I had just started working at NPR and was a temp when Sept. "Covering difficult experiences, there is a tension between the sense of devastation at what you're witnessing and the sense of purpose and having a valuable role to play. And it was just overwhelmingly women and children."Īri also mentioned that he was reminded of some advice he heard early on in his career. It took about a year for a million people to leave Syria, and a million people left Ukraine in a week. I had reported from Colombia on the Venezuelan refugee crisis. "I'd been in coastal Turkey covering the Syrian refugee crisis. "I had covered a lot of refugee crises before," Ari shared. Since the hosts had all covered major news events before, they were ready to draw comparisons to earlier experiences. Michel Martin on flight to Moldova with US UN Ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield And that makes me very interested in the ways that they don't and the ways that they do work." But I will say that my experience as a Black woman is that the systems that are built for others don't always work for all of us. "I think that as a Black person, I am very attuned to asking the questions about how the systems work and don't work, and for whom do they work and for whom do they not work? And I just think that that is part of your consciousness." She followed up, "You can't say that one particular set of issues and perspectives is the province of Black people. She also discussed how her identity and experience as a Black woman intersected with her reporting focus in Ukraine. When you take the show there, you're taking everybody with you and it gives you a sense of what it's like to be there. The advantage of taking show someplace is that you're taking everyone with you. Michel's main goal for the trip was "to just give you a sense of what it was like to be there, give you more like a 360 degree experience. I'd want to hopefully have a ton of compassion and sensitivity to what these people are going through." I wouldn't want to just go in there and just ask questions and get the story and bring it to the airwaves. I tried to have as much compassion as possible for a group of people who, right or wrong, did not expect this and were caught completely unprepared and are now trying to figure out if they're going to exist. Thinking back on his objective while in Ukraine, A shared, "I tried to not be a reporter and not be a host as much. It was only because Łucja, our fixer who had local knowledge and could read the Polish newspapers, told us about it." It had only been written about in small, local Polish publications. And that was a story that we had no idea about when we arrived in Poland. You don't do that kind of work unless you think this is going to be going on for a really long time and you're going to need it.
One really important piece of that is our fixer, the local journalist who we hire to work with us, was this amazing young woman named Łucja who told us at one point that a 19th-century railroad that went from this tiny border town in the mountains inland was being rebuilt to help move refugees from the Ukrainian border into Poland. "But we also found new stories as we were there. So I think you can go with a set of questions, but I think you're setting yourself up for trouble if you go with a set of answers, because then what you're doing is, you're reporting back to the answer that you already thought you had as opposed to pursuing the story that is."Īri went to Poland with plenty of ideas of what to report on. And it turns out that a lot of the things that we had been told were just not true. There were stories about people being kept segregated, and certain conditions. But some of the guidance we received was just inaccurate. "We did reporting before we left because the trip came up very quickly and we did seek guidance from people about some of those issues. Michel emphasized the importance of keeping your mind open to the stories you find.
0 kommentar(er)
