” translates the inky communications of the AP abroad since World War II, while Terry Anderson explains why they do it: “[A]sk the people who kill [journalists], beat them, and put them in prison, whether it’s important, because they all know you cannot have a free society without a free press.”
One mark of distinction rests on a study’s value to the academic literature, and on this score, the author has made a substantial contribution by revealing the complex process of an overlooked population of dedicated journalists. But there is another measure. This groundbreaking work reveals a transformed principal investigator: With this book, Giovanna Dell’Orto emerges as a transformational teacher, servant, and scholar in the field of foreign reporting.