March 30, 2022
Reporting from Repressive Regimes as
Authoritarianism is on the Rise
Barbara Demick
Foreign Correspondent and Bureau Chief, Los Angeles Times; Author; Visiting Lecturer in the Humanities Council, Princeton University
Lanny Jones, Introducer, and Barbara Demick
Minutes of the 26th Meeting of the 80th Year
Stephen Schreiber presided, and George Bustin read the minutes from the preceding week. There were 132 members in attendance. There was one guest: Ralph Widner’s guest Costas Papastephaniou, and a prospective member was introduced, Karl Muser.
The speaker, Barbara Demick, was introduced by Lanny Jones. Ms. Demick is a Visiting Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. She is the author of three books: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, and the recently released Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town.
In 1992, while working at the Philadelphia Inquirer as a business writer, she was asked to go to Berlin following the fall of the Berlin Wall and then moved to cover “a nasty little war” in Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, she lived in Sarajevo in a Holiday Inn, a year into the war. The Bosnian republics started breaking up and the Bosnian Serbs rejected an independent Bosnia, so they laid siege to Sarajevo. Demick profiled people on one street – reporting live from a satellite phone. Journalists were embedded in Bosnia, which was exhilarating but dangerous. She chose one street, interviewing families and writing about their lives again and again. She created people with whom readers could identify. The resulting book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Logavina Street became her model for future work.
Six years later, she ended up in Korea with the L.A.Times. She was posted to Seoul because the newspaper wanted to establish a bureau there. At that time, it was impossible for U.S. citizens to go to North Korea. Demick scrambled to get in. But the North Koreans were generally seen as hopeless pawns and not at all of interest. Pyongyang was a model city with everything groomed and manicured. Demick started interviewing North Koreans who lived in South Korea and picked a city in North Korea to write about. She conducted interviews with defectors and used smuggled footage and still photographs from journalists and others who had gotten out. Eventually, she made it to Pyongyang and, in total, went three times. She had minders each time. There was no possibility of getting rid of them, but they drank a lot!
She also went to Kaesong and up to northeast China where there were lots of defectors living. The book, Nothing to Envy, was mostly written while she was in South Korea. But she didn’t want it to be just about famine and starvation, so she wrote about a kindergarten teacher whose happiest memory was dating her first boyfriend. She was 15 years old, and the couple spent a lot of time walking in the park at night. Eventually, her family defected, but she couldn’t tell her boyfriend. He returned to town, but she had left. He defected some years later but, by the time he got to South Korea, she had married someone else.
In 2007, Demick moved to China, and her next book was about Tibet, which in many ways was similar to North Korea. Journalists were not allowed into Tibet, so she went to Nyaba, which became the center of Tibetan resistance. Journalists were constantly being turned back, even from there. Demick got in by going in a Chinese car and doing low-key reporting mostly at night. There was a local king whom she arranged to meet in Dharamshala, India, as well as the last Tibetan princess, Gonpo. Much of the book follows her story. Then followed the Cultural Revolution and lots of self-immolations as a symbol of Tibetan non-violence. Eat the Buddha includes the use of social media and satellite imagery. Open-source intelligence is now being used by journalists. Bellingcat, an independent international collective of researchers, investigators, and journalists, is a pioneer in this field of OSINT, called visual intelligence.
There was an enthusiastic Q and A. Demick is now writing about adopted Chinese girls.
Respectfully submitted,
Ruth Miller
The speaker, Barbara Demick, was introduced by Lanny Jones. Ms. Demick is a Visiting Professor of Journalism at Princeton University. She is the author of three books: Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea, Logavina Street: Life and Death in a Sarajevo Neighborhood, and the recently released Eat the Buddha: Life and Death in a Tibetan Town.
In 1992, while working at the Philadelphia Inquirer as a business writer, she was asked to go to Berlin following the fall of the Berlin Wall and then moved to cover “a nasty little war” in Yugoslavia. In Yugoslavia, she lived in Sarajevo in a Holiday Inn, a year into the war. The Bosnian republics started breaking up and the Bosnian Serbs rejected an independent Bosnia, so they laid siege to Sarajevo. Demick profiled people on one street – reporting live from a satellite phone. Journalists were embedded in Bosnia, which was exhilarating but dangerous. She chose one street, interviewing families and writing about their lives again and again. She created people with whom readers could identify. The resulting book was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, and Logavina Street became her model for future work.
Six years later, she ended up in Korea with the L.A.Times. She was posted to Seoul because the newspaper wanted to establish a bureau there. At that time, it was impossible for U.S. citizens to go to North Korea. Demick scrambled to get in. But the North Koreans were generally seen as hopeless pawns and not at all of interest. Pyongyang was a model city with everything groomed and manicured. Demick started interviewing North Koreans who lived in South Korea and picked a city in North Korea to write about. She conducted interviews with defectors and used smuggled footage and still photographs from journalists and others who had gotten out. Eventually, she made it to Pyongyang and, in total, went three times. She had minders each time. There was no possibility of getting rid of them, but they drank a lot!
She also went to Kaesong and up to northeast China where there were lots of defectors living. The book, Nothing to Envy, was mostly written while she was in South Korea. But she didn’t want it to be just about famine and starvation, so she wrote about a kindergarten teacher whose happiest memory was dating her first boyfriend. She was 15 years old, and the couple spent a lot of time walking in the park at night. Eventually, her family defected, but she couldn’t tell her boyfriend. He returned to town, but she had left. He defected some years later but, by the time he got to South Korea, she had married someone else.
In 2007, Demick moved to China, and her next book was about Tibet, which in many ways was similar to North Korea. Journalists were not allowed into Tibet, so she went to Nyaba, which became the center of Tibetan resistance. Journalists were constantly being turned back, even from there. Demick got in by going in a Chinese car and doing low-key reporting mostly at night. There was a local king whom she arranged to meet in Dharamshala, India, as well as the last Tibetan princess, Gonpo. Much of the book follows her story. Then followed the Cultural Revolution and lots of self-immolations as a symbol of Tibetan non-violence. Eat the Buddha includes the use of social media and satellite imagery. Open-source intelligence is now being used by journalists. Bellingcat, an independent international collective of researchers, investigators, and journalists, is a pioneer in this field of OSINT, called visual intelligence.
There was an enthusiastic Q and A. Demick is now writing about adopted Chinese girls.
Respectfully submitted,
Ruth Miller