Only a Few Learn Language, Culture : Foreign Correspondents: It’s On-the-Job Training

Thomas Friedman fell in love with journalism and with the Mideast almost simultaneously.

He was 15 at the time, working on his high school newspaper and making his first visit to Israel, with his parents.

“I was . . . totally captivated by the Mideast,” Friedman said. “It really changed my life. I became a complete Middle East fanatic, read everything I could. . . . “

Friedman returned to Israel for all three summer vacations while he was in high school. He lived on a kibbutz and learned to speak Hebrew. Then he majored in Middle Eastern studies and Arabic at Brandeis University, studied at Oxford University in England and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and American University in Cairo--and decided he wanted to be the New York Times correspondent in the Mideast.

First step: United Press International in London, where Friedman said he “appointed myself . . . energy correspondent and carved out this turf for myself.” Next: Fluent in Arabic and knowledgeable about oil, Friedman was sent to Beirut by UPI.

In 1981, Friedman joined the New York Times.

Nine months later, the Times sent him back to Beirut.

In 1983, Friedman won the Pulitzer Prize for international reporting.

Now Friedman is the New York Times correspondent in Jerusalem. At 32, he is widely regarded as the best American correspondent in the Mideast, one of America’s few foreign correspondents who has been based in both Israel and in the Arab world and perhaps the only one who speaks both Hebrew and Arabic.

But Friedman’s expertise and his linguistic fluency are rare for a foreign correspondent. Far more typical is the unnamed correspondent described in Edward Behr’s book “Bearings”: The correspondent arrives in the newly independent nation of Zaire (formerly the Belgian Congo) in the early 1960s and asks frightened Belgians awaiting a massive airlift back home, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

‘Better Educated’

Formal training for foreign correspondents is rare, even though correspondents are generally “better-educated, (with) more . . . language skills” than ever before, in the words of H. D. S. Greenway, a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post from 1962 to 1978 and now associate editor for national and foreign news at the Boston Globe.

For every Friedman or David Ottaway of the Washington Post--who studied three languages, has a doctorate in political science and has written three books on foreign affairs--there are dozens of foreign correspondents who know no more about a country they are assigned to than they can remember from school or learn by reading a few books between the time they are chosen and the time they get on the plane.

Many foreign correspondents spend three years in a country (or 15 or 20 years in several countries) and can still speak the native language only well enough “to get into trouble, not to get out of it,” as Norman Pearlstine, managing editor of the Wall Street Journal, said of his own experience in Tokyo in the mid-1970s.

Even most correspondents who do speak a foreign language say they do not do so well enough to confidently interview a foreign head of state in his own tongue.

R. W. Apple, who spent 15 years abroad for the New York Times, said that too many foreign correspondents lack language fluency because too many American newspaper editors have “a rather naive belief . . . that a good police reporter can cover anything.”

Commonly Held View

Most editors interviewed for this story did, indeed, voice that opinion.

Foreign correspondents are the kinds of reporters “you can send . . . anywhere and they’ll do well, whether they know the language or not,” is the way Mike Haggerty, executive news editor of the Miami Herald, put it.

Most editors say they would prefer that their correspondents be fluent in the language of the country they are going to, of course, but, “the overwhelming requirement (for a foreign assignment) is a proven track record in reporting,” said Michael Getler, foreign editor of the Washington Post. “Language is a bonus, but it’s not a decisive factor.”

Most foreign correspondents receive only a brief, intense language course before leaving the States, followed by some private tutoring once they arrive abroad--and many correspondents do not even get that much training, despite the claims of many editors that their correspondents speak foreign languages fluently.

Editors “too often only pay lip service to the notion of investing time and money in serious training programs,” wrote Andrew Nagorski of Newsweek in his book “Reluctant Farewell.”

Importance Varies

The importance of language skills varies from country to country. Fluency is probably most important in the Soviet Union and China (because those are essentially closed societies, with rigid government controls on press access) and in France (because “the French, above all, believe that their language is the repository of their soul” in the words of John Vinocur, former Paris bureau chief of the New York Times).

Fluency in Spanish in Latin America is also important--so much so that when the Los Angeles Times made assignments to its bureaus there in 1983 and 1984 and found no qualified, Spanish-speaking reporters available on its staff, editors hired three such reporters from the Miami Herald.

Fortunately, editors at large papers often do find reporters fluent in Spanish or French on their staffs. The Washington Post has even found Chinese and Arabic speakers on its staff. But most papers are not thus blessed. So several provide their reporters bound for Moscow and Peking with at least a rudimentary language course.

Language fluency is not as critical in the Mideast, editors say, because English and French are widely spoken there. (Another factor: Arabic and Hebrew are very difficult and, hence, expensive and time-consuming to learn.)

Training Not Usual

Language instruction is seldom given to reporters bound for Eastern Europe or Africa either since reporters based there cover so many countries and encounter so many different languages and dialects that their editors deem it impracticable to spend the time and money to teach them a single language. Speaking Polish will help a correspondent based in Warsaw, but it will not be of much use when he travels to Yugoslavia, Bulgaria or Hungary, as most such correspondents do with great regularity.

Indeed, many reporters travel widely from their base, and they cannot be expected to know all the languages they might need.

“I’m fluent in Italian, French and Spanish, but my Arabic is only rudimentary,” said Loren Jenkins, the Washington Post correspondent in Rome. “I can’t speak Arabic well enough to conduct an interview, but I can speak it well enough to tell a Beirut cab-driver not to shoot me.”

The problem of multiple languages is especially acute for those papers with only a few foreign bureaus. Steve Twomey, the Paris correspondent for the Philadelphia Inquirer, said he speaks French “well enough . . . that it isn’t a problem,” but he spends only about half his time in France and the rest of his time “covering 15 countries that speak eight languages.

“I can’t watch the (television) news in Italy,” Twomey said. “I can’t listen to the radio in Spain. I can’t read the newspapers in Germany.”

Cover Large Areas

Not surprisingly, some reporters who have large areas to cover or who have little proficiency in language and little knowledge of the country they are assigned to tend to agree with editors who minimize the necessity of such training. But the best correspondents say that such expertise is invaluable. They say that speaking the local language and knowing something of the area’s history and culture gives them greater access and greater understanding, as well as more respect from their local sources and more freedom from both the American Embassy and the local government.

Foreign correspondents who say that language is not important are “covering Washington’s agenda, rather than their own. They’re hideously dependent on their ‘informed sources’,” said Richard Eder, book critic for the Los Angeles Times and former correspondent for the New York Times in Europe and South America.

Mort Rosenblum, longtime foreign correspondent for the Associated Press, said in his book “Coups and Earthquakes” that any correspondent who cannot speak the native language must rely on sources who are “mainly fellow Americans or a small elite who have learned English for a particular reason. These sources are likely to give him an atypical point of view and a distorted idea of the society.”

Language reflects culture--as in the Arab world, where someone may agree to an appointment at a specific time and then say, “Inshallah”-- (“God willing”). He may show up on time or late or not at all; an Arab’s sense of time (and of punctuality) is not the same as an American’s.

Can Distort Story

Sometimes, misunderstanding a single word or phrase in a foreign country can distort an entire story--and an entire issue.

Friedman, for example, said that when he was covering a story in the Palestinian refugee camp of Bedawai, northeast of Tripoli, in 1983, he saw a woman beating on the chest of a Palestinian guard, demanding to know why her apartment had been looted and trashed. She was “screaming and shrieking, ‘We are not Jews! We are not Jews!’,” Friedman recalls.

A reporter for another publication also witnessed that scene, but he did not speak Arabic and had to rely on his cab driver for a translation. Subtlety and precision are often lost in translation; his story quoted the Palestinian woman as screaming at the Palestinian guard, “I’m not the Israelis.”

The difference between “We are not Jews” and “I’m not the Israelis” is of profound significance in understanding the problems of the Mideast. The official, public position of the Arab world, Friedman said, is to deny anti-Semitism, to say, “ ‘We’re not against Jews; we’re against Zionists.’ But the average . . . person in the Arab world still sees Israel as a Jewish state. They don’t make that distinction.”

Fluency in Arabic is not absolutely essential, of course, to understanding such distinctions. Some correspondents who do not speak foreign languages do very well abroad.

Highly Praised

David Lamb, for example, said he knew only 24 words of Arabic when he left Cairo in 1985, after three years as the Los Angeles Times correspondent there, but he was one of the eight or 10 foreign correspondents praised most highly by his peers in the course of interviews for this story.

Lamb is “a perfect example of somebody who can land in a strange town and within two days . . . know everybody and everything that’s going on,” said John Darnton, deputy foreign editor of the New York Times, who knew Lamb when both were based in Nairobi.

But Darnton was also based in Lagos, Madrid and Warsaw, and he said that when he was in Warsaw--where he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1982--he “missed 30% of . . . what was happening” because he was not fluent in Polish.

Lamb also said language skills are extremely important, and for all his success, he thinks he would have done much better if he spoke a foreign language.

“Think of living in a place where you can’t pick up the morning newspaper and read it, where you can’t read a street sign and you can’t understand a conversation you overhear in a coffee shop,” Lamb said. “Think of the nuances of that society you’re going to miss.”

Felt Like a ‘Boob’

Lamb said he can still recall feeling like a “boob” when he interviewed the president of Chad and could not speak French, and when--on another occasion--his inability to speak Spanish cost him an interview with the ruler of Panama.

When Lamb went to Harvard University on a Nieman Fellowship after returning from Nairobi in 1980, he asked Robert Gibson, then foreign editor of The Times, to tell him where he would next be assigned so he could study the history and culture of the area and even try to learn some of the language during his year at Harvard.

But Lamb said Gibson told him he “really couldn’t . . . make plans that far down the road and (I should) just enjoy myself and study what I wanted.

“So I get to Cairo,’ Lamb said, “and I spend my first year there spinning my wheels, trying to find out what the hell Islam is all about and why the Syrians don’t like the Iraqis.”

Gibson said he does not recall this conversation with Lamb, but he conceded, “It doesn’t surprise me.”

The problem--for Gibson and for other foreign editors, then and now--is that assigning a foreign correspondent is like a game of musical chairs. Or chess.

‘It’s Very Complicated’

“Sometimes you don’t have the luxury” of picking people in advance and giving them a year to prepare, said Alvin Shuster, who succeeded Gibson as foreign editor of The Times in 1983. “It’s very complicated. . . . Every time you move somebody, perhaps three or four other people have to move.”

Shuster is trying to make such decisions earlier now. Charles T. Powers, for example, has just completed six years in Nairobi for The Times, and Shuster now plans to send him to Warsaw next year. So Powers, who won a Nieman Fellowship, plans to study Eastern European history and politics--and the Polish language--when he gets to Harvard this fall.

Some Los Angeles Times correspondents have studied foreign languages relatively briefly but intensely before going abroad; others have not studied language at all. Shuster said he would like to change that, too--especially for reporters assigned to Moscow and Peking.

William Eaton, now the Los Angeles Times correspondent in Moscow, “virtually went in cold . . . (then) had about 10 weeks to 12 weeks of intensive study in Leningrad,” Shuster said. “That’s not good enough.

“Ideally, you should give a correspondent six months to nine months to study . . . the more complicated languages . . . intensively,” Shuster said.

Hopes to Improve

The Los Angeles Times is relatively new to foreign correspondence--the paper did not really have a foreign staff 25 years ago--and Shuster hopes, in time, to improve all aspects of its foreign reporting, including the training of its correspondents.

The New York Times and Washington Post already give their Moscow-bound reporters nine months to a year to prepare. The Post usually sends reporters to Stanford or to the University of Michigan for courses in Russian and “area studies;” the New York Times encourages its reporters to plan independent study programs at whatever institutions or with whatever private tutors they think best.

Most editors are concerned about the cost of such a program. They also are reluctant to detach a reporter from the staff for so long. But Bill Keller of the New York Times is spending more than 10 months this year studying Russian four or five hours a day, and he is renting a house for the summer and will have his tutor move in with him. Estimated cost of the tutor: $35,000 to $40,000.

Another New York Times correspondent, Susan Chira, lived for a year with a Japanese family in Tokyo, learning Japanese language and culture on a program jointly funded by the Times and Harvard University, as part of her preparation to join the paper’s Tokyo bureau.

New York Times editors are convinced that the thorough preparation of their foreign correspondents is well worth the cost, and most of their reporters speak the language of the country they are assigned to.

‘Definitely the Best’

“The New York Times is definitely the best on priming its people, and maybe the Post second,” Lamb said. “I think the rest fall into the broad category of the (Los Angeles) Times--’Send them in with a parachute and you can do some stories your second day there and as you go on, they’ll get better.’ ”

Lamb may exaggerate slightly the attitudes of other editors, but editors at the New York Times and--to a lesser degree--the Washington Post do seem to place more emphasis on language and other training than do editors elsewhere. This may be in part because the top editors at both papers are former foreign correspondents.

Shuster is also a former foreign correspondent--for the New York Times, in London, Saigon and Rome--but none of the five top-ranking editors at the Los Angeles Times has ever worked abroad. Top Los Angeles Times editors say they are as interested in foreign news as are their counterparts at the New York Times and Washington Post anyway, and, indeed, the Los Angeles Times is second only to the New York Times in the number of bureaus it has abroad and in the amount of money it spends on foreign coverage.

But the New York Times and Washington Post both devote about one-third more of their general news space to foreign news than does the Los Angeles Times, according to a study done for UNESCO last year, and Los Angeles Times foreign correspondents are often frustrated by their inability to get their stories into print without long delays. On one day chosen at random this year, the paper had a backlog of 24 foreign feature stories, dating back as long as six weeks.

Different Audiences

Different newspapers have different audiences and different priorities, however.

The Post’s interest in foreign news derives in part from its location in Washington, headquarters of the American foreign policy-making establishment; the New York Times has historically given a high priority to foreign news, in large part because of the cosmopolitanism of its owners, editors and readers.

Not only does the New York Times (like several other major papers) have foreign stories on its front page every day, but (unlike any other paper) it also devotes all the news space in the next 10 or 12 pages of its front section to foreign news every day.

With 34 reporters in 27 foreign bureaus, plus a foreign desk of 26 people in New York, the New York Times has a total foreign budget this year of $10.1 million. That is almost twice the size of the Los Angeles Times foreign budget ($5.6 million), more than twice that of the Washington Post’s ($4.6 million) and more than three times that of the Chicago Tribune’s ($3 million).

In percentage terms, the New York Times devotes 12.7% of its total, $80-million editorial budget to foreign news. The Post spends 9.2% of its almost $50-million editorial budget, the Los Angeles Times 8.2% of $68.6 million and the Tribune 6.8% of $44.3 million. Among smaller papers, the Baltimore Sun spends $1.1 million (8.4%) of its $13-million editorial budget on foreign news.

Think It Is Expected

Many reporters come to the New York Times precisely because they think that is the best way to become a foreign correspondent. But some New York Times reporters go abroad less because they want to than because they think it is expected--demanded--of them.

Because so many of the top editors at the New York Times are former foreign correspondents--starting with Executive Editor A. M. Rosenthal, who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1960 for his reporting from Poland--going abroad is regarded as an essential career move for any ambitious Times reporter.

“There’s an ethos, an assumption, piped in through the air conditioning, that if you’re good, you would naturally want to become a foreign correspondent,” said Carey Winfrey, who worked for the New York Times from 1977 to 1980. “To be chosen is such a distinction that it’s hard to turn down.”

Winfrey, however, hated the life of a foreign correspondent almost from the moment he arrived in Nairobi in 1979. He came back to New York before his tour was up and quit the paper nine months later.

“For me, the fun in journalism was writing,” he said, “but in Africa, it was all out of whack. I spent 70% of my time on logistics, 25% reporting and only 5% writing. I resented having to develop skills I didn’t want. . . . Being able to bribe a telex operator who spoke only Swahili wasn’t a skill I expected to be of much value in my declining years. . . . I wanted to become a better writer, to understand people better, not figure out how to trick Pan Am into letting me get on a plane that was already fully booked.”

Some Quit Early

Other New York Times foreign correspondents have also been unhappy--or made their editors unhappy--and not just in places like Nairobi. Several reporters have returned home prematurely from London, too, and London is regarded as a plum assignment on the New York Times, a city where there is no language barrier and where the deprivation and exhausting travel of many Third World assignments are delightfully supplanted by The Good Life. (The New York Times has three correspondents in London, plus a support staff of seven to handle communications, transportation, currency exchange and virtually anything else that comes up.)

The New York Times commitment to foreign news imposes an onerous burden on its correspondents, even those--the vast majority--who love being abroad.

Most foreign correspondents put in long, hard hours, with no overtime pay and few days off, regardless of the paper they work for. During a crisis such as the overthrow of President Ferdinand E. Marcos in the Philippines, it is not uncommon for correspondents to go two or three days without any sleep at all--and even when they do sleep, they may be awakened by their editors, working in a different time zone half a world away.

But the New York Times demands even more of its overseas reporters than do any other American papers. New York Times reporters are expected to write news stories on daily events, “man in the news” features on important people, trend stories, analyses, anecdotal “reporters’ notebooks,” and stories for almost every section of the paper, from science to sports to travel.

High Production Demand

James Sterba spent eight years as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times before becoming assistant foreign editor of the Wall Street Journal in 1982, and he said he left the Times in part because the paper’s high production demand and insistence on daily news coverage prevented him from doing the kinds of stories he most wanted to do, stories that “plow new journalistic ground.”

Sterba, who still travels abroad occasionally, reporting from Asia for the Journal, said that foreign correspondents for most American newspapers are increasingly concentrating on daily news stories these days, thus missing what will be “the big spot news story three months from now, six months from now,” and depriving their readers of broader, more valuable insights into the countries they cover.

The New York Times tries to provide both the daily story and the broader perspective, and most editors and foreign correspondents say the paper consistently offers readers the best foreign coverage of any American newspaper. But many correspondents and editors--including several at the New York Times--speak enviously of the Los Angeles Times approach to foreign news.

The basic view among Los Angeles Times editors has long been that they want their foreign correspondents to cover major news stories but that other, routine news stories can generally be left to the wire services, thus freeing Los Angeles Times correspondents to write feature stories, life style and trend stories, personality profiles and other stories the editors hope will give readers a more complete view of the countries they cover.

‘Most Fun of All’

Jonathan Randall of the Washington Post praises the “background, the analysis, the feeling the L.A. Times gets in some of its foreign stories,” and Warren Hoge, foreign editor of the New York Times, says being a foreign correspondent for the Los Angeles Times “has got to be the most fun of all because they just have such extraordinary latitude.”

Ironically, some Los Angeles Times correspondents say the paper’s philosophy seems to be changing. The paper still wants feature and life style stories from its correspondents abroad, but there is a sense that the paper also wants more daily news stories.

Stanley Meisler, who has been abroad for the Los Angeles Times since 1967 and is now the paper’s correspondent in Paris, said he used to enjoy writing the journalistic equivalent of “little Ph.D. theses” for the paper on subjects that interested him; now, he said, “we run around covering the news” . . . and while the paper may be better off, the reader may like it . . . it’s less fun . . . less interesting for me.”

Although Shuster denied there has been any major change in priorities, he does concede, “The day of (our correspondents) wandering around the world, writing little feature stories is over--if it ever really existed. . . . We still leave the routine news coverage to the wire services, but if there’s a major news event in the world, we want our correspondent there. If that means he has to drop a special project for a few days, then he’ll have to drop it . . . and the news of late has been such that . . . we’ve had to make those decisions a lot.”

More Frequent Moves

The Los Angeles Times has changed its philosophy in at least one other way that has long made the paper an attractive place for correspondents to work: Until relatively recently, The Times permitted, indeed encouraged some of its foreign correspondents to stay in one bureau for as long as they wanted.

Thus, Don Cook has been in Paris for The Times since 1965, and Sam Jameson has been in Tokyo for The Times since 1971.

“I used to like to keep a reporter in a country a long time,” said William F. Thomas, editor of The Times. “I thought it took a long time to really penetrate and understand the country. But now we move them around more quickly, and every time we put a good, new guy in place of a good, old guy . . . a guy who’s been in the same place a long time . . . we immediately start getting better, fresher stuff.”

Thomas said most Times assignments will henceforth be limited to three or four years--about the same as at most other papers.

Some reporters do not like the idea of shorter tours because, they say, they get tired of packing and unpacking all their belongings every few years. In fact, some foreign correspondents ultimately quit being foreign correspondents because they are tired of living out of a suitcase.

But many editors and foreign correspondents speak of a correspondent’s second and third years in an assignment as a “magic period,” a time when his initial adjustment is complete and his energy and interest are at their highest. After the third year, many say, correspondents begin to get a bit stale, even repetitive, and begin looking ahead to their next assignment.

Next: What makes a good foreign correspondent?

Susanna Shuster of The Times editorial library assisted with the research for these articles. THE FOREIGN STAFF

These figures reflect money spent by major newspapers on foreign news in 1986.

The New York Times

$10.1 mill. 12.7% of edit. budget

Los Angeles Times

$ 5.6 mill. 8.2% of edit. budget

Washington Post

$ 4.6 mill. 9.2% of edit. budget

Chicago Tribune

$ 3.0 mill. 6.8% of edit. budget