Local Journalism

There is a common refrain in these modern times: a cry for local journalists and photojournalists to be hired to cover events in faraway places. A flood in India? Don't fly some westerners in for three days to cover it, hire some local stringers! This sounds like such a good idea, doesn't it? It's cheaper, it spreads the wealth, and more importantly you'll get a more in-depth local-knowledge based report, right?

That's not wrong. The question is, how desirable is that, in reality?

The semioticians will happily tell you that a 1000 words or a photograph derive much of their meaning from the context in which they are presented. The sense of a small news article is only partly in the words and pictures of the piece itself, all those things derive their meaning from the Western Culture in which they are embedded, the culture in which I swim.

When I, through my proxies at AP and Reuters, send some craggy white dudes off to cover the flood in India, I am not looking (not really) for a local-knowledge-informed story about the flood. I want to know what the flood seems through western eyes, through my eyes. I want 800 words and 4 pictures about the flood that give me a quick rundown, in terms that make sense to me, about the flood. Yes, that is "colonial gaze" and that's what I want. That is what "news" in this sense is: a legible summary of an event.

The 800 words and 4 pictures produced by local workers, which would be allegedly so much better because of all the local knowledge, would be written from the point of view of a local, at least notionally. It would make perfect sense to them, and be 100% appropriate, it would completely avoid the colonial gaze. It would also be, at least in part, illegible to me. It would derive its meaning not from Western Culture, but from whatever the surrounding Indian Culture was. I would, obviously, be able to make some sense of it, but an unknown amount of it would elude me. What, exactly, does "uncle" mean in this piece?

The local worker might well be able to recast the piece for Western eyes, to emulate that colonial gaze and render the piece legible to me. Probably imperfectly, maybe badly, depending on how well the local fellow has mastered the art. Hiring locals to replicate the colonial gaze does not strike me as an improvement, although it would save money and spread the wealth.

The local worker has probably had enough Western Culture shoved down his throat to write a longer piece, that carefully translates all the local references and cultural cues into Western ones. Thus, the news item could indeed be shorn of colonial gaze, and simultaneously rendered legible. Well, not completely, I dare say colonial tropes would sneak in there in the translation process, but anyways. This piece, unfortunately, would be 10,000 words long. It would be a New Yorker article, not an Ohio Sentinal-Times news blurb for Page 3.

If you want to do news for the western audience, you have to translate it.

I assume the same is true for Chinese news, Indian news, and so on, but since I don't live there I won't speculate. Anyways, everything is Americanized, so there may be less symmetry here than you'd guess.

The essential job of the Western (photo-)journalist is specifically and on-purpose to tell the story in a way that is legible to me, that gives me the gloss that I would get if I went there myself, and that's what they do.

There is a legitimate question here on how much this applies to photography, which is (like it or not) a more universal language than words. The local photojournalist could probably photograph a flood in much the same way a Westerner would, but also they might not. Would they photograph flooded buildings instant recognizable to the Hindu, and incomprehensible to me? Would that substantively color the meaning? The problem is I think clearly larger for text, but perhaps also applicable to pictures.

Whether in fact "colonial gaze" and "legible to Westerners" are literally the same thing I don't pretend to know. Given how fuzzily defined "gaze" is, I dare say the answer is "it depends." They are certainly entangled.