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Daniel Pearl

From Right to Left: Christiane Amanpour, Daniel Pearl Magnet High School Student Journalists, Susan Oh, Arturo Siguenza UCLA Photography

UCLA and the World

The Evolution of Journalism – An Exclusive Interview with CNN’s Christiane Amanpour

written by Arturo Siguenza

On April 13, 2016, CNN’s chief international correspondent and award-winning journalist Christiane Amanpour spoke at UCLA’s Korn Convocation Hall for the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture Series. The series was created to commemorate the life and work of Daniel Pearl, a reporter for the Wall Street Journal who was kidnapped and brutally murdered by Pakistani militants in 2002. Ms. Amanpour, who sits on the board of the Daniel Pearl Foundation, has covered breaking news from across the globe for over 20 years and is known for her exclusive and hard-hitting interviews with world leaders, including former Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi. Both during the lecture and in an interview with The Generation Editors Arturo Siguenza and Susan Oh, Ms. Amanpour spoke about the power and importance of journalism as a civic duty and the changing environment of journalism today.

Amanpour began by addressing how important it is for Americans to be connected to the world. 9/11, she recounted, was a game changer for Americans. It impacted not only our response to terrorism, but the manner in which we absorb and emit news in the international sphere.

9/11 is the modern day equivalent of Pearl Harbor and all of that which made the world and brought the world home for Americans in a way that hasn’t been true in the previous generation or so. I have always believed that 9/11 or no 9/11, the world is a massively important place that Americans particularly cannot get along with not knowing about.

9/11 forced America to be engaged and conscious of the world outside our borders, and the need for this awareness has grown exponentially. “It’s a two way street, and there’s no choice… other than to be engaged,” she argued, and it is foreign correspondents, like Daniel Pearl and Amanpour herself, that serve as conduits for this interdependent relationship. It is journalists who “have dedicated their lives to being your eyes and ears around the world, and actually sacrificed their lives to make that happen.” This is where the power of journalists stands firmly. Journalists and foreign correspondents respond to a calling to connect the world we live in by telling the stories of those desperate to be heard. These stories cross borders, dissect political views, and unite people through the words and images that journalists proliferate.

Born in Iran, Amanpour responded to the call. She experienced firsthand the toppling effects of the Islamic Revolution on her friends, family and country, fueling her passion for journalism.

So I came to the United States, with the idea of being a journalist, because the revolution in Iran taught me, bizarrely, to be interested. It fired my imagination. It fired my curiosity, born of a very personal life experience. I wanted to understand what was going on in the world that could all of a sudden turn my life, and my friends, and my parents, upside down.

From then on, she came to push the boundaries of journalism, covering stories from Bosnia to Iraq, from Rwanda to Somalia, from Afghanistan to Turkey, and far more.

Her bold and courageous reporting style has set her apart from her peers, as she not only tells a story, but takes a stance and calls for action from the global community. She recounted her coverage of the Bosnian War in the early ‘90s explaining how she and her colleagues used their platform as journalists to push for world leaders to respond to the atrocities they witnessed, especially the massacre in Srebrenica.

I think the fact that we were able to do that in Bosnia made a difference and eventually brought an end to the war, because our reporting made it impossible, eventually, for Western democracies to turn away.

Since then, she has made it her mission to “take the torch of light and truth and shine it in all the dark corners,” and bring justice to places where she finds impunity. “If that makes me an activist,” she added, “then yes, I am an activist.”

In her years as a journalist, she reported directly from battlefields, experiencing the dangers of her profession firsthand. However, as she looked back, Ms. Amanpour reflected on how much has changed. She noted that while journalists have historically been caught in the crossfire of war and conflict, it was during the Bosnian War that journalists started to be deliberately attacked. “[Daniel Pearl] was perhaps the first of the brutally murdered journalists in our generation…Today, and especially since 9/11, the leading cause of death for journalists is murder…people want to shut us up.” The increased risks of death, kidnapping and imprisonment for journalists today makes it incredibly difficult to report from war-torn places like Syria, which has led to underreporting of the war. She believes the lack of information from Syria, coupled with the West’s reluctance to intervene, has allowed ISIS to grow, terrorism to flourish and has resulted in a refugee crisis in Europe–an issue that Western countries are scrambling to mitigate. This is precisely why she argues that the global community must be engaged and invested in what is going on around the world.

The world is way too interconnected now for…any country to sit contentedly in its fortress…This is too globalized a world for anyone to be able to make it, for anybody, any country to be able to make it alone.

Amanpour reminded us that journalists hold the ability of forcing the world and its leaders to take notice, “whether it’s your school leader, whether it’s community leaders, whether it’s the mayor’s office, the governor’s office, the president, Congress, dictators around the world, whoever it might be, the more we shine the light on these stories, the more difficult it is for impunity to take hold.”

In addition to the concerns she has about the increased dangers of reporting from the field, Amanpour is also troubled by how journalism is consumed today. In today’s age of smartphones, social media and the barrage of viral content, she is concerned that journalism is losing its ability to garner focused attention to pressing issues. With more people self-selecting the news they want to read and superficially lending attention to stories via “likes”, she feels that society is losing its collective consciousness, or the “critical mass that [we] need to affect any kind of reaction to what is happening”. She fears that this “flash in the pan” reporting, makes everything seem important, while at the same time, makes nothing important at all. We came together to #BringBackOurGirls in Nigeria and #JeSuisCharlie after the Paris attacks, but she asks, “What now?” She admits that journalists are still trying to figure out “how to make [technology] work” for them and, in her case, how to engage activism in today’s climate of fleeting attention.

Today, journalists walk a fine line between performing a civic duty to the world, and putting their lives at risk in the face of leaders and organizations that deem us enemies. From Syria to Egypt, from Russia to Turkey, from Mexico to the Philippines, leaders have aimed to punish journalists not only physically, but also by voiding freedom of expression.

They don’t have to kill you, although they do, but they can put you in jail. They can put you on trial. They can just silence you whichever way they want to.

Amanpour has dedicated significant time to questioning those who seek to silence and suppress journalism, sitting face-to-face with leaders like Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan and bravely pushing them for answers. However, she recognizes the evolving nature and danger journalism has taken on. While she faces increased challenges of spreading truth to the masses and increased danger in the field, she remains committed to her religion of truth–the same religion of truth that Daniel Pearl risked his life to uphold–to be the “eyes and ears” for all of us at home.
A link to the full audio of the interview can be found here.

June 15, 2016 0 comment

Security and Conflict Technology UCLA and the World

“Show, Don’t Tell”: Advice for Anyone with a Phone, Camera, or Keyboard

written by Erica Anjum

By Erica Anjum

Samantha Power was in the building. Schoenberg Hall, UCLA, to be exact, on February 23, 2014.

Although Ambassador Power is the United States’ permanent representative to the United Nations, she was not there to divulge the secrets of the White House or the UN. She was there as a former journalist.

After a roundtable discussion with a few students harboring their own journalistic ambitions, Ambassador Power addressed a much larger audience for the Twelfth Annual Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture and discussed the relationship between journalism, public opinion, foreign policy and international relations.

Social issues had drawn both her and Daniel Pearl to journalism, and had transported them far from home. At 23, a young Samantha had relocated herself to Yugoslavia and set up shop as a freelance journalist.

From the title to the last sentence, her words not only reported what was happening on the ground, but they were also charged with emotion and conviction. They rang with the challenge of someone looking you in the eyes and asking, “This is what is happening. What are you going to do about it?”

By established standards, past and present, journalism should be factual; moreover, good journalism should be neutral. Ambassador Power’s articles were not neutral then, but neither are most journalistic endeavors now. Some people lament the loss of neutrality in journalism, and others question whether it was ever a reality to begin with. Ambassador Power’s articles and her lecture at UCLA, titled “The War on Truth (and what we must do to win it)” suggest that due to the very nature of some topics, journalism cannot be, and more importantly, should not be neutral.

Journalists take risks with their own lives when they travel to unstable and violent regions. The risks they take, however, leave them with both power and responsibility. Modern technology makes it easier for the common man to share his stories today, but in situations with graphic and massive human rights violations, journalists are often in the best position to give people whose rights are being violated and lives taken voices loud enough to be heard internationally and immediately. They can contextualize the local into the global, raise awareness, and shape public opinion and emotions. In the process, they can ultimately provoke and impact foreign policy by rendering issues that may not be of direct geopolitical significance or of concern to national security as part of the intervention and aid agenda.

In this way, journalists hold an immediate power: by raising awareness, they can push governments to stop atrocities in their tracks. They also hold a more long-term power: the research for academic articles and books, generally esteemed as the reservoirs of knowledge, usually takes place long after events have passed, when witnesses are dead and much evidence has been shoved under the proverbial rug. Often, the only indication of what is happening, what happened last month, last year, or ten years ago is through what journalists produce. Thus, while their stories have the power to compel people and governments to act now, what journalists record in the present also contains the potential to shape the future.

These powers and the attached responsibilities have not changed since Ambassador Power was in Yugoslavia and Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, but there have been significant developments in the field.

As a journalist, Ambassador Power was able to make a living as a freelancer because the print media allowed for the same article to be syndicated across multiple newspapers, magazines, and journals at a profit. Professional journalists today generally cannot make a living as freelancers anymore; everything is online, and consequently, content cannot be repeated. Technological innovations, however, have also spawned a new breed of “journalists.” Armed with camera-phones, everyone is a witness; in the world of hashtags and blogs, anyone can be a reporter. They may not have degrees or paychecks, but they have opinions that can reach thousands in minutes. These citizen journalists are also sometimes killed for their actions, just like their professional counterparts.

This new breed seems far removed from the likes of Samantha Power and Daniel Pearl. It should be remembered, however, that while their names and careers are now famous, both the Ambassador and Daniel Pearl began their journeys as ordinary people interested in what was happening around them, and who were determined to share what they saw. The current phenomenon is in essence a decentralization of both power and responsibility: everyone can be aware and everyone can raise awareness. This not only makes it more difficult for dictators to muffle the truth, it also addresses the issue of the media only reporting the truth as they see fit.

As more people take on the role of informal journalists, events as they are unfolding in a variety of places can be shared through many voices. As multiple perspectives converge to tell each story, the truth behind every incident can be much better recorded for present and future generations. While some writers and the stories they have told may one day become extraordinary, the future lies in the possibility to engender things unextraordinary. The best way to win the war on truth is to render the truth common to tell and common to find.

This overall shift from professional to popular journalism corresponds in an interesting way with Ambassador Power’s transition from a journalist to a politician. Her speech at UCLA did not suggest that she is now any less concerned about the human rights issues that once drove her career as a journalist. On the contrary, her words resonated with the values of someone who still cares deeply about the atrocities witnessed on the ground, then and now. Her responsibilities have not changed, her target audience has. As a journalist, she focused on public opinion; as a diplomat she focuses on persuading policymakers in a bureaucracy which in her own words “aggregates the slowness of 193 governments.”

The roundtable discussion preceding the lecture was meant to be an opportunity for budding journalists to receive advice from a former professional. However, the message implicit in the discussion and the speech came from someone who has been watching events unfold from the perspective of both a journalist and a diplomat. Ambassador Power described the events leading up to Daniel Pearl’s murder as a “catastrophic alchemy of us vs. them.” This alchemy continues to fuel cycles of retribution taking individual lives, fanning genocides, trampling rights, and burying the truth in the process. While we may not all find ourselves caught in the middle of these violent dialogues, we each have our roles to play. These roles may change over time: Ambassador Power’s responsibility now is to help design an effective response through institutional machinery. Meanwhile, in a new era in which every individual is armed with the technology to fight, we each share the burden once reserved for professional journalists to bring the truth to light.

March 17, 2014 1 comment