Foreign News Coverage

When looking at foreign news, one must look at the reasons for being in a certain location for reporting in the first place.
1. Is our interest there in danger? 2. Are you a threat to us? 3. Do they have something that we can use? 4. Disaster: how big and could something like this happen to us?. There are two ways to become a general foreign news correspondent. The first way is to go there and work as a freelance journalist, otherwise known as a stringer. You are able to get your name known and after a long time you have the ability to get hired full time. This happens in a minority of cases in terms of foreign correspondence. The other way is that you receive a job at home and then you work your way up in the organization. After you work in the local news, features, and national stories, you are up for promotion. The promotion leads to foreign reporting in the middle of your career.

Media organizations send foreign correspondent by either stationing them or parachuting them. If you are stationed, the media organization rents an office and hires a local staff. The media organization buys a house apartment and has a permanent presence in which journalists are rotated through, but the station stays the same. The typical rotation is two to four years. The journalists gain experience of are and reports with knowledge.

Parachuting is when a huge news event occurs and there is extreme interest in the event. The media organization appoints a team to report on the issue. The media organization pays for part or all of the team to go. The on site media pays for hotel, food, travel, and insurance. The journalists set up a telecommunication connection to home. These journalists need not have any knowledge of the place. The reporting does not come with deep knowledge and unfortunately most of the big stories are parachuted.
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n terms of how the wars around the world can be reported and misreported, all one has to look at is the way that journalists are appointed to such affairs. Some of the journalists have no knowledge of the country/area and are put there at last minute and demanded to report on important issues such as war. An example of the reporting of war can be found in the movie, "Control Room." In the movie, the military press center is shown. CentCom is the media headquarters in the Middle East on the outskirts of Doha, Qatar. John Rushing is the press officer from the military for Central Command. The military wants to turn the media not the case. These are powerful images being shown, and at some points they almost offer a sense of relief. This documentary showed many different journalists from around the world have to come together to get the best information about what is really going on at war.

It doesn't matter where in the world a war is taking place, there are going to be accusations being made about whether or not the media is portraying the truth of the war. There is no way for us as citizens to know if what we see is 100 percent true. However, the first thing lost in the coverage of war is truth.