RTE's New Washington Correspondent

international | arts and media | opinion/analysis Tuesday September 28, 2004 16:37 by Michael Hennigan - Finfacts.com

Robert Shortt currenty a business correspondent at RTE, is to succeed the current incumbent Carole Coleman as the station's Washington Correspondent. Is an expatriate posting justified when areas of the world such as Asia and Africa generally go unreported?

Americans are well known to have a limited interest in foreign news unless there is an American angle to it. The following is from a satirical piece on a US survey on the annoying amount of international news on the web. "I can see where it's important if we're, like, beating some country in the Olympics or bombing them or, ideally, both," Grisham added. "But if some Colombian drug lord sinks a ferry full of Israeli soldiers in North Latvoania or Serbo-Malaysia, or wherever, and Americans aren't involved, what has that got to do with me?"

Other respondents said they were appalled, not just by the availability of non-U.S. news, but by the way important U.S. news is reported by some of these foreign sites. "Yesterday, for instance, the St. Louis Rams beat the Atlanta Falcons, OK, and I go to the London Times site and it's not even there," said Chip Pernadge of Kansas City, Mo. "Jesus, no wonder those guys lost the war and had to give Hong Kong back to Canada."

The RTE audience's interest in US news is served by several services including the Washington Correspondent. However, it is difficult to see how a cost of at least €300,000 could be justified compared with having a contracted competent freelancer. It would surely take years for a newcomer to such a crowded media market as Washington to develop useful contacts beyond the Irish Embassy.

These days as newspapers use freelancer bylines from different part of the globe as if the individuals are on their own staff, there is no particular cachet in having a full-time expatriate correspondent in a place like Washington. Europe is a different matter as European news is not 'foreign' news and there will be an Irish angle to many such stories.

In the past, the role of a resident foreign correspondent such as the famed Alastair Cooke of the Guardian and the BBC's 'Letter from America' was important but with the web and cable, everyone has the potential to access American media themselves. Meanwhile, significant news from much of Asia and Africa only gets attention when it only gets bad enough to be taken seriously.