Foreign Press Corps Reports on L.A. Life

Los Angeles correspondent Ana Maria Bahiana’s photo essay about Southland beaches shocked the Brazilian public.

“See how large those bikinis are!” ran the O Globo headline. One picture showed a Los Angeles couple playing chess amid ice boxes, chairs and soft drinks. The photo caption read: “Look at all the things people carry to beaches here!”

Then there is the story Claude Etique, a correspondent for Swiss National Radio and Switzerland’s Sonntag-Ceitun newspaper, recently did about a young executive singles group in Los Angeles. “It’s interesting to see that supposedly professional people have so much trouble meeting other people that they have to pay to find someone to talk to,” he said. Organized groups for meeting other eligible singles don’t exist in Switzerland, Etique said. In fact, in his hometown of Basel (population 174,000), most of his friends and acquaintances are packed into one square mile.

But in Los Angeles, Etique can go a week without seeing anyone he knows. He’s convinced that Swiss readers will be intrigued by a story that tells of the huge, impersonal nature of Los Angeles that enables singles groups to thrive.

These are part of the disparate images of Los Angeles that are dispatched to dozens of foreign countries by the hundreds of foreign journalists who live and work here. Their stories help shape, or reinforce, the opinion that foreigners have not only of Los Angeles, but of the United States.

The correspondents living here are a diverse bunch, from bureau chiefs reporting for celebrated publications like the Times of London to struggling free-lancers. And the picture they paint of Los Angeles varies greatly. Jitsuro Kihara of Japan’s Kyodo News Service says his readers want somber, insightful stories about Japanese investments in Los Angeles, on the city’s economy and its crime problems.

But sometimes the correspondents write not so much about what they see in Los Angeles, but about what their editors and readers want to read. Laurent Triqueneaux, a Los Angeles correspondent for four French magazines and a radio talk show, said, “I would like to write about the city as I live her and breathe her. . . . But I have to earn a living too.”

So he regularly writes about one of the evergreen subjects for French readers: the American entertainment industry. A recent story was on the pending marriage of French comedian Yves Lecoq and “General Hospital” star Lydie Denier, one of the few French actresses to make it in Hollywood. Triqueneaux knows his readers’ tastes: He interviewed the happy couple next to a pool in a picturesque Hollywood Hills villa. “This is a true fairy tale I’m going to tell you,” his article in Tele Poche begins.

Pacific Rim Business

Triqueneaux has more trouble selling grittier stories about California’s burgeoning business in the Pacific Rim, or the smog. “Los Angeles is a myth,” he said. “People are dreaming about it all over the world. It would be such a disappointment to imagine it as a place of traffic and business and smog.”

Exactly how many foreign correspondents ply their trade here depends on who is counting. The U.S. government’s Foreign Media Liaison Office in Los Angeles counts 120 foreign journalists here, while some foreign writers put the figure as high as 400.

Although Triqueneaux gripes about the stories he covers, foreign coverage of Los Angeles used to be even softer, contends Helmut Voss, a correspondent for West Germany’s Springer Newspaper Group. He arrived in 1970 as his country’s first Los Angeles correspondent, a few months after the Charles Manson murders.

Perfect L.A. Story

It was a perfect L.A. story. “It had all those typical California ingredients. Hippies and Hollywood stars being murdered,” Voss said. “It reinforced all the impressions people had of the strange town out here.”

These days, foreign correspondents tend to take Los Angeles more seriously. The 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Brazilian journalist Bahiana said, helped reshape the city’s image abroad. About 3,500 correspondents from around the world poured into a city many knew only as the world’s film-making capital. Instead, they found a vibrant metropolis with a population and economy to rival some nations.

As California’s trade with Pacific Rim countries has swelled, so has Asia’s desire for news from Los Angeles. A decade ago, veterans say, only a handful of Asian correspondents operated out of Los Angeles. Today, Kihara of the Kyodo News Service estimates, there are 30 Japanese correspondents alone. And there are reporters here from Taiwan’s Central Daily News, the Manila Broadcasting System and the Korean Broadcasting System, among others.

One subject popular with Japanese readers is golf, and in the past year Kihara has written about the Japanese companies that bought up 20 golf courses in Southern California, including the prestigious Riviera Country Club.

Another subject he’s considering writing about is the Working Girl syndrome. L.A. women who have put off having children in order to pursue their careers might provide a glimpse of what Japanese society will become several decades from now. Few women in Japan, Kihara said, work after they are married, but younger Japanese women are beginning to pursue careers.

Perils of Easy Credit

Swiss reporter Etique recently did a story on the flip side to L.A.’s affluence: debt. He attended a Beverly Hills meeting of Debtors Anonymous, a group for people who can’t control their use of credit cards. The story appealed to his readers because in Switzerland people are just learning about the perils of easy credit. “Young people flash their credit cards more than they used to,” he said. “Hopefully, this story will serve as an early warning.”

For Benjamin Landau, correspondent for Israel’s Ha-Aretz newspaper, covering Los Angeles is an intensely personal experience. Well over 100,000 former Israeli residents live here, he says, and issues that are pressing in his homeland also are important here.

He was amazed, for example, by the fervor generated by last year’s Peace Now demonstration when two factions of Los Angeles Jews confronted each other. Each group favored different solutions to the Palestinian uprisings. Peace Now, a leftist American support group, included actor Richard Dreyfuss, who urged Israel to begin negotiations with Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank. But Peace Now faced off against a group of counterdemonstrators that included militant Jewish Defense League members.

The demonstration interested Israeli readers, but Landau conceded, “It was so out of place to see two Jewish groups yelling at each other with other Americans looking on in a Beverly Hills park.”

One subject that most foreign journalists keep hunting for is trends. If something takes root in Los Angeles, it might also catch on back home. Cocooning, for instance, or the philosophy of retreating from a hostile world into the comfort of your home. West Germany’s Voss wrote an article last year for Die Welt newspaper on a Santa Monica couple so absorbed by cocooning that they had picnics on their front lawn and kept their children home to play.

Trend Stories

Shortly after his article appeared, a West German financial magazine editor called Voss to commission a more detailed article. Perhaps German companies should develop products for cocooners, he speculated. After all, another exotic Southern California trend Voss wrote about in 1981, aerobics, caught on in West Germany the following year.

For all the increasing seriousness in coverage, a foreign staple remains the oddball L.A. story. “The weird Los Angeles story always has a market,” said The Times of London reporter Ivor Davis. He recently completed a tongue-in-cheek story on Universal Studios’ new “Earthquake” attraction, which tries to replicate an 8.3 Richter scale earthquake. Davis described how hundreds of tourists and Los Angelenos line up every day to enjoy the ride. Why anybody would want to have a taste in advance of a future catastrophe is beyond him. “I had fun with this story,” he said.

Of all the foreign coverage, perhaps Hollywood stories are the most popular. Readers of Australia’s TV Week are no less desperate for gossip on stars and programs like “The Cosby Show” and “Moonlighting” than are Americans, said Jenny Cooney, the magazine’s Los Angeles entertainment writer. “When Cybill Shepherd sneezes,” she says, “my readers want to know about it.”

“L.A. Law,” for instance, is a hit in Australia and, Cooney says, Aussies see the characters as representative of an appealing life style in L.A.: a city of fancy cars and high-priced powerful lawyers. Aussies want to read about the actors, so Cooney has written stories about many of the stars of “L.A. Law,” including actor Corbin Bernsen.

Tass Writes About Movies

Even the Soviet press loves Hollywood. Asked what he writes about most in Los Angeles, Tass News Service correspondent Andrey Sidorin says the movie industry, the Oscars and “the huge salaries of film stars.”

At least one journalist is entranced neither by L.A.’s sober side nor its lighter side. Ian Black, correspondent for Britain’s Daily Mirror and Independent Television News, has been based here five years and finds Los Angeles, “less rewarding intellectually than any assignment I’ve ever had,” certainly much less satisfying than his last assignment, covering Zimbabwe. Hollywood, he agrees, is what most of the world wants to read about when it comes to L.A., but he hates writing trivia about the lives of the stars.

So why stay here? Two reasons, Black says: The climate is great; and L.A. is just a hop and a jump to really happening places like Central America.