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Coverage of Terrorism
ported until it reached pandemic proportions.
It was simply beyond the
press to report on the early fluctuations
of the Thai baht in ways that
connected to Main Street.
I tell my students to heed the message
of John Donne, who observed
that no man is an island. That is, sooner
or later what happens to anybody else—
down the street or thousands of miles
away, in a country whose name we can
barely pronounce—affects us. I tell
them good journalists are involved in
humankind. If they aren’t, they will
never be able to write about the world
in ways that touch readers nor be able
to learn anything about themselves.
At this point, you may be wondering
how American journalism can accommodate
this enlarged mission. Here
are a few suggestions.
• Most news organizations cannot afford
to keep correspondents abroad.
But some can do what my old paper,
the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, did years
ago, which was to send reporters
abroad to write about events that
were not daily front page news. In
1967, I went to the Soviet Union for
60 days. I wrote about agriculture,
industry, education, culture, what
people did for amusement, and what
there was of religion. I didn’t write a
single story about what was going
on in politics. Yet from all that I did
write, you could easily see the vast
reach of the Communist state into
the lives of its people.
• News organizations could also experiment
with consortiums. A half
dozen independent regional papers
could send a few reporters abroad
to provide good stories throughout
the year. Chains could do this more
easily. Those that cannot even afford
this could borrow the concept
of the old “rail column.” This was a
column that ran along the righthand
margin of The Washington
Post’s editorial page before the paper
had a proper op-ed page. The
idea was simply to print there every
day the most interesting 800 words
its editor could find. Almost any
paper, I should think, could afford
the space to print once or twice a
week the 800 most interesting words
its editors could find about people
and events elsewhere in the world.
• Making foreign news interesting is
the key. As Barney Kilgore, the old
editor of The Wall Street Journal,
liked to say, “The easiest thing for
the reader to do is to quit reading.”
If the new international journalism
is dull, we can forget about an audience
for it.
Our foreign news coverage has deteriorated
shamefully. As Shaw reports,
“newspaper editors and television news
executives have reduced the space and
time devoted to foreign news covered
by 70 percent to 80 percent during the
past 15 to 20 years.” The events of
September 11 and thereafter instruct
us that this is not acceptable.
With regards to international news,
the media today find themselves in the
situation of the drunk who breaks into
a cold sweat as he sobers up. He remembers
that he just sped dead blotto
through a crowded school zone. He
swears, never again. He determines to
live his life in a “serious way.”
But now it’s tomorrow. Does he
head back to the saloon? Or does he
begin a new and more responsible life?
Like him, journalists, too, have a
choice. ■
William F. Woo, a 1967 Nieman
Fellow, has taught journalism at
Stanford University since 1996. He
formerly was editor of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch.
wioux1@stanford.edu
Training Journalists to Report Safely in
Hostile Environments
‘…fire services personnel don’t go fighting fires without proper training….’
By John Owen
Two and a half months into the
war on terrorism, eight journalists
had been murdered, many
had been injured, and several had been
held hostage. At this writing, a few
American soldiers had been killed. This
comparison led the British journalist
Phillip Knightley to observe: “It is now
safer to be a member of the fighting
forces than a representative of the
media. What’s going on?”
No journalist, however experienced
or well trained to work in a conflict
zone, can feel secure working in lawless
parts of Afghanistan where armed
gangs or defectors from the Taliban
will rob and murder them. It is how
Swedish cameraman Ulf Stroemberg
lost his life, when gunmen burst into
the home where he and other Swedish
journalists were staying in a Northern
Afghanistan town.
But could the lives of other journalists
have been spared had they made
other judgments? The experience of a
British journalist who undertook a dangerous
assignment is worth examining
more closely.
When Yvonne Ridley, a British reporter
working for the Sunday Express
tabloid newspaper, was arrested by the
Taliban for illegally entering Afghanistan,
she assumed that the greater jour-
Nieman Reports / Winter 2001 25