Words matter. These are the best John Pomfret Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
One of the problems that we have as American journalists is that we bring the American cultural baggage with us and we plop it down and it follows us around and that’s just a fact of life.
I went back to the States and started at a small newspaper in Riverside County, California, covering the police; I was making $280 a week covering the police.
And when they do spin out of control there are important ramifications that affect America, not just its direct national interest but its broader interests as a nation which has thought of itself as a beacon to other nations, of freedom, liberty, democracy, whatever.
I was fourteen when Kissinger made his secret trip to China, and then there was subsequently Nixon’s trip to China, and I was very much seized with an interest in China.
I think to a certain extent in Bosnia and among the Hutus in Rwanda and also among the Tutsis in Rwanda who then took revenge on the Hutus, there is a sense of being swept up and a sense that the society in which they live has gone mad.
I grew up in New York City in the late ’70s, at a time when U.S. – China relations were something that was on the front page of The New York Times on a regular basis.
But on the other hand, in the midst of the chaos, you find normal people. You find people who are willing to risk their lives to tell you what they saw, even though they have no dog in the fight.
Stanford had no journalism program so I just learned by doing, effectively.
For me the much more significant question is what did the Americans do, if anything, to help the Croatian army, because they are the ones that changed fundamentally the map of Bosnia, not the Bosnian army.
I had my life threatened by Bosnian Serbs on numerous occasions.
A lot of times when we work overseas we tend to put the experience of someone who lives overseas, a Chinese person or a Korean person or a Bosnian person, within the prism of an American life.
Whereas with foreign coverage there’s a much broader disconnect between you and your audience.
The work is a calling. It demands that type of obsession.
I’ve been shot at on numerous occasions.
In some ways the domestic reporting is a lot easier because Americans will talk to you about anything.
