An Anchor Reflects

Lisa Mullins | Published on August 4, 2011 at 3:07 pm

A neighbor approached me the other day as I was pulling into the driveway . She’s a school teacher and she’s simply overwhelmed. No, not by her third-graders.  By the news.  More specifically, she says, news from abroad is an unrelenting roster of reports of war, destruction, and despotism. “Every time I turn on the radio,” she said, “there’s a story about something bad happening some place in the world I hadn’t been thinking about.”  So she turns it off.

Her words could have been uttered by almost any editor, producer, or reporter who covers international news. They could have come from my own lips. For more than a decade, I’ve been anchoring Public Radio International’s “The World,” a one-hour daily news magazine. The program’s mission is to provide international news for an American audience, an audience with heightened interest in global events but diminished access to global reporting.

As my neighbor spoke, I scrolled back over the show I’d anchored 90 minutes before, hoping it
had been a light day for blood shed. It wasn’t.  The truth is that anyone who holds a light to global events, whether in the name of journalism, humanitarianism, missionary work, or activism, runs into the problem of how to tell important stories over and over again without exhausting, disheartening or even repelling our audience.  How can we tap into the curiosity about what’s transpiring beyond our borders and maintain that interest over the longterm? The tapping-in is tough enough.  Maintaining attention is even tougher.

Thankfully, there are ways to do both. Allow me to share a few stories from my experience at “The World.”

One recent example of my own awakening to a part of the world that– paraphrasing my neighbour– I hadn’t necessarily been thinking about, involves Sri Lanka.

In fact, there was a relatively recent sequence of events that encouraged my enduring interest in the island efforts to help our audience understand what’s transpiring there.

On December 26, 2004, when one of the largest earthquakes ever recorded struck the region, much of the news media’s attention was on the tsunami that followed, that pounded India, Thailand, Sri Lanka and Indonesia’s Aceh Province.  One of our producers made dozens of phone calls until she found a survivor who happened to be Sri Lankan.  He had been at a vacation resort in the southeast of Sri Lanka when the tsunami struck. He wanted to talk and seemed to be in shock. He was a bon vivant who told us about the Christmas party at the hotel the night before, the dance contest that drew Sri Lankans, Americans, Australians and anyone else who could squeeze onto the dance floor.  He told us about how, when the tsunami struck, he had just left the restaurant deck that was obliterated by the wave. He saw people he’d been celebrating with the night before.  Now, they were battered, wounded, or dazed and looking for loved ones.  The winner of the dance contest was one of them.

It was one of those interviews that barely requires an anchor to pose questions.  He recreated the previous 24 hours of his life and it was engrossing, terrifying, and genuine. The next day, we called him back to make sure he was okay.  He was. We were relieved and so were the listeners who wrote in after hearing him tell his story.  Suddenly, they had an investment in him and how his story would unfold.  They were drawn in for the long haul, and so were we.  Audiences respond to people who are real and situations that are unvarnished. The more they’re subjected to manufactured sentiment and trumped-up drama, the more they absorb stories that are just the opposite.

The second in the sequence of events that picqued my curiosity about Sri Lanka came in a casual comment by a colleague in the newsroom.  We were tossing around ideas for a story about the spread of suicide bombing from Iraq to Afghanistan. My colleague noted, almost as an aside, that the techniques of modern-day suicide bombers were honed by the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka.  In the news business, we crave these links that connect one part of the world with another.  We could now link Sri Lanka’s civil war, the conflict that spawned the modern-day suicide bomber, with the two wars that have claimed so many American lives.

The third in the sequence was the most profound for me.  In March of 2009, our London BBC bureau secured an interview with a Sri Lankan journalist whose husband had been murdered a few months before. He was Lasantha Wickrematunge, editor of the Sunday Leader newspaper. He had anticipated his death and had written an editorial to be run in the event of his murder.  He blamed the government.  His wife, Sonali Samarasinghe Wickramatunge, had gone into exile for her own safety.  We conducted the interview over the telephone. I liked her immediately.

Fast forward five months.  I had embarked on a Nieman Fellowship for Journalists at Harvard University, and on day one, I found myself in a room full of fellow fellows.  It wasn’t until Sonali introduced herself to the group that I realized she was the wise and warm woman I had interviewed by phone several months before.  During the fellowship, Sonali filled in many of the gaps in my understanding of the place I had become so curious about.  The tropical beaches that became bloody battlefields, the bomb blasts she could see from her balcony in Colombo— even aerial fire that looked like Fourth of July fireworks.

She talked about her late father, a policeman whom she adored.  She remembered something that happened in the late 1970s. Her dad, who was Sinhalese, was the senior superintendent of police with jurisdiction over a district in the restive central province.  Sinhalese rioters were burning Tamil homes and shops.  They were threatening families and destroying communities.  Sonali’s father had declared a curfew then putting his youngest child Sonali, her two older sisters and their mother into the family car he spent the next six hours driving from one town to another. He’d park the car, tell the girls to keep the windows up and the doors locked, and knock on the door of every Tamil family that had been threatened with being beaten or killed. He visited those who had been victimized, their homes and shops burnt, and stopped to help innocent bystanders who had been beaten up.  He talked to them, comforted them, and pledged to do his best to quell the violence. The violence stopped and her father personally and together with his team dealt with any curfew violaters.

Getting to know Sonali and understand more about her country was tremendously rewarding for me.  She enlightened me about the culture, politics, beliefs, beauty, family life, and cuisine of Sri Lanka in a way that conventional journalism rarely can:  Stories like Sonali’s, like that of the traumatised party-goer who survived a tsunami, and that of the Sri Lankan suicide bombers who exported their deadly craft to Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond, help connect Americans with this far-away place.  And they break through to news consumers who, like my neighbor, have a hunger for journalism that not only informs but enlightens and leaves them eager to hear more.

 

Lisa Mullins is anchor of “The World,” the daily international news magazine co-produced by the BBC World Service, Public Radio International, and WGBH Boston. She was a 2010 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

 


6 Comments to “An Anchor Reflects”

  • As usual Gotabaya you are exposing your ignorance and racism. I don’t believe you are the real gotabaya writing this either.

  • Sonali is a western Christian stooge .

  • Ms Samarasinghe together with her husband was a hero to us. We miss him. We applaud Ms Samarasinghe’s bravery and her courage to still stand up for our rights even though she personally suffered because of it

  • This is a great article but it also reflects sadly the lack of true knowledge or desire to know more about the rest of the world even among journalists in the US

  • Yes we miss sonali’s professional journalism in Sri Lanka

  • Lisa you rock



Opinion

An Anchor Reflects

A neighbor approached me the other day as I was pulling into the driveway . She’s a school teacher and she’s simply overwhelmed. No, not by her third-graders.  ...