October 4, 2023
No Ordinary Assignment
Jane Ferguson
Award-winning Foreign Correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Contributor to The New Yorker, Visiting Lecturer in the Humanities Council, Ferris Professor of Journalism
No Ordinary Assignment
Jane Ferguson
Award-winning Foreign Correspondent for PBS NewsHour, Contributor to The New Yorker, Visiting Lecturer in the Humanities Council, Ferris Professor of Journalism
Lanny Jones, introducer, and Jane Ferguson
Minutes of the Fifth Meeting of the 82nd Year
President John Cotton called the meeting to order at 10:15 AM on October 4, 2023. Kathy Trenner read the minutes for the previous week’s meeting. Guests (and their hosts) included Mary Kay Kuser (Rob Kuser), Sally Marti (Jose Marti), Helene Buckwald (Howard Buckwald), Kathleen Cassidy (Marcia Snowden), Colette Breen (Barry Breen), John Fleming (Joan Fleming), Laurel Harvey (George Harvey), and Dee Gozonsky and Nancy Greenstein (Earlene Baumunk), who were welcomed by the president. One hundred thirty members attended the meeting in the Convocation Room, Friend Center, Princeton University.
John reminded members that the October 15th deadline for dues payment is rapidly approaching and he thanked Tony Glockler and his hospitality committee for this morning’s refreshments.
Our next meeting is October 11, returning to 701 Carnegie Center. Our speaker will be Sabine Kastner, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Princeton University, and she will speak about her recently published memoir, Visual Perception: The Art of the Brain.
Lanny Jones introduced the speaker, Jane Ferguson, award-winning Foreign Correspondent for PBS NewsHour and contributor to the New Yorker. Ms. Ferguson is currently a visiting lecturer in the Humanities Council, Ferris Professor of Journalism, Princeton University. Lanny reviewed her career as a war correspondent, highlighted the awards she has won, and described her as a journalist who does not hide her gaze from the atrocities of war and war crimes. But she is also notable in that she reports real stories about real people affected by these wars, including her own experiences. He then invited her to relate excerpts from her recent memoir.
Jane began by telling us what a 37-38 year old is doing writing a memoir: “I wanted to write a book about why someone becomes a conflict reporter, what kind of person actually does this sort of work, and to be brutally honest.” Quoting from the prologue of her book she continued, “I wrote No Ordinary Assignment with one main purpose, to answer with total honesty the question, why do you do this work? Really!” Jane detailed a list of practical reasons that could apply, but then said because we individuals are shaped by where we came from and the things we have seen, she had to go back to her own origin story as a child and figure out what actually set her on this path.
Raised in Protestant Ireland just miles from the Northern Ireland border, she was surrounded by the elements of war in the 1980s. In this very militarized place it was normal to see checkpoints, bombings, and British armies in conflict with the IRA. She described a childhood of secrecy in which her mom shielded her from the truth, and talk of war was referred to merely as “The Troubles.”
She detailed a book chapter titled “Uncle Desmond was kicked by a cow.” This turned out to be her mom’s explanation for her uncle’s limp. Only as an adult did she learn he was actually shot in an IRA terrorist incident at his farm. Despite her family’s secrecy, she was always asking questions, wanting to understand. The more she found the answers fudged, the more she wanted to know.
As she regularly watched the evening news with her family on BBC TV, she was struck by the number of female reporters traveling the world. Having had no other positive women role models, she knew instantly that this was the job for her.
Limited by her family’s controlling secrecy, she was lucky to earn a scholarship, leaving her Irish home to come to the Lawrenceville School here in New Jersey. After college, Jane moved to the Middle East working as a journalist. While at her first job in Dubai, she longed to be a foreign correspondent. In late 2009, she packed up and flew to Afghanistan, working as a print reporter. She recounted doing a magazine interview with renowned British war photographer Tim Page, a veteran of the Vietnam War. who at the time was training young Arab journalists and photographers. Jane described him as the first person who really talked about real journalism. Mesmerized by his comments she came to realize her obsession with being a war reporter was what she called “pure BS.” The real work was capturing the experiences of war belonging to the millions of people around her living that experience.
She would spend much of the decade working first for CNN and then Al Jazeera English covering conflicts throughout the Arab world. In 2012 while in Yemen covering the Syrian revolution for Al Jazeera, she was asked to join the Syrian rebels to cover the revolution. Her account of sneaking across the border into Syria with rebels armed with automatic weapons as she wore a flak jacket was harrowing. The danger she faced was clear and she described this baptism under fire experience was very frightening. But she also called her time in Homs a cornerstone of her career which really took off as a result.
Joining PBS in 2015 she continued to focus on Afghanistan. Having lived in Kabul during 2013-2014, she returned to Afghanistan and was present covering the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021. Her time in Afghanistan allowed her to freely engage in conversations with both Arab women as well as the Taliban invaders. As she described the desperation, confusion, and panic that existed on the day Kabul fell, with Arabs scurrying to flee the country, her emotional connection to the Afghani people came through clearly. With the fall of Kabul, the city that defined her, she ended her talk and opened the Q & A.
Answering questions, she said she felt no discrimination at being a female war reporter, as war reporters were looked at as a third gender, rather than male or female. She said she was encouraged to lose her Irish accent and did so by reading the New York Times aloud to herself while in Yemen. She shared that she was most upset by inaccurate casualty reporting by news sources. In Yemen reports of 15,000 deaths ignored the 400,000 lost through both famine and a cholera outbreak, the human side of war that she portrayed in her coverage. She concluded saying she decided to give up her war reporting career when it became clear to her that she would never have a normal personal life if she continued to travel to the world conflicts.
Respectfully submitted,
Larry Hans
John reminded members that the October 15th deadline for dues payment is rapidly approaching and he thanked Tony Glockler and his hospitality committee for this morning’s refreshments.
Our next meeting is October 11, returning to 701 Carnegie Center. Our speaker will be Sabine Kastner, Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience, Princeton University, and she will speak about her recently published memoir, Visual Perception: The Art of the Brain.
Lanny Jones introduced the speaker, Jane Ferguson, award-winning Foreign Correspondent for PBS NewsHour and contributor to the New Yorker. Ms. Ferguson is currently a visiting lecturer in the Humanities Council, Ferris Professor of Journalism, Princeton University. Lanny reviewed her career as a war correspondent, highlighted the awards she has won, and described her as a journalist who does not hide her gaze from the atrocities of war and war crimes. But she is also notable in that she reports real stories about real people affected by these wars, including her own experiences. He then invited her to relate excerpts from her recent memoir.
Jane began by telling us what a 37-38 year old is doing writing a memoir: “I wanted to write a book about why someone becomes a conflict reporter, what kind of person actually does this sort of work, and to be brutally honest.” Quoting from the prologue of her book she continued, “I wrote No Ordinary Assignment with one main purpose, to answer with total honesty the question, why do you do this work? Really!” Jane detailed a list of practical reasons that could apply, but then said because we individuals are shaped by where we came from and the things we have seen, she had to go back to her own origin story as a child and figure out what actually set her on this path.
Raised in Protestant Ireland just miles from the Northern Ireland border, she was surrounded by the elements of war in the 1980s. In this very militarized place it was normal to see checkpoints, bombings, and British armies in conflict with the IRA. She described a childhood of secrecy in which her mom shielded her from the truth, and talk of war was referred to merely as “The Troubles.”
She detailed a book chapter titled “Uncle Desmond was kicked by a cow.” This turned out to be her mom’s explanation for her uncle’s limp. Only as an adult did she learn he was actually shot in an IRA terrorist incident at his farm. Despite her family’s secrecy, she was always asking questions, wanting to understand. The more she found the answers fudged, the more she wanted to know.
As she regularly watched the evening news with her family on BBC TV, she was struck by the number of female reporters traveling the world. Having had no other positive women role models, she knew instantly that this was the job for her.
Limited by her family’s controlling secrecy, she was lucky to earn a scholarship, leaving her Irish home to come to the Lawrenceville School here in New Jersey. After college, Jane moved to the Middle East working as a journalist. While at her first job in Dubai, she longed to be a foreign correspondent. In late 2009, she packed up and flew to Afghanistan, working as a print reporter. She recounted doing a magazine interview with renowned British war photographer Tim Page, a veteran of the Vietnam War. who at the time was training young Arab journalists and photographers. Jane described him as the first person who really talked about real journalism. Mesmerized by his comments she came to realize her obsession with being a war reporter was what she called “pure BS.” The real work was capturing the experiences of war belonging to the millions of people around her living that experience.
She would spend much of the decade working first for CNN and then Al Jazeera English covering conflicts throughout the Arab world. In 2012 while in Yemen covering the Syrian revolution for Al Jazeera, she was asked to join the Syrian rebels to cover the revolution. Her account of sneaking across the border into Syria with rebels armed with automatic weapons as she wore a flak jacket was harrowing. The danger she faced was clear and she described this baptism under fire experience was very frightening. But she also called her time in Homs a cornerstone of her career which really took off as a result.
Joining PBS in 2015 she continued to focus on Afghanistan. Having lived in Kabul during 2013-2014, she returned to Afghanistan and was present covering the fall of Kabul to the Taliban in 2021. Her time in Afghanistan allowed her to freely engage in conversations with both Arab women as well as the Taliban invaders. As she described the desperation, confusion, and panic that existed on the day Kabul fell, with Arabs scurrying to flee the country, her emotional connection to the Afghani people came through clearly. With the fall of Kabul, the city that defined her, she ended her talk and opened the Q & A.
Answering questions, she said she felt no discrimination at being a female war reporter, as war reporters were looked at as a third gender, rather than male or female. She said she was encouraged to lose her Irish accent and did so by reading the New York Times aloud to herself while in Yemen. She shared that she was most upset by inaccurate casualty reporting by news sources. In Yemen reports of 15,000 deaths ignored the 400,000 lost through both famine and a cholera outbreak, the human side of war that she portrayed in her coverage. She concluded saying she decided to give up her war reporting career when it became clear to her that she would never have a normal personal life if she continued to travel to the world conflicts.
Respectfully submitted,
Larry Hans