Reporting Under Fire (25 page)

The years moved on, and Robin grew to learn more and more about life in the Middle East. She talked with hundreds of people on the streets of Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Morocco—virtually every Middle Eastern nation. She already spoke French, widely used in the Middle East and North Africa, but she regretted she didn't know more Arabic or Farsi (the Persian language spoken by Iranians) so she could better understand the people she met. She started to look at current events in mathematical terms. “If you know enough about a region, then it becomes like a mathematical equation. You figure what all the numbers are, and you figure out the solution…. Then, if something changes, there's a new variable. You throw in that factor and there's a new outcome.”

Robin Wright makes regular appearances before college crowds to discuss developments in the Middle East.
Courtesy of Sam Colt

In late 2010 a new, shocking variable changed the equation in the Middle East when a young man named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest corruption in Tunisia, an act that sparked the Arab Spring. The sight of women and men filling the streets of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Bahrain, and Syria caught Western governments off guard. But to Robin, the Arab Revolution was no surprise; she had seen it coming for years. “All the change in the world—the end of Communism in Eastern Europe, the end of apartheid and minority rule in Africa, the end of military dictatorships in Latin America—has all been part and parcel of the same phenomenon, and that is globalization.”

Equipped with her historian's view over the long term and a gift for words, Robin uses a journalist's skills to interpret events as they unfold. “All these events—including the Arab [Spring] uprising—it's all part of … the whole idea that we've come up with a form of government democracy that will play out in lots of different ways. Whether parliaments, presidents, what kind of parties run against each other—the idea is that the people have a right to participate. It's far from over; we're only at the beginning stages. But this is arguably the single most important change in 500 years since city-states became nation-states. Now we are taking that next big step with nation-states moving toward globalization.”

In a powerful piece she wrote in 2011, Robin told of one young woman's efforts at reform, Muslim-style, that have taken hold in Egypt and other Arab nations. Robin herself rarely wears a headscarf as she moves along the streets of the Middle East. However, her subject, Dalia Ziada, proudly wears the headscarf—hijab—as a sign of reform. Dalia is a member of Egypt's “Pink Hijab” movement, named for the vibrant heads-carves that young Muslim women adopted as their symbol for women's and human rights in Egypt.

For many young women, hijab is now about liberation, not confinement. It's about new possibilities, not the past. It provides a kind of social armor that enables Muslim women to chart their own course, personally or professionally. For Ziada, hijab provides protective cover and legitimacy for campaigns she considers to be the essence of her faith—human rights and justice.

“Families feel much more comfortable allowing their girls to be active, to get higher education, or jobs, or even to go out alone at night when they are wearing hijab,” [Ziada] told me. “It's a deal between a Muslim girl and society. I agree that I will wear hijab in order to have more space and freedom in return.”

In its many forms, hijab is no longer assumed to signal acquiescence. It has instead become an equalizer. It is an instrument that makes a female untouchable as she makes her own decisions in the macho Arab world. It is a stamp of authenticity as well as a symbolic demand for change. And it is a weapon to help a woman resist extremism's pull into the past. Militants cannot criticize or target her for being corrupted by Western influence.

Robin Wright appears regularly on Sunday morning news programs and shares her expertise on television and radio broadcasts in the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and Australia. She has written four books about Africa and the Middle East and has more to come. She chose a punk rock hit as the title for her 2011 book on democratic change in the Muslim world;
Rock the Casbah: Rage and Rebellion Across the Islamic World
relates how young Muslims are creating their own brand of Islamic democracy with hip-hop, comedy, poetry—and the pink hijab.

Following lives of ordinary people who rap and write poetry has been key to Robin's understanding of world events. “A lot of big-name correspondents like to swoop in and talk to top officials,” she said, “but the danger is they live in a bubble that's divorced from reality. I really like getting out on the street and just talking to people.” She notes that many of today's correspondents “do drop-bys … they come in for a couple weeks or months and go home.” But that's not how she has lived her life or done her job.

She shares little about her private life. She never married, “not my choice,” she emphasized. “I always thought I would, but you don't have time for everything and I'm not going to do something just for the sake of doing it. In the right situation it might have happened.” That said, there have been special men in her life. “Interesting characters,” she mused. She is much more open about her childhood, about her mother, who was an “inspiration,” and her father, a veteran who would not tell his stories of World War II until Robin herself had experienced combat. Then, she said, they developed a whole new relationship, an almost unspoken understanding that they had a shared experience of war.

Robin said she fears that American kids today don't know enough about the world, especially because globalization will define their lives in the 21st century. Third World kids, she says, “do get it … they speak English and multiple languages. They probably know more about American geography than American kids.”

For any young person thinking about a career as a foreign correspondent, Robin recommends learning everything possible about the world. “Know the world … and know the world
well.
Speak at least two other languages, only one being another European language and the other involving a whole different
alphabet—Chinese, Russian, Japanese, Arabic—something to bridge the cultural gap.”

Writing is only 5 percent of a journalist's job. “I tell young people, ‘Don't major in journalism … you can learn those skills working on the student paper or taking a good writing class. Major in the field you want to cover. It requires an extraordinary amount of expertise to be able to understand what the truth is.

“A lot of young correspondents have a theory about what's happening and look for someone to give a quote that supports it … but you have to have a blank slate and carry out your own public opinion survey of what's
really
going on and how people
really
feel. It's not talking to five people; it's talking to hundreds of people … what's the public mood, [and] among officials, talk to all the different wings of government…. [It's] a much more daunting and demanding profession than most people understand.”

Forty years as a working journalist and her depth of experience have earned Robin Wright recognition as a scholar in Middle Eastern issues. She flies to the Middle East regularly to observe and report on its changing politics and societies. She maintains a web page at
robinwright.net
, and she tweets from
@wrightr
.

Robin Wright isn't the only woman to specialize in Middle Eastern affairs. Women correspondents have long headed to the Middle East in search of the truth about what's going on there. Martha Gellhorn covered a Palestinian uprising, as did a younger reporter, Janine di Giovanni. Martha Raddatz has reported from there for both NPR and ABC News. Others include Christiane Amanpour, an Iranian by birth who made her name with American TV watchers on CNN during the Gulf War, and Marie Colvin, an American reporting for the
Sunday Times
of
London who was killed in Syria in 2012. There are more: NPR's Middle East correspondent Deborah Amos, CBS correspondent Martha Teichner, and CBS correspondent Kimberly Dozier, who was gravely injured in a 2006 car bombing in Iraq that killed everyone around her.

The one reason more than any other that I love the news business is because I learn something every single day. Every single day.—Martha Raddatz

About 9
PM
EDT on Sunday evening, May 1, 2011, Americans were getting ready for the week, thinking about Monday morning and going back to work or school. Some in the East and Midwest sat down to tune in to
Desperate Housewives
or
The Amazing Race
when reports trickled in that the president was preparing to speak to the nation—a most unusual event for a Sunday night.

ABC News foreign correspondent Martha Raddatz was sitting on an airplane waiting to take off on a long, tiring flight to Afghanistan, one of many she'd made since the United States had gone to war there in 2001. Her BlackBerry phone buzzed, and the next thing she knew, she was off the plane, her luggage retrieved, sitting on the floor of a terminal at Washington Dulles International Airport talking on two phones at once. She'd gotten a tip—probably the biggest of her professional life. Osama bin Laden, mastermind of the September 11 attacks on
the United States, had been shot dead by a select team of American soldiers at his hideaway compound in a Pakistani city.

Martha spoke to her son, at home with friends, knowing that he'd be worried not just about his mom but also about what was going on. She swore him to secrecy, shared the news, and emphasized that he tell no one. (He complied.) Then she got back to work. Raddatz, an on-camera reporter, is one of the most visible parts in the well-oiled machine that is ABC News, known to media types as a “news operation.” It's an operation, all right: massive amounts of research and prior planning, copy written, videos shot and edited beforehand. There was new information, only hours old, gleaned from sources at the White House, the Pentagon, and the CIA—how the raid was kept secret, how the compound was laid out, who was living there, and how bin Laden died. Money was spent, lots of it, so that Raddatz and her ABC colleagues could get on the air with full coverage by 7
AM
Monday. Americans were sure to tune in.

That morning Martha Raddatz gave a live report from the Pentagon. She stood in front of the memorial whose 184 benches, evoking the tail of a crashed airliner, stand in honor of the men and women killed when a terrorist flew a hijacked American Airlines plane into the Pentagon. As computer-generated images of bin Laden's compound appeared on screen, she reported on the logistics of killing him—“Bin Laden was ordered to surrender but refused. The SEALs shot him in the head, likely a double-tap, two shots to ensure a kill.”

Martha Raddatz looked the complete professional as she reported from the Pentagon that morning—conveying information in the calm, purposeful manner that one expects from a veteran correspondent. She's an expert on so many aspects of the bin Laden story: the September 11 attacks on the United States, Middle Eastern politics, wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
US military, the White House, the Pentagon. Bin Laden's death was one endpoint—there will be more—of a long, complicated and never-ending news story, one that has taken Martha from Washington to Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan so many times she has nearly lost count.

A career in TV news wasn't what she'd planned on. Martha grew up in Salt Lake City, Utah, a Protestant. Her father died before she turned three, and Martha's mother raised her and her sister. When she was a girl, Martha had “absolutely no inkling” what she wanted for a career, but her mom's Saturday morning trips to the library stand as a bedrock experience. She read— a lot. “I liked to read biographies,” she recalled. “Maybe that's the first inkling you want to live a life that's not the one you're living.”

She went to college at the University of Utah, with no firm grasp on career plans when opportunity knocked during her senior year and a job opened at a small TV station in Salt Lake. Martha dropped out of school and took the job, which on reflection she admitted “was stupid.” She moved up from grunt-work tasks to shooting her own film (still part of the job at small stations) and going on camera when she was 24. She moved to Boston and instantly adored living there. She stayed for 12 years.

“Before she was Martha Raddatz at ABC News, she was Martha Bradlee here at Channel 5, WCVB-TV, and she was a heck of a reporter,” wrote
Boston Globe
columnist Kevin Cullen. She married her first husband, Ben Bradlee Jr. (son of the legendary
Washington Post
editor Ben Bradlee), and they had a daughter, Greta. Martha's job at WCVB took her out of town and overseas frequently, but she was able to plan her travels ahead of time, which made her family life somewhat easier to balance. She and Greta's father divorced, and Martha married again, an attorney named Julius Genachowski, with whom she has a son, Jake. Jake
was 10 when Martha started reporting from war zones. (Today Martha is married to NPR correspondent Tom Gjelten.)