Ain't We Got Fun?

To most moviegoers--and to some deskbound newsmen--it sometimes seems that the globetrotting, glamorized foreign correspondent has all the fun. But in the current Atlantic Monthly, Paul Scott Mowrer, longtime foreign correspondent, Pulitzer Prizewinner and onetime editor of the Chicago Daily News, gives a more realistic account of the lonely, often frustrating, sometimes wildly exasperating life of a correspondent.

"At home," said Mowrer, "[the reporter] had a deep sense of being where he belonged. Abroad . . . he is quite by himself, in a strange place of which he can never be really a part... To get to know [even Englishmen] takes about a year." Worse than the loneliness is the treatment of cable news at home: "[The correspondent] looks for his piece. It should have been on page one. He finds it on page sixteen. It appears rather short. That is because they have simply left out the key paragraph . . . Their editorials make him wonder if they even read his stuff. . .

"Some editors have a mania for trying to improve a man's copy, thus making the writer say what he didn't quite mean in a way he didn't intend." There is something even harder to take. "Just when . . . the correspondent has done all the preliminary work and is all set to cover [a] conference that the great world will be watching, he is handed a wire: 'Our Washington correspondent, Bill Blah, is arriving with the American delegation and will be in charge.Please give him every assistance.' "

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