Complaints of Developing Nations
Many developing nations complain that the international news services generate inaccurate pictures of their countries with incomplete or unfair reporting. They complain that not enough is reported from their areas and that what is reported concentrates on catastrophes, political upheaval and other sensational material.
Such complaints are not without merit. There are several reasons for this, some of which have been touched upon in previous sections of this paper; i.e., problems of communications and the inhospitality of many of the complaining nations. There are at least three reasons.
Economics
One is economics. Operating an international news service is an expensive proposition. Although UPI is a private enterprise organized for profit, it has not returned a dividend to its owners in more than 20 years.
UPI welcomes the opportunity to send its services to new areas. It is willing to tailor its services to the requirements of its subscribers which means obtaining news from areas in which they are interested as long as factual, unbiased reporting is acceptable. But such subscribers must be willing to pay a fair price for the service and to keep their accounts current. Neither UPI nor other international agencies can afford anything else, but the cost of their service would be far less to subscribers than the cost of supporting national news agencies in every country which wishes to improve its inward and outward flow of news.
Technical Strictures
Another problem relates to the technical strictures of producing newspapers and news broadcasts. The newspaper space or broadcast time which can be devoted to news from a particular foreign country is limited. Correspondents must write with that in mind. It is difficult to present a complete picture of a complicated subject in a 300-word story, yet many newspapers will use no more than that on any but the most important subjects of the day. A correspondent's work and the picture he presents, therefor, must be measured by the total of his work over a period of months.
Of course, neither a correspondent nor his news service has any control over what the editors of hundred of newspapers around the world select from the tens of thousands of words of news service copy they receive each day. News agencies file much more "positive" or "constructive" material than many critics realize because the critics do not see the full service of those agencies, only the stories published in the papers they read or broadcast by the stations they listen to. A serious report on economic development filed yesterday may be printed in only a few newspapers while the tragic story of today's catastrophe will be printed in hundreds.
Quality
Finally, there is the problem of quality. first, the quality of the newspapers and broadcasters which present an agency's news service range from excellent to poor and this is reflected in the way they handle news from abroad. Second, news agency reporters are like other humans with all their good and bad points.
News agencies try to select their best people for foreign assignments. Mistakes can be made but the correspondents selected generally are above average and have the further advantage of working for organizations dedicated to the ideal of accurate, unbiased reporting. UPI has no political bias, no point of view. Its reporters and editors are schooled in the idea that their first responsibility is to be accurate. A former editor-in-chief of UPI, Roger Tatarian, wrote this to new employees:
"For millions of people in this country and additional millions overseas, we are the only source of information on events outside their immediate localities. So our job is to be faithful stand-ins for people who cannot witness these distant events themselves. The test of our work is whether our reportage enables them to reach the same general impression, or gain the same understanding, that the event itself would have given them. To act as the extension of other individuals with different attitudes and different politics is to assume an enormous responsibility. It may well be impossible to achieve this with complete satisfaction, but that does not relieve us of the responsibility of trying to achieve it."