American Foreign Correspondents

I read with enraptured interest your series on foreign correspondents. Laurels are in order for David Shaw for his thoroughness.

It was an enlightening and simultaneously alarming series, however. Without question the most disturbing revelation was that many newspapers send journalists to foreign assignments with no (or very little) language skills.

Surely, in a country with 240 million citizens, there must be at least a few qualified “good, solid police reporters” who have made the effort somewhere along the line to acquire foreign language expertise.

The failure of editors (is it mere laziness?) to find and nurture bilingual or multilingual reporters is, in a way, a microcosm of the American arrogance often painfully visible abroad. No, not everyone in the world speaks English. Nor should that be expected.

Can you imagine a French correspondent in Washington who speaks only a few words of English? Can you imagine a Tass reporter covering the United States who knows next to nothing about American history?

Come on, editors. Open your eyes! A little digging would certainly unearth a myriad multilingual journalists, journalists who would probably have at least some feel for the culture, history, and language of the country they cover. Let the cultural and lingual ignorance of the American tourist and the American GI continue, if it must, but surely, from foreign correspondents we should expect a little bit more.

ERIK KIRSCHBAUM

Torrance