Norms, perceptions, and the fog of news

‘All action takes place, so to speak, in a kind of twilight, which like a fog or moonlight, often tends to make things seem grotesque and larger than they really are,’ Carl von Clausewitz famously observed of war. A similar observation may be made of news gathering, especially in a foreign context. Foreign correspondents pursue news stories in an environment that is, to varying degrees, uncertain and unfamiliar. What they discover, like the objects in a fog, are products of both material reality and imagination. The literature has long grappled with the tension between observing and imagining the news—between objectivity and subjectivity. Underlying the question of whether the news is a function of impartial, rules-based reporting of facts or inter-subjective interpretation are two distinctive approaches. The latter formulation may be conceived as the domain of constructivism, while the former may be referred to as institutionalism.

The institutionalist approach to news gathering emphasizes the role of rules and procedures developed and congealed over time. American journalism has drastically evolved since the penny press revolution of the 1830s, prior to which newspapers were either commercial or political, with the latter financed by political parties or politicians. The business model of the less expensive ‘penny papers’, which were sold on the street, relied on wide circulation and advertising, rather than subscription fees and subsidies from political parties. Their relative political independence and news reporting served primarily to attract more readers, rather than to advance professional journalism. By shifting the newspaper's attention from covering ‘the affairs of an elite’ to attracting ‘an increasingly varied, urban, and middle-class society’, the penny press established the modern idea of news.Footnote ¹¹

The notion that news reporting must be objective has been widely attributed to the establishment of the Associated Press in 1846. However, the Associated Press practised neutral reporting out of necessity, as it gathered news for politically diverse newspapers. It was the NYT that, by the end of the nineteenth century, acquired a reputation for consciously and most successfully seeking objectivity. The newspaper was founded in 1851 and rapidly grew into a powerful, globally recognized journalistic institution. Gay Talese (1969) described its influence on public opinion and global reach in his classic account of the newspaper:

The First World War and its aftermath also contributed to the institutionalization of American journalism. The journalists’ experience with propaganda and public relations fostered cynicism—the view that ‘facts themselves, or what they had taken to be facts, could not be trusted’.Footnote ¹³ One response was the development of new genres of subjective reporting, such as the political column. The other was institutionalization—the replacement of ‘simple faith in facts with allegiance to rules and procedures created for a world in which even facts were in question’.Footnote ¹⁴ What emerged was ‘a corporate bureaucracy’,Footnote ¹⁵ accompanied by division of labour, specialization of function, and increased complexity. Further reinforcing the institutionalization of journalism was the journalistic creed, with a set of conventions that ostensibly ‘perform for the reporter the function that rules of evidence do for the scientists’.Footnote ¹⁶

The constructivist approach challenges the institutionalist faith in rules-based objectivity. It conceptualizes news as an artefact of socially learned beliefs about society. Human behaviour is less a function of material reality than the social values that assign meaning to both the observed and unobserved phenomena.Footnote ¹⁷ These values are essentially theories about how the world works or should work and, therefore, shape how events are interpreted. Our understanding of what is news-worthy is based on our conception of what is not news-worthy—that which is too ordinary to report.

Social construction plays a particularly important role in journalism because of the lack of universally shared criteria for distinguishing between news and non-news. Constructivists argue that news gathering ultimately hinges on the correspondent's ‘opinion’ of what news is, and what is news-worthy.Footnote ¹⁸ A successful reporter has ‘antennae, so to speak, that have become sensitive to what the trade regards as news, but he cannot describe it in terms that are discriminating and non-tautological’.Footnote ¹⁹ What the trade regards as news, according to the constructivist perspective, is ‘socially constructed, elaborated in the interaction of the news-making players with one another’.Footnote ²⁰

While the ideas of what news is and what news-worthiness means are indeed socially constructed, the scope for interpretation has certainly narrowed with the bureaucratization and standardization of news production. Politics has also played a key role in shaping both the social construction and the institutionalization of news. The journalistic quest for objectivity has been, to a large extent, also a quest for professional autonomy. Hallin (1986) notes that American journalism of the second half of the twentieth century has developed a strong hostility toward the wielders of political power while, at the same time, gained unprecedented access to the government: ‘Structurally the American news media are both highly autonomous from direct political control and, through the routines of the news-gathering process, deeply intertwined in the actual operation of government.’Footnote ²¹

The term ‘Fourth Estate’ has been popularly used as a shorthand for the news media, connoting its role as a major institution of representative democracy.Footnote ²² As journalist Walter Lippman emphasized, democracy requires a ‘steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news’.Footnote ²³ Still, Hallin (1986) argues that journalists employ different understandings of objectivity depending on whether the story they cover is deemed consensual, controversial, or deviant in the existing power structure. The sphere of deviance contains the political actors and views deemed unworthy of consideration by the political mainstream of the society and, consequently, journalistic neutrality does not apply there. A typical example of deviance in the USA context is communism. By abandoning neutrality in the domain of deviance, journalists reinforce ‘the limits of acceptable political conflict’.Footnote ²⁴

The institutional and constructivist approaches to journalism are particularly useful for understanding the ‘strategic level’ of news gathering—the level at which news objectives are defined and resources for meeting them are allocated (by editors). Still missing is a framework accounting for the inescapable ‘tactical’ elements of news gathering: the on-the-ground constraints shaping the process. The next section develops such a framework.

A structural approach to news gathering

This section develops a theoretical approach to news gathering by supplementing the strategic factors already identified in the literature—perceptions and norms—with the tactical constraints correspondents face while in the field. It identifies two structural factors that constrain news gathering on the ground. The emphasis on structure does not imply a complete absence of agency, but rather illuminates the main factors constraining agents. This article identifies the structural factors constraining the agency of foreign correspondents and, consequently, the effects of institutional norms and individual perceptions. These factors are best seen not as ‘independent variables’, but as mechanisms driving the news-gathering process.Footnote ²⁵ Isolating the mechanisms sheds light on a phenomenon that may otherwise seem chaotic or idiosyncratic. It does not make it possible to predict the news, but it does allow us better to understand how the news is collected.

The first mechanism is logistical. Logistics refers to the correspondents’ movement and maintenance. Operating on foreign ground is usually tougher than on one's own, and some foreign territories are more physically and psychologically demanding than others. Travellers to Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s were often forewarned: ‘Karachi is not Paris.’Footnote ²⁶ There is also a critical spatial component to news gathering. The correspondent is required to step outside of his or her office and cover as much physical ground as possible. The NYT editors frequently reminded their correspondents that ‘Karachi is not Pakistan’ (i.e. they ought to cover more than just the capital) and to include in their reports ‘some of the basic problems of your territory and something about the people, their lives and their attitudes’.Footnote ²⁷ The capacity to do this is structured by the logistical mechanism of news gathering.

The second mechanism is political, and it contains both a ‘supply’ and a ‘demand’ component. On the supply side is the prevailing political climate in the host country. This climate is shaped by the country's regime type—be it democratic or authoritarian—as well as the nature of its relationship with other countries, most notably the foreign correspondent's home base. Authoritarian regimes, such as the one faced by NYT correspondents in Pakistan in the 1950s and 1960s, are characterized by low transparency, high censorship, and widespread propaganda, which significantly affect the news-gathering process. On the demand side are the preferences and demands of the editors and readers. Whether and how their story will be published and read are inescapable professional considerations of journalists. The task of making Pakistan intelligible and interesting to the American audience fell primarily on foreign correspondents.

The next sections provide an in-depth examination of how logistical and political constraints significantly structured the news-gathering process for NYT correspondents in Pakistan during the formative period of USA–Pakistan relations (1954–71). First, a background section provides an overview of the major historical events shaping the relationship between the two countries. The subsequent empirical analysis is divided into three time periods: 1950s, 1960s, and 1969–71. There is marked variation in the foreign correspondents’ on-the-ground experience across these periods. In the 1950s, while Pakistan was actively courting the USA for economic and military aid and the NYT was just setting up in the country, logistical constraints dominated. In the 1960s, with Pakistan under military rule and more seasoned correspondents on the ground, it was the political constraints that most actively shaped the news-gathering process—so much so that the newspaper failed to anticipate a war erupting between Pakistan and India in 1965. In 1969–71, Pakistan was on the precipice of a civil war and another war with India. The NYT foreign correspondents foresaw neither, due to both political and logistical limitations to their work. NYT Foreign News Editor Emanuel R. Freedman (who held the position for nearly two decades) emphasized that the task of the NYT foreign correspondent was to ‘cover important situations as they are developing as well as when they burst into fireworks’ so that the public is not ‘caught by surprise when the crises arise’.Footnote ²⁸ Neither the institutionalist nor the constructivist accounts adequately explain why the NYT and its readers were caught off guard when major crises erupted in South Asia. The ensuing sections show how taking into account the logistical and political constraints to news gathering helps us better to understand how the American public came to know Pakistan during the formative years of USA–Pakistan relations.

Historical context of New York Times news gathering in Pakistan

The early work of the NYT foreign correspondents in Pakistan was far less objective than the institutionalist ideal while, at the same time, far less subjective than the constructivist expectation. It was deeply affected by the country's political climate and the state of USA–Pakistan relations. Most consequential was the divergence between the existing state of the relationship and that which was desired by the Pakistani leadership. The wider the expectations gap, the more difficult was the work, and life, of the correspondents. The Pakistani leadership sought to build a more profitable alliance with the USA. Rather than wooing the Americans by enabling deeper and more favourable news coverage, it manipulated the ground experience of key USA representatives, among whom were NYT correspondents, in Pakistan to signal displeasure. This was coupled with the continued insistence that the newspaper base a correspondent in the country.

Pakistan pursued an alliance with the USA soon after gaining independence in 1947. The nation's founding father, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, requested $2 billion in military and civilian aid, but the request was rejected in the aftermath of Pakistan's first war with India in 1947–48.Footnote ²⁹ It was then-army chief Ayub Khan who succeeded in establishing the USA–Pakistan military pact in 1954 by stressing his country's strategic location and role in the global fight against communism. Throughout the Cold War, the USA public opinion was generally more sympathetic to Pakistan's rival—India—because of its status as a democracy. India also attracted significantly more USA national news coverage than did Pakistan (see Figure 1), until the late 1980s (even during most of the Soviet war in Afghanistan, in which Pakistan played a key role). The NYT followed—or, to some extent, led—the national pattern in Pakistan news coverage in the 1950s through 1970s (see Figure 2). Starting in the late 1980s, however, it parted ways with the national trends by continuing to pay closer attention to India than to Pakistan.Footnote ³⁰

Figure 1.

References to India and Pakistan in United States of America national news

Figure 2.

References to India and Pakistan in the New York Times

Pakistan's oscillation between democracy and dictatorship made USA alliance with the country a tougher sell to the American public.Footnote ³¹ Consequently, rather than appealing to the Americans on the basis of shared values, Ayub (and his successors) played the geostrategic card while attributing the less savoury Pakistani policies to Indian aggression. He forewarned the Americans that ‘“Pakistan must not be taken for granted.” Anything less than (a sufficient amount of) aid which would enable it to defend itself would be “futile and a waste of time.” Moreover, it would expose Pakistan to communist and Indian pressure and “accentuate its internal difficulties”’.Footnote ³²

Ayub seized power following a military coup in 1958 and imposed martial law; in 1969, he was briefly replaced by another general, and another round of martial law. In its professed quest for democracy and freedom around the world, the USA turned a blind eye to the authoritarian tendencies of its allies. Historically, USA aid to Pakistan has been significantly larger during the country's three periods of military rule (1958–71, 1977–88, and 1999–2008) than when a civilian government was in power. Figure 3 displays the trend in USA economic and military assistance to Pakistan. It was most substantial in the 1950s and 1960s, until the start in 2001 of the USA War on Terror, in which Pakistan has played a prominent role. Between the years 1954 and 1971, Pakistan received more military aid than when it was directly involved in America's proxy war against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1979–89. However, the funding did little to clear the fog of news for the NYT correspondents in Pakistan.

Figure 3.

United States of America assistance to Pakistan, 1948–2010. Note: All figures are in US$ (millions). Figures are adjusted for inflation and presented in 2009 constant dollars. Source: Wren Elhai, Center for Global Development (2011), data presented in ‘Sixty years of US aid to Pakistan’, The Guardian, 11 July 2011, http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/2011/jul/11/us-aid-to-pakistan#data, [accessed 1 September 2017].

A reporter's paradise? Pakistan news gathering in the 1950s

In the early 1950s, the NYT was new to Pakistan, Karachi was courting Washington for military and economic aid, and civilian rule made Pakistan's political climate more relaxed and open. The serious constraints to news-gathering NYT correspondents faced were mainly logistical, rather than political, in nature.

Pakistan was initially covered by Michael James. Born in Paris, James attended Princeton University before enlisting in the Army Air Corps soon after Pearl Harbor. His previous assignment involved covering the Korean War. His reporting was scant, as James was battling ‘inexcusable procrastination’ and various illnesses, including malaria and what the local doctors called ‘sand-fly fever’. His logistical impairments influenced the quality of the news coming out of Pakistan. For example, in the summer of 1952, James identified several news possibilities originating out of the country: (1) a war over Kashmir; (2) Pakistan becoming a leader of the Muslim world; and (3) the entire country collapsing.Footnote ³³ None of these reflected the reality. It would be more than a decade before Pakistan engaged in another war over Kashmir. Neither did Pakistan ever collapse nor become a leader of the Muslim world. By November 1952, the NYT ended James's assignment, citing the correspondent's ‘unsatisfactory job’.Footnote ³⁴

A foreign desk memorandum captures what the newspaper expected of its foreign correspondents:

Jack Callahan was responsible for covering Pakistan after James. But his work was also deemed unsatisfactory. The correspondent was not spending enough time outside of his office. For example, his ‘Pakistan would take key anti-Soviet role’ (28 May 1954), was based on a statement by a nameless ‘responsible government official’ and superficial observations of public behaviours. Callahan was recalled from Pakistan after a serious mistake in one of his stories was caught only after it appeared in print. ‘If we cannot rely on the correspondent to summarise a document accurately, it is almost time to give up,’ Freedman bemoaned.Footnote ³⁶

Freedman held the foreign news editor position between 1948 and 1965. Having started his career at The Times as a copyreader on the foreign desk and then running the desk at the London bureau (1945–48), Freedman's reputation as ‘[r]eliable, solid, no bad habits’Footnote ³⁷ quickly earned him the foreign news editor job. He managed roughly 50 foreign correspondents. Before dismissing Callahan, Freedman consulted with Abe M. Rosenthal, a foreign correspondent with experience in India and Pakistan. Rosenthal pointed out that the main impediments faced by Callahan in Pakistan did not stem from a particularly difficult political climate. He observed that, while Callahan ‘understands the situation in Pakistan’, he is not ‘a good or even fairly good’ writer. ‘I don't have to tell you that there is nothing esoteric or mysterious about constructing a story,’ Rosenthal elaborated. ‘But from what I have seen a reporter either learns how to do it fairly quickly or he never learns. He [Callahan] cannot relax at a typewriter; he attacks a story as if it were his enemy. Insecurity fills him.’Footnote ³⁸

Rosenthal's own opinion of Pakistan was that it was ‘a reporter's paradise’. The 1950s were the most open Pakistan had been or would be to American journalists for decades to come. Rosenthal was particularly impressed with the ease with which he made contacts. The country appeared ‘wide open to American correspondents, especially New York Times men. It was not only that I was able to see everybody on short notice. It was that they talked frankly and fully’.Footnote ³⁹ Rosenthal compared his experience in Pakistan with that in India, ‘where every interview is a fencing match and sometimes you leave an office feeling sure you know less than when you walked in’.Footnote ⁴⁰

Pakistan may not have been a ‘paradise’ for reporters—it certainly required some effort. Hindered by the logistics of opening and staffing a Pakistan bureau, the NYT missed an opportunity to provide the American public an informed introduction to the country.

A sideshow to the main event: Pakistan news gathering in the 1960s

During the 1960s, with an authoritarian military regime preoccupied with being taken for granted by the USA,Footnote ⁴¹ Pakistan was very far from a reporter's paradise. ‘At the moment I'm deeper in red tape, official and commercial, than I've ever been before,’ NYT foreign correspondent Jacques Nevard reported to Freedman. ‘While an end to it is in sight, it's elusive and gives a distinct impression of moving farther away from time to time.’Footnote ⁴² The year was 1963, and Nevard had just spent his first ten days in Pakistan. The Pakistani leadership had finally been granted its request of NYT staffing the country, and Nevard was irked by the officials’ seeming unwillingness to do ‘anything to make it any easier’ for him ‘to establish a residence-cum-office here and get to work’.Footnote ⁴³

Nevard was born in 1925, in New York City. Having not completed college, he was a self-styled ‘history buff’. He preferred to be stationed in Western Europe, but was open to other locations, so long as his wife—‘an enthusiastic voyageur’—and three young children could accompany him. When applying for a position at the NYT, Nevard requested three foreign assignments of three years each; in nine years, his oldest child would be entering college. He thought of the experience abroad as preparation for a long-term career at The Times. Nevard had previously spent two years in the United Kingdom and France in military service, and a NYT evaluator described his interest in becoming a NYT foreign correspondent as ‘intense’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Prior to his assignment in Karachi, Nevard was stationed in Hong Kong.

To Nevard, the main impediments were not logistical, but political. As he explained to his foreign editor:

One cause of Nevard's fewer logistical constraints was the assistance of a NYT stringer, Nanji. Nanji's assistance to Nevard included significant legwork, keeping files in order, and talking over stories and story ideas. When Nevard was away, Nanji spent three or more hours a day at his office. The NYT did not, however, adequately compensate Nanji. Lelyveld observed that Nanji's ‘financial distress . . . seems real enough’, and was the result of NYT ‘paying him poorly, considering what he was doing’.Footnote ⁴⁶ Yet, it appears Nanji found the work he was doing for NYT at least somewhat satisfying: he had declined an offer from Time, which paid more than NYT.

Though long-awaited by Pakistani officials, Nevard's arrival coincided with increasing anxieties in Pakistan over the extant nature of USA–Pakistan relations. Washington had given some aid to Pakistan's main rival, India, following China's invasion in 1962. A NYT Rawalpindi-based stringer warned the newspaper before Nevard's arrival that the correspondent ‘would be profoundly shocked to find that things are not going too well for them with their “staunch ally”’. He explained that the ‘bitterness’ was caused by ‘the feeling that the building up of India's war potential without a Kashmir settlement would cause a military imbalance with Pakistan’.Footnote ⁴⁷ India and Pakistan's contest over the status of Kashmir had previously led to the 1947–48 war between the two countries.Footnote ⁴⁸

The editor's response to Nevard's first letter from Pakistan shows a push for more active, but rules-based, engagement. Freedman communicated his expectation that Nevard overcome the logistical and political obstacles and cover the news in Pakistan ‘with the same professional standards and norms’ as in Washington.Footnote ⁴⁹ As the longest-serving foreign news editor, Freedman played a key role in institutionalizing the no-nonsense culture at The Times. Talese (1969) described Freedman as ‘an arm of The Times, an instrument of the institution, a rock in its foundation’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Freedman's reply to Nevard was characteristically firm but encouraging:

Freedman's attitude toward red tape and censorship in foreign countries is well captured in his letter to a foreign correspondent in Moscow, where the situation was even more difficult: ‘please don't let the specter of censorship inhibit you too much. I sometimes wonder whether even the censors wouldn't like to see more lively and entertaining copy.’Footnote ⁵²

The editors’ demand for ‘more lively’ news coverage was continuously reinforced through numerous correspondences, which structured the correspondents’ professional considerations. As Clifton Daniel, managing editor of NYT (1964–69), reminded Nevard:

The type of instructions NYT editors gave to foreign correspondents in Pakistan were not particularly unique to the country, or the region. For example, Clifton Daniel also reminded a foreign correspondent in Brazil:

The editors’ demand for livelier coverage led Nevard to prepare an article with particularly attention-grabbing language. It described Karachi as ‘probably the most unloved big city in the world’.Footnote ⁵⁵ The piece immediately drew the ire of informed NYT readers, who described Nevard's characterization of Karachi as wildly inaccurate. For example, the president of the State University of New York Agricultural and Technical University wrote to the editor:

Another reader, a resident of Pakistan, wrote a scathing critique of Nevard's piece to the editors:

The editor's response to the above letter shows the high degree of confidence Nevard enjoyed in New York. Rosenthal wrote:

After his first year in Pakistan, Nevard developed scepticism about the quality of news coming out of the country. He advised ‘extreme caution’ when using material that came from the stringers.

Nevard explained that the stringers were ‘being subjected to constantly increasing pressure from the Pakistan government’.Footnote ⁵⁹ At the same time, the stringers were critical to the operation because the press conferences held by Pakistani officials were typically open only to Pakistani reporters, and native Urdu speakers were required for the ‘speaking chores’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The NYT foreign desk was, at the time, very conscious about the foreign-language deficit among its correspondents: ‘We are badly in need of better language facilities. Our correspondents list facilities in many languages, but in reality they are deficient even in basic tongues.’Footnote ⁶¹

The wire service for news on Pakistan was also unreliable. Nevard observed that the Associated Press (AP) did not staff Pakistan, ‘Except on the rare occasion when a staffer comes over from India, anything that is transmitted from Pakistan under an AP logo is actually put out by an employee of one of the Pakistani “news” agencies; actually a government propaganda agency’.Footnote ⁶² The United Press International (UPI) had a young American correspondent in Pakistan until 1964, but ‘like other foreign wire services, had to sell to one of the Pakistani “news” agencies (see above for description of these), UPI pulled their American out’.Footnote ⁶³ Finally, Reuters, Nevard observed, from time to time carried a bogus dateline. One example is Reuters’ popular Dacca-datelined story describing scenes of carnage and estimating the number of individuals killed. The Reuters correspondent was based in Karachi and the news agency ‘did not then and still does not have a Dacca stringer. That story was written in Karachi by the Reuter [sic] correspondent before he went to Dacca’.Footnote ⁶⁴

Nevard observed that it was not only the journalists who experienced pressure from the government authorities. The country was not a typical tourist destination for Americans, and consequently many of the Americans who visited Pakistan were USA government employees. Nevard noted that even those who visited Pakistan under the aegis of the USA government ‘provide a field day for all kinds of local civil servants’.Footnote ⁶⁵

Owing to the political constraints on his work, by the summer of 1964, Nevard gave up on covering the country. ‘I feel Pakistan is just a part of the India story; that it is a sideshow to the main event,’ he wrote to Freedman. ‘My personal opinion is that Pakistan simply does not generate enough news to warrant full time coverage by a resident correspondent.’Footnote ⁶⁶ He advised that the newspaper rely on correspondents from India to ‘make swings into Pakistan as news warrants’.Footnote ⁶⁷ Unbeknownst to Nevard, Pakistan was about to generate a lot of news. Ayub had begun preparing a covert infiltration of India-controlled Kashmir, which was to lead to the second India–Pakistan war.Footnote ⁶⁸ Nevard's misjudgement of the situation in Pakistan was a direct result of the political constraints he faced on the ground.

The NYT followed Nevard's advice of closing the Pakistan bureau. The new foreign editor, Seymour Topping, observed that the Pakistani officials were ‘very anxious to have us open the Karachi bureau’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Topping worked actively to shape the foreign news-gathering process by instituting new norms and restructuring the Foreign News Copy Desk in New York. He believed the newspaper should be ‘more selective’ in the details it publishes, and pushed correspondents to cover the ‘social, intellectual and technological revolutions moving nations’.Footnote ⁷⁰ In his 1968 ‘Foreign Desk Guidelines’, Topping instructed the foreign correspondents to ‘report more about how the people live, and what they and their societies look like, how their institutions and systems operate’.Footnote ⁷¹ He also helped to place foreign news at the forefront, having played a key role in transforming the daily Times into a four-section paper, with foreign news (along with national news) placed in the first section. The four-section paper became a model for other newspapers.Footnote ⁷²

Toping told the Pakistani officials that NYT would reopen its bureau only after it was assured that the new correspondent ‘would be free of political censorship and the kind of harassment which Jacques Nevard was subjected to’.Footnote ⁷³ Until then, Pakistan was covered from Delhi by Joseph Lelyveld. Lelyveld was a graduate of Harvard College and Columbia School of Journalism, as well as a Fulbright Scholar. He was promoted from the position of a copy editor to foreign correspondent after only three years on the job. He was later to earn a Pulitzer Prize for his work on South Africa, as well as serve as the executive editor of The Times (1994–2001).

The Pakistani government retaliated by making it difficult for Lelyveld to visit the country. In the spring of 1967, the newspaper took up the matter with the Pakistani Mission at the United Nations and, after five weeks, Lelyveld's visa was ready. However, the correspondent reported ‘a couple of snags’ with the visa. First, it was a single-entry visa, not the requested multiple-entry visa of long duration. Second, the correspondent was told that, if he wanted to meet government officials, he had to submit a list of their names at least four weeks before arriving in Pakistan. ‘The effect of these two conditions is to create a nine-week lag between the beginning of plans for a trip to Pakistan and the trip itself . . . To put it mildly, this arrangement will inhibit coverage of Pakistan from Delhi—which, I take it, is the whole idea,’ Lelyveld described.Footnote ⁷⁴ He suggested covering Pakistan not from India, but from the more ‘politically neutral from the Pakistani point of view’ Iran or Turkey.Footnote ⁷⁵

When he finally arrived in Pakistan in the summer of 1967, Lelyveld found that the situation was not as bad as it originally seemed. He was told ‘at a very high level’ that he would not be granted a multiple-entry visa. Pakistan was ‘eager not to be covered from New Delhi’, and could have a multiple-entry visa ‘as soon as The New York Times named a correspondent to Pakistan, though it was recognized that I'd have little use for one then’.

The political uncertainty began to take an emotional toll on Lelyveld. He even considered quitting:

Lelyveld applied for another visa to Pakistan while still being in the country. His request was granted, and the outcome even exceeded his expectations. ‘Somewhere a cog in the administrative machine went haywire,’ he explained.Footnote ⁷⁷ ‘Instead of a single-entry visa I received the best visa I've ever been granted to any country—unlimited entries for four years. Though somebody is going to lose his head, I didn't point out the mistake.’

During his summer of 1967 visit, Lelyveld found Pakistan ‘fascinating’, and advised Topping to increase the newspaper's coverage of the country. He had raised the newspaper's concerns about censorship and harassment of correspondents with the Pakistani officials, who denied the accusations. ‘But that's just the way Pakistan is; it's the way a lot of other countries are and we'll just have to finesse it,’ he concluded.Footnote ⁷⁸ Lelyveld reasoned that Pakistan requires an experienced correspondent who could navigate the difficult conditions, but ‘it might also be an advantage if he were young and single, for he would have to travel tremendously . . . to get anything out of the beat’.Footnote ⁷⁹

Topping replied that he did not see any need to assign a special staffer to the Pakistan–Turkey–Iran area, and inquired ‘if the Pakistanis would find it acceptable to receive, on a temporary assignment, a Times staffer based in Israel’.Footnote ⁸⁰ Topping's question came just two months after the 1967 Arab–Israeli war; if there was a country that drew more hostility from Pakistan than India, it was Israel.

Only one of the five articles Lelyveld filed from Pakistan was published in the newspaper. The correspondent was disappointed, but ‘after three martinis—a trick of meditation taught to me by my guru—I decided to take the matter philosophically’.Footnote ⁸¹

Don't send fruit cakes: Pakistan news gathering in 1969–71

As Ayub decided to step down in 1969, the NYT began seriously considering reopening the Pakistan bureau.Footnote ⁸² In January 1970, Pakistan's Ambassador to Washington, Agha Hilaly, lunched with Topping in New York. He ‘urged’ Topping to base a correspondent in Pakistan, indicating that ‘the situation in Pakistan had changed drastically’ and that a Times correspondent would be ‘well treated if we decided to post one there’.Footnote ⁸³

The years that followed were particularly tumultuous. In 1970, Pakistan held the first nationwide general elections that were based on universal adult suffrage on a one-person, one-vote basis. The widespread enthusiasm about the astounding democratic development—a military ruler voluntarily relinquishing power to elected civilian authority—was, however, short-lived. An unexpected electoral outcome quickly triggered a political crisis in the country's Eastern wing, soon to be followed by a civil war. On 25 March 1971, the government initiated a military crackdown of East Pakistan. On 16 December 1971, it surrendered to the joint command of the Indian and rebel forces. Pakistan's Eastern wing became a new country called Bangladesh.

Malcolm W. Browne's experience demonstrates how both the political and the logistical problems faced by foreign correspondents in Pakistan came to a head. Browne observed that the Pakistani government regarded all journalists as ‘enemy agents’. Censorship extended ‘to all outgoing cables and to all airfreighted material, including film. The problem is that once something goes into the censorship maw, I have no idea what comes out. Copy may be deleted, or, what's worse, changes may be made’.Footnote ⁸⁴ Consequently, Browne asked that the editor's office keep his copies as they arrived in New York so that he could compare them against the originals. He decided that he would try to deliver through someone else the very sensitive stories that were unlikely to pass censorship. ‘There is some risk involved in this, since I am watched like a hawk, and the playback of my copy to officials is practically instantaneous,’ he explained.Footnote ⁸⁵ In June, Browne received an official reprimand from the Pakistani government for including in his piece a quotation from and reference to the Holy Prophet. He predicted that the atmosphere will worsen as ‘foreign aid remains largely choked off’, and noted that the local newspapers are now suggesting that American policy is characterized by ‘duplicity’ and that the USA ‘is now in league with India and the Soviet Union to undo Pakistan’.Footnote ⁸⁶

The response from the foreign news editor, James Greenfield, was highly supportive: ‘we all stand impressed at the ease in which you have slipped into an extremely difficult situation.’Footnote ⁸⁷ By fall, this difficult situation also involved the inability to receive packages:

Browne also accused the Pakistani Post Office of stealing magazines, ‘which later turn up being sold by street urchins and even supposedly reputable publication dealers’.Footnote ⁸⁹

Anticipating that the newspaper would be sending multiple correspondents to East Pakistan to cover the civil war and its outcome, Browne put together a list of tips for them. He warned that at the Intercontinental Hotel, in government offices, and at all the foreign consulates in Dacca (the administrative capital of East Pakistan), ‘roughly half of the local staffs are either friendly toward or active agents of the Mukti Bahini guerrillas. The other half work for the secret police’.Footnote ⁹⁰ He explained that there have been numerous assassinations and bomb incidents in the city and so ‘no one has a sense of humor’.Footnote ⁹¹ He also noted that ‘War and Islam have combined to make booze especially expensive and scarce. Always bring some’.Footnote ⁹² He concluded:

So politically and logistically constrained was the news-gathering process that a reporter as highly experienced and perceptive as BrowneFootnote ⁹⁴ was unable to see the coming of a war between India and Pakistan. In fact, the major scoop came from Washington when Jack Anderson revealed Nixon's secret tilt toward Pakistan despite the genocidal conditions in the country's Eastern wing.Footnote ⁹⁵ During the East Pakistan crisis, the Nixon Administration convened meetings of the Washington Special Action Group to discuss the situation in South Asia. Records of these meetings were leaked to Anderson. Kissinger was quoted as describing the conflict as a ‘tragedy’ that turned into ‘an attempt [by India] to dismember a sovereign state and a member of the United Nations’.Footnote ⁹⁶

Pakistan's military crackdown on East Pakistan occurred at the time the USA was busy winding down the war in Vietnam and building a diplomatic relationship with China. Consequently, as then-USA National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger recalls: ‘there was almost nothing the [Nixon] Administration was less eager to face than a crisis in South Asia.’Footnote ⁹⁷

Pakistan served as an important channel of USA–China rapprochement, and USA leadership turned a blind eye to the accounts of ‘selective genocide’ pouring in from the State Department.Footnote ⁹⁸ Nixon's reliance on Pakistan for the China connection, and belief that Pakistan would soon ‘learn the futility of its course’, led to the USA ‘policy of restraint’ vis-à-vis the crisis in East Pakistan.Footnote ⁹⁹ In practice, this meant privately trying to persuade the Pakistani leadership to accept East Pakistan's autonomy, while also sending ‘clear signals’ to the Soviet Union not to support India in an invasion of Pakistan.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ When the war with India finally broke out, Pakistan counted on the USA for support. The support never arrived, and the special relationship between the two countries effectively came to an end.