We are thinking and speaking this weekend about the multipolar world we witness as it takes shape around us. As Xi Jinping, a prominent champion of this world, asserted not long ago, it is a time of great challenge but also of great promise. I subscribe to this thought. And this morning I have a few remarks concerning the role, the position, and the responsibilities of the journalist in this emergent multipolar world.

A profound transformation

Journalists must undergo a profound transformation to match the challenges and meet the hopes of our time. In a single word, although I will add a few to this, journalists must make themselves multipolar if they are to reflect their moment, our moment, in history.
  The task of the journalist in any circumstance is to represent the world for readers and viewers who will never see much of it for themselves. So, for the journalist, and I am speaking here of the correspondent, “representing” means “re–presenting.” In effect, the journalist is creating realities, and these realities become fixed in the minds of readers and viewers as the way the world truly is.
  The responsibility the correspondent bears when we consider his work in this way will be obvious. Until our time, the journalist has been required to report, write or broadcast entirely from the perspective of the nation that supports his medium. If you write for an American newspaper, your work reflects the orthodox American point of view.

The perspectives of others

It is a subtle point, but the perspectives of others are rendered as deviations from the norm. The journalist, in other words, must work within and fortify the construct scholars call “Self and Other.” There are the “we,” and there are the “they.” The work was done, so to say, with one’s nose pressed against a pane of glass, on the other side of which were the people and the societies one was reporting upon. It was a little as if the correspondent looked in upon them as if looking at one of those snow globes with which you may be familiar. To draw too close was to “go native,” as the expression goes, and this was considered a not-unserious transgression. It was, in quotation marks, “unprofessional.”
  In the interest of time, I give you a very brief outline of the practice of journalism as it has been for a very long time, and as it is today. The Cold War, I consider, was for journalism the most damaging development of the last century in that it more or less institutionalized the Self-and-other narrative. It is this practice of journalism we must now transcend – quite decisively to leave behind if we are to match the challenges of our multipolar world and make our contribution to fulfilling our hopes for it.

The reinvention of the foreign correspondent

I spent three decades abroad as a correspondent, commentator, and editor, and I was very fortunate in many ways. One of these was the nature of the publications I worked for. The two most important of these, the “Far Eastern Economic Review” and the “International Herald Tribune”, were rare in that they effectively had no nationality to which they were requited to conform. The “Review” was published in Hong Kong and was majority owned by a bank. The “Herald Tribune” was American-owned, but its head office was in Paris and it had, in consequence, a very worldly perspective on events, as against a strictly American perspective. When I finished my three decades abroad, most of them in Asia and all of them in the non–West, I collected my thoughts in a course I lectured at The University of Hong Kong. I called it “Reinventing ‘the foreign correspondent,’” and this is what I determined then had to be done – a reinvention. I began with questions, and it was more important to me to pose the questions than to have answers to them, given they were very new. Must a correspondent’s work remain always embedded in his or her culture or nationality? Must it reflect the assumptions and presuppositions, the politics and political positioning, of the medium for which he reports? Or can the work transform the correspondent such that he is more than an American writing for an American newspaper, or an Egyptian writing for an Egyptian newspaper, or (not infrequently the case now) an Egyptian or Brazilian reporting for American, British, or who-have-you media?
  These were not musings. I counted them, as I count them now, vital questions. The readily available reply to this last thought is negative. Taking the past as a guide, it is a shared point of view that defines a culture, and this cannot be surrendered. If you report for an American newspaper, you are tattooed “American” and your work, by the time it is published, speaks in the tongue, the unspoken language hidden within all languages. But my years in the field suggested another answer. Of all that our time has to tell us, first among its messages is that the past is only so useful as a tool of navigation. High among our tasks is a purposeful, continual act of transcendence – of ourselves, of our inherited perspectives, of our cultures. I am not talking here about pretending to be other than what one is – American, German, British. I am talking about a new recognition of the very unique place correspondents occupy, one that requires them – with an understanding of their responsibilities and with discipline – to leave their nationalities behind for the duration of their assignments among others. This is the project I propose now.
  Who correspondents are, what they do and how, where they stand in relation to those they are covering, their responsibility to those they cover as well to their readers or viewers – all this requires a fundamental rethink, if these questions have until now been thought of at all.

“Going native” is an imperative

Going native, once a transgression, is to be counted not merely a virtue but an imperative. It means drawing much closer than tradition has allowed to erase the imaginary borderline between Self and Other. It means leaving part of oneself behind for the sake of the assignment. It means reporting another people not with one’s nose pressed against glass but, after determined effort, from within, from among them. Friedrich Nietzsche, in another context entirely, called this taking off the garb of the West. Vaćlav Havel, in a noted speech delivered at Independence Hall in Philadelphia on 4 July 1994, called what I describe “a new model of coexistence, based on man’s transcending himself.” There are a couple of other names to mention here.
  Ryszard Kapuścinski, the noted Polish journalist, published an excellent book on this topic called The Other. Emmanuel Lévinas, the French phenomenologist born in Lithuania, devoted much of his work to the question of the Self in relation to The Other. He argued, indeed, that we must, in the end, not merely recognize the Other but take responsibility for the Other.
  After a long time at the self-transcendence as I have just very briefly mentioned it, correspondents will realize, as I did, that in covering others they are staring into a mirror – there to learn as much about themselves as those to whom they pose incessant questions. I like this word “transcend” to describe what I propose. It can be done. We can transcend ourselves. I have done it and I am not alone in this. I cannot conclude with any thought this is other than a long process. It is the same with the matter of exceptionalism and post-exceptionalism: In both cases I am talking about a new consciousness. The changes our time requires of us are large and require extended effort.

Independent media

I will end by pointing out that this task will be especially difficult to accomplish among our corporate-owned media. I have argued for a long time now that the responsibilities of independent media are far larger than their resources but are nonetheless to be assumed, even embraced. I am describing for you another of these responsibilities. It is among independent media that the journalist of our time can be most effectively “reinvented,” to take the term from my university course, so as to meet our new century’s challenges and fulfill our hopes for it.  •

https://www.zeit-fragen.ch/en/archives/2023/nr-20/21-sonderbeilage-xxx-kongress-mut-zur-ethik-2023/journalismus-im-21-jahrhundert

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