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The search for a good "story", often becomes an end in itself.

"THINK of these poor people," I said rather dramatically to my Press Club audience in my early days as a United Nations refugee official, "having to cross borders without knowing what awaits them on the other side, leaving behind the comforts of home and loved ones, not knowing in what bed they would sleep that night or what their next meal would consist of, anxious about the strange lands into which they had to venture, unsure when they would be able to return ...."

"You mean refugees?" asked a sympathetic listener.

"No," I replied, "I mean foreign correspondents." That was good for a laugh, of course, especially when my audience consisted largely of members of that rather special tribe, expatriate journalists. Their challenge has always been a unique one — reporting about the unfamiliar to the uninitiated, while trying to make the alien interesting. "Personally," as a character observes in Evelyn Waugh's Scoop, arguably the funniest novel in the English language about the journalistic profession, "I can't see that foreign stories are ever news — not real news." Despite the widespread prevalence of that attitude among newspaper readers in the developed West, the foreign correspondent came into his own over the last century. Delving into the murky mysteries of distant domains, pursuing his leads across desert trails and swampy marshlands, cutting his way through alien jungles and official obfuscation with equal insouciance, dodging bullets and competitors and governmental censors, the foreign correspondent first emerged as a cult figure before World War Two. That was when Hollywood paid the profession the supreme compliment of making a film about it, entitled "Foreign Correspondent" (as if the term alone conveyed all the glamour and mystique of the job), with Clark Gable in a trenchcoat and a rakish trilby smiling omnisciently through his cigarette fumes. Every woman who saw "Foreign Correspondent" wanted to be swept off her feet by one, and the breed hasn't looked back since.

But the Waugh character's objection still remained — news about unfamiliar places wasn't really news. After all, the essential absurdity of the foreign corrrespondent's calling remained that he had to take unimaginable risks to report a story about Ruritania to readers who couldn't imagine where Ruritania was. And what was the point, one might well ask, of smuggling yourself across borders, evading police patrols, spending your scarce shekels on bribes and beer, to become the first to announce "King Zog Dead" to an audience which had never known that King Zog was alive? The point was, of course, that editors wanted it. They wanted the news because they wanted to publish something different, something that would make ordinary people sit up and take notice, something that would bring colour into drab suburban lives in Hoboken or Hartlepool. The ruling credo of journalism for much of the last century was succinctly phrased by an American editor, Arthur MacEwen: "News is anything that makes a reader say, `Gee Whiz'!" No one says "Gee Whiz!" very much these days, of course, not even in America — both because that expression has long since been supplanted by others more colourful and less printable, and because our capacity for surprise has long since been dulled by a surfeit of sources. Foreign goods now invade the most bourgeois of middle-class living-rooms, and nowhere is too foreign to be inaccessible: the democratisation of air travel has made overseas vacations affordable for the most insular of Western homebodies.

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Even more important, the revolution in satellite broadcasting has brought to our breakfast tables and our living rooms, and increasingly our computers and our mobile phones, glimpses of events from every corner of the globe. Any doubt I might have had about the reach and influence of global mass communications was dispelled when I happened to be in St. Petersburg, Russia, for a conference and was approached by a Tibetan Buddhist monk in his robes, thumping a cymbal and chanting his mantras, who paused in his chanting to say: "I've seen you on BBC!" New communications technology has shrunk the world, and in a real sense made it all one. When you have seen on your own television sets Sarajevans cowering under shellfire, Timorese being burned out of their homes and Rwandan corpses bleached white in the waters of the rivers into which they were thrown, there remains very little indeed that can provoke that "Gee Whiz!" What then is a foreign correspondent to do? One challenge is to make the outside world intelligible to the journalist's home audience. The global mass media reflects principally the interests of its producers. What passes for international news is usually the news of interest to the economically developed world. Yes, there is the occasional third world voice, but it speaks a first world language. As far back as the first Congo civil war of 1962, the journalist Edward Behr saw a TV newsman in a camp of violated Belgian civilians calling out: "Anyone here been raped and speak English?" In other words, it was not enough to have suffered: one must have suffered and be able to express one's suffering in the language of the journalist.

In the process, the search for news, for a good "story", often becomes an end in itself, divorced from the human needs of its subjects.

Journalism, that most essential of professions, is also the most predatory; it feeds on suffering, on misfortune, on injustice, all of which it seeks to depict rather than to redress. And yet, without it, no real change would be possible, since change requires awareness, and it is awareness that is the real stock-in-trade of the journalist. In our increasingly inter-dependent world, it is no longer possible to shelter behind claims of ignorance of foreign lands; news about anywhere is available to even the most incurious, in papers, on TV, and most of all on the Internet. What happens anywhere in our globalising world increasingly affects us all. As someone once said about water pollution, we all live downstream.

Of course the breed has changed. Today's star foreign correspondent is more likely to be an Iranian Christian woman with British-educated vowels on an American cable news network than a macho Clark Gable figure with a politically-incorrect cigarette. But her work is more essential than ever.

The writer is United Nations Under-Secretary-General for Communications and Public Information.
Visit him at www.shashitharoor.com