International Reporting Project - Seminar Highlights

Reporters Should Seek Out Lesser Known Sources to Understand US Foreign Policy

By Elizabeth Shryock, SAIS ‘08, Journalism and Media Career Club


James Mann

WASHINGTON, September 19, 2006 � Reporters seeking to understand American foreign policy decisions should be leery of relying on “big names” in Washington for information and should start focus on sources at embassies, think tanks, foreign media outlets and the government bureaucracy for foreign policy stories, longtime Los Angeles Times diplomatic correspondent James Mann told the Fall 2006 International Reporting Project Fellows today.

“There is an extraordinary over-emphasis on the ‘talk show world’ here,” said Mann, an Author-in-Residence at the Foreign Policy Institute of the Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), referring to the circle of well-known administration officials and pundits who frequently appear on television, the lecture circuit, or in the White House press room. “You might think Tony Snow or Ari Fleischer is important,” he said, referring to two official White House spokesmen. “Really, they are irrelevant.”

Mann suggested that journalists seeking in-depth information and important stories may want to consider specializing in a particular country or region and spend time talking to working-level (what he calls “hidden world”) officials in both American and foreign governments.

He said that trying to understand American foreign policy by focusing on a particular region or making the rounds of foreign embassies can yield interesting results. “[Journalists] don’t instinctively think to talk to people at embassies about American policy,” Mann said. “But even if they are not the dominant influence on policy, they are probably better informed than anyone else about what the U.S. government is up to and where the debates are.”

Mann also encouraged students to keep tabs on the foreign media. “There are all kinds of things that the American press corps isn’t covering,” he said. “One way of finding out what’s going on in American foreign policy is to keep track of what [the foreign press corps is] thinking about and writing about.”

After a three-year stint as a foreign correspondent in Beijing during the 1980s, Mann joined the Washington bureau of the Los Angeles Times to cover foreign policy with an emphasis on U.S.-Asian relations. He is the author of two books on China and most recently, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush’s War Cabinet (2004).