Beyond Borders: 'International Stories', Bias and Foreign Policy

How do you write about a country and its people? This is one of many questions that has been buzzing in my head in the last few days ever since my friends and I at the Young India Fellowship (YIF) got started with the Indian Foreign Policy (IFP) course. Taught by former Ambassador AK Singh, the course has a ton of readings: policy papers, commentaries, op-ed/ journal articles, and newspaper reports. Reading them made me reflect on the varied styles of writing.

Epic Openings and War Reporting

I went back to the book "Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University" which we extensively read as part of the Investigative Journalism Course taught by Nikita Saxena. The chapter ‘Stories Matter’ by Jacqui Banaszynski had hooked me with its grim opening. Here’s the screenshot below:

I often read works like that of Jacqui because grabbing attention from the first line is an essential skill. Such opening paragraphs and other readings from IFP made me further fall into a rabbit hole and I stumbled upon this recent interview published by Neiman Lab: "War correspondent Jane Ferguson pulls back the curtain on her career covering global conflicts". Ferguson advocates for the importance of conflict journalism, shares about TV news reporting and sheds light on the true essence of effective war coverage.

Reading all of this made me think about my time in the newsroom. While working with the Hindu BusinessLine, I attended Splice Beta — a journalism-focused festival — in Thailand in November 2022 and I got a chance to interview Jakub Parusinski — the Chief Financial Officer of the Kyiv Independent, a prominent English-language news sites bringing out breaking stories from the Russo-Ukraine war zones. This was my first 'international story'. 

Foreign Policy and Newsroom

Apart from the lengthy readings for IFP, we also have ‘simulation exercises’ — a Model United Nations-like activity where fellows take part in discussing key global issues by representing different nations. This has been fun as well.

We even wrote a response paper too last week and here's what I wrote for the prompt: “Evaluate the importance of studying Indian Foreign Policy through your areas of education and profession.”

I got first-hand experience of witnessing the impact of foreign policy through ‘international news’ while working as a journalist with ‘News Today (NT)’. The experience was demanding yet surreal. If anyone asks what it is like to be in a newsroom, I compare it to orchestrating a symphony, with the Editor-in-Chief assuming the role of the conductor, guiding a talented ensemble of reporters, desk editors, proofreaders, and designers. 

As NT was an eveninger, I juggled as a local news reporter in the morning and as a desk editor, I worked alongside my colleagues to bring out the print edition by 3 PM. I handled the international page of NT and it was fun. 

Here’s how it usually works: Desk editors log into an online portal to collect international news articles (or stories in newsroom parlance) written by reporters from across the globe for agencies like Press Trust of India, Bloomberg, Associated Press, Agence France-Presse, Reuters, among others.

Desk editors, then the Editor-in-Chief, judge what stories should go into print based on importance. Indian newsrooms often highlight stories from the US with more prominence compared to other nations on the international page. However, what trends in social media or primetime TV news on that day dictate which story would appear above the fold.

Breaking News related to war, calamities, economic bash, and announcements by WTO or the UN also takes the spotlight on print. I had it easy to decide the top story for most editions as Donald Trump was the US President at the time; everything was news if the most powerful man on earth ranted on Twitter.

Desk editors package such syndicated copies and paste them onto the newspaper’s designing tool like Adobe and start editing them by their print size. Designers simultaneously add relevant photos for the story. The proofreaders then fact-check, fix the grammar and rewrite if needed.

Editors often take the liberty to give catchy headlines. Saying more with less is a skill much valued here. Editors also advise the desk hand to add graphic boxes that offer context to the story. For example, if you take an article about the US election, then an accompanying box could be on election terminologies for readers to understand better. 

‘Read more to know more’

As a desk editor, I started reading more about foreign policy to make sure the international page came out well. Working under my first mentor R Chitra, the assistant editor at NT was a priceless experience. She told me and other cub journalists to ‘learn every day the editorial beat’ we were assigned to do. Thus as a desk hand, she said to bring in context and history anywhere that is needed and know about the foreign policy of the nations to solidify a reportage.

While writing Op-ed pieces, we were advised to back our ideas with strong facts and write in simple language. It’s better to sound clear than clever. Cut the crap. Keep it straight to the point. Having moved to different newsrooms post-NT to DT Next and then to the Hindu BusinessLine, I try my best to follow this rule. 

For a publication on Medium, I wrote about "Hagia Sophia and the Deafening Silence". This Op-ed was written after President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government changed the UNESCO World Heritage site’s status from a museum into a mosque. To understand Turkish politics, my editor advised me to dive into several dozen long forms to solidify my research and get my opinion backed by data. My article explored how “history has shown that when populists rise to power, they widely use religious rhetoric for their ideological drive”. 

Last year, following the devastating earthquake in Turkiye and Syria, I wrote an Op-ed on how to fight misinformation in times of natural calamities. I adopted the same principle of research before I started writing the piece: learn the geographical and historical context of the land, the political parties at play, the people and finally what is at stake. I adapted the same framework and researched the foreign and defence policy of Russia while I wrote an explainer about the "S-400 Triumf Russian missile system". 

I have realised that writing any report with context and an explanatory style allows readers to grasp information more effectively. As journalists, incorporating historical context and providing a basic understanding of foreign policy in our international reports is vital for accuracy and depth. In the world of information, content might be the king but context is the kingdom. Context is crucial while writing international news and a journalist can make it effective only if they know a fair bit of foreign policy. 

Bias and Narrative Control

One other question that has kept popping into my head is the biased coverage of Asian and African countries by Western and European media. For instance, in one of IFP’s discussions, I addressed an analysis of over 1,000 articles by the investigative journalism platform Intercept. It showed how coverage of the Gaza war by the New York Times, Washington Post and Los Angeles Times heavily favoured Israel. They have shown a consistent bias against Palestinians and have used emotive language to describe the killings of Israelis, but not Palestinians, the investigations found.

This biased coverage in major newspapers and mainstream TV news is impacting general perceptions of the war and directing viewers toward a warped view of the conflict. It’s also shaping how the US perceives this conflict. As news consumers, we have to be mindful and remember what Malcolm X said: “If you're not careful, the newspapers will have you hating the people who are being oppressed, and loving the people who are doing the oppressing.”

That’s all for today.

❤📖Something epic on the way!

My friend from the Young India Fellowship Pubarun Basu, an award-winning documentary photographer and I are working together on an amazing project that we plan to release in the coming weeks. Stay tuned for more!

Did you like reading this edition? Should I do better? Please don’t hesitate to offer me your feedback. I am open to ideas and suggestions. Feel free to reach me at [email protected].

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