Decolonise How? | What is humanitarian journalism?

Patrick Gathara

Welcome to Decolonise How? A podcast that examines the stories we tell about humanitarian crises.

 

How we understand crises – and how we respond to them – are shaped by the stories we tell. And we tend to listen to a few people: reporters and editors; researchers and academics; aid workers and humanitarian agencies.

 

In this new podcast, we’re examining how well communicators fulfil their role, and the ethical questions they navigate. Who controls the narrative? Whose knowledge counts? How are communities in crisis represented? What gets framed as truth? And, how can we all do better?

 

My name is Patrick Gathara and I’m an editor at The New Humanitarian.

 

Martin Scott

Does the way that humanitarian crises get represented in media matter? Certainly, definitely it does. 

 

Gathara

Today, I’m joined by Dr. Martin Scott, Professor of Media and Global Development at the University of East Anglia in the UK. 

 

Scott

There is a kind of implicit decision-making about cultural proximity: some people’s lives and some people’s suffering are regarded as more or less likely to be of interest to my audience.

 

Gathara

Dr. Scott has studied and written extensively about the ethics, practice, and impact of media coverage of humanitarian crises. He is a co-author of a groundbreaking study – that The New Humanitarian also took part in – which examined the reporting practices of journalists covering humanitarian crises. It’s available as a book titled Humanitarian Journalists: Covering Crises From A Boundary Zone. 

 

Scott

We'd speak to journalists and they would say to us: well, some things are just not newsworthy. Why don't you cover the Central African Republic, for example? Well, I'm afraid it's just not news. That's the answer they would give to us. And as far as I'm concerned, that's just not good enough. 

 

Gathara

I started by asking him if, as the popular saying goes, “if it bleeds, it leads,” why do so many humanitarian crises get very little media attention?

 

Scott  

I guess the critique is, which crises? What is newsworthy is the sensationalist, the dramatic, the strong visuals, the compelling, the novel, and so crises are in some ways, inherently newsworthy, or at least some crises are. Often the issue is that the volume of coverage that a crisis receives is not proportional to the scale of suffering, or basically, to put it simply, only a certain number of crises get covered, and many get ignored. So, basically, this isn't the bad decision of any one individual journalist. They don't go out of their way to say, I know, let's disproportionately only ever deliberately choose to focus on these kinds of people suffering, because we think they're more important. No one thinks that. It's the cumulative outcome of all the decisions across all the newsrooms that produces this disparity.

 

Gathara 

Yeah, but why does it produce sort of this sense of only some crises get covered, and some crises, I suppose, in particular geographies. Is there a way of understanding why this happens?

 

Scott 

Yeah, so CARE International do a report every year looking at which are the most underreported crises. And for the past three years in a row, I think, the top ten least reported humanitarian crises have all been in the continent of Africa. That tells us something, just as you say, that tells us that crises that happen in Africa are cumulatively - if you add up all the decisions that international journalists make - it's those crises and the scale and level of suffering, they are likely to report on least, and we know that, that's demonstrated over and over again. The harder question is not, are some crises covered less? But why? As you ask, and that's a complicated picture. But again, we also know the answers to those questions. The first answer to that question is profitability. It costs more money to cover some kinds of crises, not just in relation to access, to flying journalists there, to getting the kind of resources and investment in producing the content, but also the expected revenue that you might generate from it. You know, maybe you're going to get less advertising, less clicks, less subscribers to certain kinds of crises. And again, that's not ruthless journalists seeking to be money-hungry. We shouldn't mischaracterise the problem in that way. The wider context is journalism in general is facing a humongous, economic crisis. Journalism is not profitable, and journalism is disappearing in most - if not all - sectors, and that includes humanitarian journalism. Firstly, because the economics underpinning it. It doesn't generate money. It's very costly. And secondly, because of the kind of news values, the criteria that journalists use to decide whether something is newsworthy or not. And although maybe journalists wouldn't say it quite like this, there is a kind of implicit decision-making about cultural proximity. Some people's lives and some people's suffering are regarded as more or less likely to be of interest to my audience. If you say it like that, you know, it's tied to an economic underpinning of a certain commercial model of journalism, it's also, it makes sense when you're making decisions. You know, I've only got limited resources to cover the world and these crises. Well, my audiences don't have a natural cultural affinity with the people there, therefore, over time, I'm going to make less decisions to cover those things.

 

Gathara  

Does it matter that lots of crises are ignored? I think in some research that you've done it says policy-makers don't pay too much heed to what newspapers and less of the media say about crises, at least when it comes to influencing allocations…big governmental allocations of aid to crises. So, my question is, does it matter whether or not crises are covered? 

 

Scott  

Yeah, that's a great question. So, we interviewed some of the most influential policymakers in deciding the allocation of international humanitarian aid, and we asked them: when and how might media shape your allocation decisions? And the top-line finding is that most of the time, media doesn't. There are far bigger considerations when senior civil servants and ministers make decisions about where their limited amounts of humanitarian aid go, and the biggest factor shaping that is often politics, in combination with assessments of levels of need, so the greatest need, combined with donors' political considerations that might favour certain parts of the world or certain thematic areas, that dictates the vast majority of where aid gets allocated. And in that context, the fact that one newspaper chose to cover one story or one crisis slightly differently, or a little more, or a little less, doesn't really shape civil servants' decision-making, maybe around the edges, maybe occasionally, maybe it helps them make the case to a minister to do something they were already going to do. So, the first answer to your question, in general, does media coverage shape the allocation of humanitarian aid? Indirectly and only in concert with other factors - and it's not the biggest one. You're right. But that's not the answer to your question, does media coverage of humanitarian crises matter? It certainly matters, but in much longer term, complex and pervasive ways that it's harder for us to kind of isolate in any particular individual interviews. It matters because it shapes the frame of reference by which we understand these things. The pervasive influence over time, the cumulative effect, not of one journalist, but of all journalists, of social media content, of the algorithms, of political discourse, of public discourse, all those things, cumulatively together, are reinforced by the choices and selections of mainstream journalism, such that we produce a world in which it's considered normal and natural to not care about the suffering of some people in some crises in parts of the world, and no one really thinks about it or questions it, yet the lives and suffering of other people are innately more important to us. How do we get to a situation in which that's considered normal and natural? We get to that situation whereby the political economy of the dominant communications we have in society reinforces it day in, day out. 

 

Gathara

Right. I was going to ask about quality versus quantity, whether it's the amount of coverage that would then influence things, or it's really whether the coverage is done well?

 

Scott 

What our research showed is that if civil servants aren't expecting lots of media coverage, and then suddenly a kind of wave of media coverage hits the political agenda. It puts pressure on ministers who then put pressure on civil servants to do something about it. The best example of this would be the Beirut blast a few years ago. No one saw that coming. A wave of accompanying media coverage pushed civil servants and decision makers and donors to allocate more money to Lebanon than they had otherwise allocated, and in this particular circumstance that generally involved taking money away from where it is needed more, and allocating it to a crisis that actually, despite the visuals, needed it less. Now, you can learn a few things from this. You could also seek to manufacture or trigger greater pressure on politicians by triggering a greater volume of coverage, so you could coordinate with civil society organisations and others to raise the profile of a particular crisis in order to place politicians under pressure, so sometimes volume does matter, yes.

 

Gathara  

And arguably, this is happening in Gaza, with most politicians complaining that they can't ignore what's happening because of the pictures that are available online.

 

Scott  

But often that very claim, the claim you've just said, that politicians say: I can't ignore these images anymore, therefore I have to do something about it, that is itself political and rhetorical. There are everyday graphic images in Gaza and elsewhere, but when politicians choose to respond to them, is a political choice, so they can use media coverage and the illusion that they've been influenced by the media, as a kind of moral justification to make decisions that they weren't making yesterday, and they weren't making before. That's why it's important to unpick the actual role of the media, because often politicians use it as an excuse to make decisions, and everyone believes: ah, the media can drive crises. Well, actually, no, was it just the politician telling you that, in order to have political cover to make that decision? This is why it's complicated, no? And if I make one more point about this, the volume of media coverage is far more likely to shift in relation to the political agenda. Sometimes it looks like the media has driven foreign policy change, but it's actually higher up the political agenda anyway, whereby the media respond to it by giving more media coverage to allow for policy change. It's complicated, and often it's not the media driving it, even though it looks like it is.

 

Gathara  

So, it works both ways, where you can have media driving some form of action through providing the sudden onset news, but also itself being used as an excuse by politicians to make decisions that they can then justify?

 

Scott  

Exactly, and that's why the kind of simplistic assumption that if only we could get this crisis in the news, if only we could get a journalist here to cover it, that will trigger pressure on politicians to do something. That's often not the case. You need to be far more strategic about when and how you generate what kinds of media coverage, the timing of it in relation to policy change, and the collaborations you have with other actors in order to generate change. That's how you use the media as one part of a wider strategy to put pressure on politicians to change decision-making. Media won't…very, very, very rarely would do it by itself.

 

Gathara  

Let's talk about this term you have popularised with your study: humanitarian journalism. What's your definition of what a humanitarian journalist is? 

 

Scott  

Broadly speaking, you could think of humanitarian journalists as any kind of professional journalist who covers humanitarian affairs. In other words, it's a subject area, just like sport is a newsbeat - I don't know - politics is a newsbeat, and you might think of humanitarian affairs as a newsbeat. That's one way of thinking about it. Anyone who covers anything to do with humanitarian affairs. But that's not what we argue for in the book. In the book, we see humanitarian journalists as a certain kind of journalist whose understanding of their professional practice is shaped not just by journalistic values, but also by humanitarian values. In other words, they cover humanitarian crises in ways that are informed equally or similarly by humanitarian norms. They come up with these hybrid journalistic practices, and maybe I'll say a word about what a few of those are. We talked earlier about cultural proximity, this kind of the idea that some people's lives are inherently more interesting, more relevant to my audience than others. That's a kind of unspoken but conventional journalistic, implicit norm of traditional journalism. Well, these hybrid humanitarian journalists, who often work outside of mainstream news organisations, they often reject this idea of cultural proximity: some lives are worth more than others, and instead replace it with the idea that's of moral equivalence, that is: all lives have equal value. So, if the starting point of your professional practice is that all lives are equal, then which stories you choose to report is going to be reflected by that. So, the fact that Ukraine and other crises, right at the top of the news agenda of all other news organisations, your starting point as a humanitarian journalist who foregrounds the idea that all lives have equal value, will obviously be to cover those crises that are not being covered by everyone else. So, you will, broadly, report the underreported. And that's the case, not just for which crises you choose to cover, but also how you cover them, and in particular, who you speak to. Again, let's say we choose to cover - I don’t know - the Central African Republic - that often comes out towards the very bottom of countries experiencing crises that receive almost no international news coverage. Let's say we choose to cover that. Who do we speak to first? Whose perspectives do we foreground? First you have the government, then you have the other organisation. Well, in this case, if you're a humanitarian journalist, and you foreground the belief that all lives have equal value, you ask: who have we not heard from? Whose voices really matter but we're not hearing from? And therefore, you're more likely to amplify marginalised voices.  

 

Gathara  

Right, do humanitarian journalists - as you define them - then do a better job of covering crises? 

 

Scott  

Nope, they do a different job of covering crises. Mainstream, conventional journalism, as applied to humanitarian crises, often does excellent work: professional journalism, fact check, a range of perspectives, vivid explanations of what's going on. Mainstream journalism often does excellent professional practice. The problem is, if that's the only kind of professional journalistic communication we ever get, that's when you get the problem. We only ever hear the same kinds of stories, from the same people, about the same crisis, from the same frames of reference, using the same ethical guidelines within which to report these things. So, the problem is not bad professional practice. The problem is a lack of diversity. We need humanitarian journalists alongside mainstream journalists, so that we have a more rich, diverse set of professional practices covering crises around the world from different perspectives with different ideas, this idea of plurality and communication, that's what's missing. That's why it's important, so neither of them does a better or worse job. They approach stories in subtly but importantly different ways. 

 

Gathara  

We already have lots of people who talk about crisis, not just journalists. The humanitarian agencies, and their communications, and their marketing materials that they put out about crises. You've got academics such as yourself. You've got researchers who go into these spaces and sort of give us a picture of it. So, where do you see journalism and especially humanitarian journalism, where does it sit within this ecosystem, and in what ways should it seek, if at all, to influence how other reporting is done, or other discussion communicating about crisis is done? 

 

Scott  

Yeah, so at the moment, I think it plays a very small role. It scarcely exists, because the political economy supporting it is just not viable. So, most crises, international communications about most humanitarian crises, are overwhelmingly dominated by the communications of humanitarian agencies because their communications teams have far more resources and access than journalists do. So, I think there's just a huge disparity at the moment. I also think that the binary whereby: journalism is always best, and these kind of institutionalised humanitarian organisations communication is bad. I think that's a problem too. At times, I'm impressed with the communications of humanitarian agencies because they often carry a kind of definite benchmark: international humanitarian law, when you're breaching international humanitarian law, that's a bad thing, and so people breaking that, I will condemn in a way that often mainstream journalistic practices can have this false balance that...you know you see it over and over again, whereby, one side accuses the other of breaking international humanitarian law, the other side, they're reinforcing it. And so, you get this weird equivalent false balance, where there's no benchmark by which you would ever condemn any practices, because you're both-siding everything. Whereas, at least in the communications of international humanitarian organisations, there is a benchmark. Now they have their own institutional priorities, often they've got to not displease their own backers, which are often the states who were themselves involved in the crisis. So, there's huge problems with the comms of international organisations too. But to get back to your question, that's why we need a multiplicity of things happening at once. We need to understand the stance of international humanitarian organisations without it dominating. We need a plurality of journalistic practices internationally and domestically. We need local voices, obviously, to be communicating, expressing their understandings and influencing both those things at the same time. We need a multiplicity of voices, and it's hard to overstate how far away we are from that, because the ability of populations to share their voices on platforms that aren't distorting who gets to be heard, and the journalism that scarcely exists, and the politics shaping the international organisations, we are a million miles from the kind of professional communications environment that we would want in the context of humanitarian crisis.

 

Gathara  

What needs to change if we are to create the sort of plurality of media, of ways of speaking, of crisis that you're talking about, what needs to change in the political economy to allow that to happen? 

 

Scott 

So, at the moment, these small fragments of humanitarian journalism that do exist have only been made possible by relatively, exceptionally small amounts of donor money from philanthropists, and foreign ministries, and occasional charities. There's a very, very small sector of civil society and of government funding sustaining the current models. I think the answer to your question is to give legitimacy to humanitarian journalism as a vital contribution to understanding and acting better on the rapidly increasing scale of human suffering around the world to the very small number of donors that continue to fund in this area. In many ways, the state of humanitarian journalism is a reflection of the state of the crisis of international humanitarian support in general, and the kind of collapse of the current world order, and the emergence of whatever world order we're currently moving into, and being buffeted in those winds, we need to carve out a small number of allies in donors or civil society or audiences in particular, to maintain at least some level of professional humanitarian journalism. And I think, just by legitimising the existence of this practice and talking about how important it is, that's the first step.

 

Gathara  

Assuming humanitarian journalism arose out of a recognition of deficiency, if you will, in how crises are covered, whether in terms of scale or in terms of the quality of coverage that's presented, and taking your framework or fields of talking about humanitarian journalism existing within a boundary between journalism and humanitarianism. Would it be useful to formalise this field, firstly, so that humanitarian journalism actually is seen as distinct from what we might call mainstream journalism, or would it be better the other way around, where the values that inform humanitarian journalism then bleed into how mainstream coverage is done?

 

Scott  

Yeah, it's a great question. You know, how formally should we recognise a professional field of humanitarian journalism? There's pros and cons. You're making me think of some of the people we interviewed for this book, and they would talk about this journey from the centre of the journalistic field. They would say things like: yes, I've always covered humanitarian crises, but I started my career working from a traditional journalistic news organisation, maybe something, the BBC, BBC World Service, or equivalent. And they would say things like: I feel I have to fit my reporting into a sort of template, into a sort of hierarchy of who to speak to, the parameters of how to tell the story. And yes, I can do good journalism, good, independent, fact-check, objective journalism. But I feel frustrated about which stories I get to do. I feel I have to put my stories in a template, and then they would say to us: I was so frustrated that I took a risk. I moved out of that organisation, and I moved to the edges, to the periphery of the journalistic field and closer to the humanitarian field, and I began working for a smaller, less financially secure, nonprofit, news organisation whereby I didn't have to rely on that template. I could now cover crises in more experimental, more diverse, more creative, more, ways that I felt I could better reflect the diversity of experiences in the crisis that I'm covering. Now, at the same time as having a more creative practice, because I'm at the edge of the field, I'm kind of less of a journalist with a capital J. I can experiment with practices, because I'm not under the same kind of scrutiny to be a BBC-style journalist. But, should we formalise this kind of field of humanitarian journalism? Should we call it itself its own field? Well, on the one hand, that would raise its status, raise its profile. I am arguing that it’s really important, that it scarcely exists, needs more support, needs more legitimacy, and we need more humanitarian journalists. So, on the one hand, the answer is definitely yes, but I would just slightly caution that in the process of kind of formalising a separate, discrete field of humanitarian journalism, you might lose some of that creativity, some of that freedom that journalists feel they have when they move out of the center of the field. 

 

Gathara  

If we were to create that field and if we were to formalise it, then what would it mean for ordinary, regular journalists who want to go and cover crises? 

 

Scott  

Yeah, well, then they can make some explicit choices. Then we would denaturalise the idea that there is only one way to cover crises, to why the most human suffering around the world is not important to your audience, is not worthy of consideration and of representation, and it relies on the idea that there is only one singular journalism. It cannot change. That's not newsworthy. There's nothing I can do about it. The creation of – and the recognition of – a field of humanitarian journalism problematises the idea that there is only one way to do it. No. There are many legitimate forms of professional practice covering humanitarian crises, and we need them now more than ever. And so, if it produces a slight tension, maybe that's a healthy one.

 

Gathara  

Going to the, sort of, singular mainstream way that's dictated by mainstream ethics. Are they really geared to covering crisis in the way crisis should be covered. And I know ‘should’ is kind of like a loaded word here, but do you think mainstream media ethics, the sorts of codes of ethics that people are taught in journalism school, you know, around the world, are they adequate for actually representing the reality of what a crisis looks like, and what actually being in a crisis feels like? 

 

Scott  

I think the answer's got to be no, or at least a recognition that conventional journalistic values have a role to play, but if other forms of professional communication don't exist, then that's when it becomes a problem. So, what's missing from this conversation - what the focus of our book and often the conversations are about - is the kind of international dimension. How can we communicate about humanitarian crises to people not experiencing the crisis in distant lands? That's what we're often talking about, and that's the level that I think we're having this conversation. It's a completely different conversation to have about how those experiencing the crisis themselves, and who are directly involved and contributing to, or might help solve the crisis, locally. What are the most effective forms of communication there? That's a different question, I think.

 

Gathara 

Yeah, and I think I mean that would raise a question of: what say do they have, the people who are within crises and how they are portrayed by media outside, and what say should they have. The questions around, the ethics of whether media, as has developed in in how it covers crisis, is really an extractive industry, where we go into spaces and we assume we are entitled to the stories that are there without thinking about then what do we give back, or what do we owe these communities for telling their stories?

 

Scott  

And I think that's a very fair critique and an important one, and often not the first one you hear when you hear critiques of objectivity and neutrality. The idea that because you're experiencing the crisis, you are not objective. I am the objective one, because I'm not. And therefore I can come in, and tell the story in a way that has more validity to your story. I might include you a bit, but only in the parameters that I've already set because I'm neutral. That's clearly problematic. That needs to be challenged and questioned, and we need to understand, you know, how can you be accountable to not just your audience, but to the people that you're reporting on? I think we've only barely begun to discuss that. 

 

Gathara  

I mean, right now, as you know, there's lots of pressures on the entire humanitarian system. We've seen resources being taken away from organisations like you say that actually support both the coverage and the provision of humanitarian aid. I don't know whether in your current research, you've come across, or you can tell us, how this is impacting humanitarian journalism, whether these organisations are managing to find their way around these sorts of reduced opportunities for money, or is it the case that they’re suffering and shutting down? 

 

Scott  

It's not just humanitarian journalism with another hat on. Remarkable numbers of media outlets in general were funded by USAID and by National Endowment for Democracy in the U.S. Their withdrawal from funding for media support in general has led to collapses in lots of countries’ journalism, particularly those affected by crises. In Ukraine, in Myanmar, and elsewhere, where journalism is not economically viable, often it's international aid money supporting this, maybe often diaspora journalism or specialist nonprofit journalism that just wouldn't exist because it would be captured by the state. That's collapsing. It's not just humanitarian journalism. It's journalism in general. The consequences for journalism, and not just of USAID pulling out, but that it's created the grounds for other donors to stop funding journalism, perhaps when they weren't sure if they should be or not. It's made it harder for other states to stand up for human rights and supporting human rights. It's made it easier for authoritarian states to clamp down on journalism, particularly those who were getting USAID support, and other backing from perhaps Western states, who now are supported by the rhetoric of some in the U.S. to kind of clamp down on the media even more, so it creates a pervasive environment where it's even even harder to support journalism in general, let alone humanitarian journalism. Reporters Without Borders - big international media freedom charity - every year, they publish their annual index of the state of media freedom around the world. The economic situation in 2025 was the lowest it's ever recorded. One of their findings was that media outlets in 160 out of 180 countries achieve financial sustainability with difficulty or not at all. Journalism in general, is exceptionally difficult to achieve any kind of financial viability, let alone sustainability. That's the context which explains why journalism about humanitarian crises is so hard, because if journalism in general, independent journalism is scarcely financially viable, what about journalism of the most hard to access, complex, unsafe, politically contentious, parts of the world will be even harder.

 

Gathara  

Is there any reason to hope that things might get better or might change? Do you see any silver lining in this cloud?

 

Scott  

I think the geopolitical environment in which humanitarian crises happen and are understood, and the international community and domestic actors engage with them. That international world order is rapidly changing. It makes humanitarian crises and political crises more likely to happen, and more likely to carry on for longer. It also means how you act in the world changes: going through the UN may be less effective, kind of multilateralism will be harder. International norms - international human rights norms - are harder to reinforce and appeal to. We are in a very new international world order, and it's not entirely clear - to me, at least - what exactly that order looks like. How we act on humanitarian crises must therefore change, because the old order is collapsing before our eyes. We need to respond and understand we live in a different geopolitical environment. 

 

Gathara  

But if how we act needs to change, then doesn't that change start with how we perceive them, and if it's about how we perceive them, then doesn't that mean how we report on them needs to change, which will take me back to my question that: is it that the way most people understand or learn about crisis is through mainstream press, you know, as you've mentioned earlier…

 

Scott

Oh yes. 

 

Gathara

Does then how mainstream media reports on this crisis itself need to change?

 

Scott 

Definitely. I think the reference points by which mainstream journalism explains the world have changed, and are changing, and will continue to change, and journalism needs to catch up and continue to reflect that. For example, when covering humanitarian crises, your benchmark can no longer be, what the U.S. thinks about this. Your benchmark should be, what is international humanitarian law? At the same time, it kind of creates opportunities for thinking about action in different ways. How is South Africa responding to crisis? How is Brazil responding to crisis? How does geopolitics change in which South Africa hosting the G20 raise issues in different ways? How can we take advantage of the shift in geopolitics of different actors? Are there new allies you can work with in different thematic areas, to support journalism, to act on particular crises? That's the mindset, I think humanitarians and journalists should operate in the world. I think the level of humanitarian need is only going to increase, as the kind of hegemonic world order as we've known it is shifting and collapsing and becoming critiqued.

 

Gathara  

Would you say that then this would open up room for humanitarian journalism itself to sort of get into these cracks that are then exposed on how mainstream media covers a crisis?

 

Scott  

Exactly. I make two points. One, that humanitarian journalism represents a different kind of ethical practice, a kind of corrective practice to some of the limitations of mainstream journalism, which resonates with more actors in an increasingly multi-polar world. I think, yes, I think humanitarian journalism can fill those cracks. At the same time, I think mainstream journalistic practices - a pursuit of truth, and objectivity, and neutrality, and independence, and criticality, not things that humanitarian journalism are rejecting, but things that are particularly foreground in mainstream journalism - that will also become increasingly important because of distortions of truth by increasingly powerful states. We need mainstream journalism even more than ever, because of the complex world we're now in, and we need humanitarian journalism more than ever because of the shift in geopolitics. 

 

Gathara  

Thanks a lot, Martin, thank you for being part of this. 

 

Scott  

Thanks for having me. Pleasure to chat.

 

Gathara

Thank you for listening to Decolonise How? a podcast from The New Humanitarian that examines the stories we tell about humanitarian crises.

 

This episode was produced and edited by Freddie Boswell and Levi Sharpe.

 

Coming up on Decolonise How?

 

Jane Ferguson

I had grown up with this sense of what a foreign correspondent was, with the bravado of a war reporter that, you know, it's all about walking around in flak jackets and being seen as some sort of great, brave, hero, but what I learned early on was that my impression was very self-absorbed.

 

Gathara 

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I’m Patrick Gathara. Thanks for listening.