Scoop

Scoop is a satirical novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, first published in 1938, drawing on Waugh's own experience as a newspaper correspondent covering the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935. Through a case of mistaken identity, the Daily Beast newspaper's proprietor confuses William Boot, a mild countryman who writes an obscure nature column called Lush Places from his family's crumbling estate, with a fashionable young novelist of the same surname, and dispatches the bewildered William to cover a brewing civil war in the fictional East African country of Ishmaelia. Entirely unqualified and unprepared, William nonetheless stumbles by accident into the biggest story of the crisis, a German-backed coup, while the assembled press corps of vain, competitive and largely uninformed foreign correspondents remain oblivious around him, and he returns to England having unwittingly scored the scoop of the title, only for the newspaper, through a further mix-up, to honor his fashionable novelist namesake at its celebratory banquet instead. Satirizing the vanity, incompetence and fabrication Waugh had observed among the international press in Abyssinia, alongside the eccentricities of an English country gentry class in decline, the novel introduced the enduringly quoted Fleet Street maxim, coined by the paper's foreign editor, that a good foreign correspondent should file the story his editors want rather than the story that is actually true, and it remains widely regarded as one of the sharpest satires of journalism ever written in English.