Author: Samuel Kennedy

I found myself floored by the Azmat Khan articles. The nut-graph wasn’t exactly a revelation–I feel like the US Army’s disregard for civilian casualties has been a well-established precedent–but the fine granularity of detail that Khan reached with each individual victim and circumstance was astounding. Each individual story had the quality of a whole news piece, and Khan gathered so many. I wonder if her compensation would have been higher if she had split the piece into even more parts…

In my experience reading war reporting, two general approaches to conveying information have developed: the “embedded” perspective and the “humanitarian” perspective. This contrast can be portrayed easily by comparing coverage of Ukraine with coverage of Gaza; one has only embedded reporting and the other has barely any. While the former typically dehumanizes the targets of war through tactical jargon and black-and-white terminology, the latter typically treats the military as a black box that drops bombs at random. I think the Khan articles were so impressive to me because she was able to tell “both sides” of strike after strike; in doing so, she was able to paint a far more damning account of these attacks than somebody who had only interviewed the victims. 

I would love to ask Khan a few questions about her approach to reporting. Namely, why was this a two part series? It felt like a lot of what was covered in the first part was covered again in the second. In fact, I found the strongest sections of the first part to be the direct comparisons between the Pentagon documents and the on-the-ground interviews. Making an effort to separate the human toll from the Pentagon’s documents seems to detract from the cognitive dissonance that makes these pieces so strong. 

Jane Ferguson’s reporting for PBS NewsHour was fun to see, since I was fortunate enough to take her class last year. It’s encouraging to see the professionalism of the end result, given the unbelievable stress of her situation. With that said, I was thrown off by some of the choices that the NewsHour made with regards to their focus. Professor Ferguson mentioned that many Afghans had issues with how the US pulled out of Afghanistan, more so than that they pulled out in the first place. That makes sense to me, but no mention was really made about why the how of the operation was so disastrous (the breaking of the SIV promise, for instance). This omission could have more to do with NewsHour wanting to make as much content as they could from the situation, but I suspect it also had to do with the goal of including the segment on Biden’s speech, which I felt was significantly less important. 

One aspect that really surprised me was the pattern of the Afghan diaspora. I assume that many of them arrived in the USA by airplane, so I don’t really get why there is such a presence in Texas. Of all the places to put these refugees in, why would the state that constantly complains about an immigrant overflow from Latin America be the choice? Perhaps they have come through the Darién Gap?

I was blown away by the degree of journalistic access that Matthew Longo had in The Picnic. Even without Longo’s dramatic prose, the cast of interviewees was so strong that a more mediocre writer could have easily carried my interest. Longo was able to get ahold of the prime minister at the time, the guard who opened the gates, and the person who thought of the idea in the first place. I was personally impressed by Longo’s thorough attention to details which, were I the one gathering information, would have struck me as irrelevant. For instance, I would not have thought to  mention the man who was disgruntled with the amount of wire that had been cut, yet it ended up playing a perfect segue from the description of the celebratory crowds to the concluding statistical remarks. In class, I hope to ascertain the degree to which Longo embellished or filled in the gaps with details from his head. Certain details struck me as seeming somewhat strange to have been found in an interview (e.g. was it mentioned that Norbert left behind a scent at specific moments, or was that just part of the storytelling?). I personally always find myself taking extra caution with how I represent another person’s experiences, and I think it would be a great help for me to learn how Longo approaches that tension.

Jessica Goudeau’s After the Last Border was incredibly readable for me, which came as a  surprise since the majority of her evidence consisted of statistics and quotations from speeches. A lot of this excerpt was interesting because it was journalism about journalism. There’s an interesting dynamic of internal complexity that arises from Goudeau’s portrayal of the media’s portrayal of European immigrants. I’d like to give special mention to the way Goudeau initially used “better to be safe than sorry” ironically to indicate the USA’s total disregard for the safety of foreigners, before switching to the offensive and tearing into the consequences of US policy with her paragraph on “the cost of sorry.” After reading academic essay after academic essay, it was certainly refreshing to read a piece of writing that was capable of using forceful language without sacrificing too much of a fact-based foundation. 

Reading John McPhee was encouraging, albeit somewhat painful. On the one hand, getting advice on how to write a lead and how to structure a story is hugely beneficial for me. On the other hand, I had really been hoping to take McPhee’s class before he retired, and this reading served as a reminder of what I missed out on. When it came to the advice, I noted some amusing resonance with Stephen King’s On Writing. These books that seek to offer aid in the nebulous craft of writing tend to give advice (e.g. bring notepad around) then immediately give noteworthy examples of people who didn’t need the proverbial notepad or even openly despise notepads. This can, at times, obstruct my ability to find solid advice. I suppose the general framing of these books is “if your strategy gets the job done, do it…if not, try these things.”