> > To be fair to Jennings, he probably meant that few American reporters
>speak Arabic, not that few people in the world speak it. Which is the
>scandal of most U.S. reporters abroad - they barely speak the
>language of the target country (even in Canada, probably!),
>
>You mean French or English?
English. That was a joke. Though NYT reporter James Brooke was covering Canada from Denver for a while a few years ago, because the Times balked at the expense of keeping an Ottawa bureau open (a fact I learned via the Yale alumni magazine). He had a 416 number that rang in his Denver apartment.
Doug