Scoop (novel)
Scoop is a 1938 novel by the English writer Evelyn Waugh, a satire of sensationalist journalism and foreign correspondents.
Plot
William Boot, a young man who lives in genteel poverty far from the iniquities of London, is contributor of nature notes to Lord Copper's Daily Beast, a national daily newspaper. He is dragooned into becoming a foreign correspondent when the editors mistake him for a fashionable novelist, a remote cousin, John Courtney Boot. He is sent to the fictional East African state of Ishmaelia to report the crisis there. Lord Copper believes it 'a very promising little war' and proposes 'to give it fullest publicity.' There, despite his total ineptitude, he accidentally manages to get the "scoop" of the title. When he returns, however, credit is diverted to the other Boot, and he is left to return to his bucolic pursuits, much to his relief.
Background
The novel is partly based on Waugh's own experience working for the Daily Mail, when he was sent to cover Benito Mussolini's expected invasion of Abyssinia—what was later known as the Second Italo-Abyssinian War (October 1935 to May 1936). When he got his own scoop on the invasion he telegraphed the story back in Latin for secrecy, but they discarded it. Waugh wrote up his travels more factually in Waugh in Abyssinia (1936), which complements Scoop.