HOW WOMEN HAVE CHANGED FOREIGN CORRESPONDING

Reporting from war zones and places of trouble across the world consumes our multi media stage. Until recently, however, women were at the back of the queue in the ranks of those who sent back news of global disasters. Not anymore. Today women reporters go anywhere and they have changed the nature of reporting and how viewers see their world. Melissa Roberts is co-editor co-editor of The Beijing Bureau & co-editor of and contributor to Through Her Eyes – Australia’s Women Correspondents From Hiroshima to Ukraine. Trevor Watson is an award winning journalist & co-author of Through Her Eyes – Australia’s Women Correspondents From Hiroshima to Ukraine.  Melissa Roberts and Trevor Watson addressed The Sydney Institute on Wednesday 5 October 2022 to discuss their work and the ways women have radically altered human perception of disasters.

HOW WOMEN HAVE CHANGED FOREIGN CORRESPONDING

MELISSA ROBERTS

Women correspondents have changed the way foreign news is covered. It took a long time for them to be able to make their mark. Now they cross borders with rebels, embed with special forces, flee the Taliban. But it wasn’t always that way.  They were, until quite recently, banned from the front line and the bureau.

When I started out in journalism, female foreign correspondents were rare beasts. Margaret Jones had been sent by the Sydney Morning Herald to Washington in the 1960s and then was one of the first two Australian foreign correspondents to be based in Beijing in 1973, but a single swallow does not make a spring. It took 50 years for the ABC to post a woman abroad as a foreign correspondent. Helene Chung was sent to Beijing in the mid 1980s, having earlier been told that even training her would be a waste of money, as she was “a girl”.

In the late 1960s, Diane Willman was refused a posting to the Middle East as she was likely to “get married and have children and then where would we be?” Willman did indeed have a baby in Beirut where she fearlessly and insightfully covered the civil war as a freelancer, hiding baby Tarek under a mattress during bombardments.

Women broadcasters were told their voices did not carry authority and anyway, men did not want to be “told” by a woman. At home, they had long been mostly confined to the women’s pages, covering female-focussed stories like society weddings. For offering household and relationship advice, they were derided as “sob sisters” by their male counterparts – sneered at for abiding by the limitations imposed on them by that same cohort.

The first women foreign correspondents had to buck stereotypes to break news. They were pioneers, and we owe them a debt of gratitude. They had to pay their own way to the story, then find freelance work once they got there. Kate Webb, the UPI bureau chief in Cambodia during the Vietnam war, said she got her job when the two men in line for it ahead of her were killed. When General Douglas Macarthur tapped Lorraine Stumm to cover the Japanese surrender and the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, her editor told her to take leave and make her own way to Japan, an almost impossible task. Yet she persisted. Sydney Morning Herald  photojournalist Kate Geraghty paid her own way to East Timor – becoming the Albury Border Mail’s first foreign correspondent in the process. (She was subsequently re-imbursed.) Even when they made their own way to the story, it wasn’t easy. There were layers of difficulty.

During WWII and the Vietnam war, Australian women journalists were formally banned from the front. They would distract soldiers, there were no ladies’ toilets, they were too “emotional” to do the job. Margaret Jones, like all female journalists, was barred from the all-male domain of the Press Club. It mattered, because that’s not only where news events were held, it was where sources traded those all-important tips and leads. Lorraine Stumm was obliged to leave a wartime briefing in Singapore when male correspondents complained that as a woman, she must therefore be a gossip, and so unable to keep a military secret.

This isn’t ancient history. In the 1980s, I Interviewed a senior Australian Navy officer. He told me there could never be female submariners because there were no ladies toilets on a sub. Again, with the bathrooms. Nor could he imagine a female sailor hot bunking, or even wanting to go on a submarine. Apparently, it wasn’t very nice. It would be the turn of the century before women could serve, and then only if the sub had separate women’s quarters. This for people prepared to fight, even die for their country.

But, even then, the barriers were falling, broken down by those pioneering journalists and the normalisation of feminism, which changed how both women and men operated in journalism and in the wider world. By then, I had already started my correspondent career freelancing from Delhi for The Australian. And women were gaining access, slowly, to the most coveted of journalism jobs. I was fortunate to find two male mentors early on, Mark Collier, then News Director at Radio 2UE who sent me to the Press Gallery in Canberra, and Piers Akerman at The Australian, who would have me stand at his side as he edited my stories.

But the standard foreign correspondent remained a man. Candace Sutton, now of The Daily Mail, writes in Through Her Eyes about covering the wake of the Rwandan genocide in 1994:

As central Africa was seized by a humanitarian disaster on a colossal scale, the media flooded in to cover what had become the biggest story in the world. I wanted to be there but there was a problem. The Sun-Herald had already assigned a reporter to the story. He was the sort of tall, confident type who got tapped for the big jobs.

Diaa Hadid, now of NPR, talks about officials in the Middle East being quite disappointed when she turned up. They had hoped to be interviewed by a chiselled jawed correspondent with piercing eyes, instead of a mouthy young Australian woman of Lebanese descent.

And yet, women correspondents have fundamentally changed the way international news is covered – and the kind of news that people want to read. In World War II and Vietnam, the predominantly male correspondent corps reported on the great men of history and the tectonic shifts in world politics – the generals, the movement of troops, the men engaged in combat. Important stories, every one of them.The women, meanwhile, locked out of the front and so frontpage news, told the stories of the injured soldiers and their nurses, but also the stories of the refugees and the ordinary local people affected by the chaos and tragedy of war.

We have moved away from the idea of “women’s news stories” and “men’s news stories”. That’s an old stereotype. And, of course, the division was always nuanced.

But the type of story covered by those male journalists made up the entirety of what we thought of as hard news. Women had been pushed into a different kind of story and thought of as inferior. But, as they took their place in foreign posts, something strange happened. The consumers of media, ordinary people, turned out to have an insatiable desire for those so-called soft stories. And it is those stories – about the real people affected by the big events – that now make up a larger proportion of what we think of as news.

The stories once derided as soft, are meaningful and hard-hitting. Women changed how news is perceived. Now, all journalists think about news in that way – about the people sheltering in basements in Kiev, rather than the type of ordinance raining down on them or the name of the general who ordered it.

The women who contributed chapters to Through Her Eyes are notable for their drive, their insight, their passion – and their skill. Perhaps those women, still to some extent outsiders, were more alert to the plight of the less powerful. And perhaps this has translated into their work. The ABC’s Barbara Miller talks about her real concern for the well-being of migrants flooding into Europe, still worrying about how the subjects of her interviews were getting along years after the story had become the audio equivalent of fish wrapper.

Sophie McNeill, also from the ABC, talks about downing tools to save the life of a single elderly man. Prue Clarke, who thought she might die on the street in New York as the twin towers fell on September 11, went on to establish an organisation called New Narratives to support the development of free and fair journalism in Africa.

And gender does continue to play a role in the daily lives of correspondents. There’s a quote in Geraldine Doogue’s book The Climb, from researcher Anna Fels, who says women refuse to claim a central, purposeful place in their own stories, eagerly shifting the credit elsewhere and shunning recognition. And that holds them back.

Certainly, many of the women we approached for this book asked: “Why me? Surely there’s someone else, better/more famous/more worthy.” None of the male correspondents we approached for our last book, The Beijing Bureau, asked that.

But there remains a risk to women of being seen to be too driven, too ambitious or too egotistical. It’s a narrow path to walk.

All correspondents, male and female, risk death, injury and kidnap in pursuit of the story. It’s a more dangerous world than it once was for journalists. Females face the additional threat of sexual violence, a problem many are loath to discuss in case it limits their chances to win that coveted posting. Some powerful males imagine that the women operating in what they consider a man’s world to be sexually available, or that western women in general are promiscuous – a suspicion also harboured in the Middle East about Lebanese women. There’s also vicious online harassment, affecting proportionately more women, that can leech dangerously into real life.

Then there is the problem of moral injury – the harm that comes from seeing terrible things happening to too many blameless people. There is the conflict that comes from knowing that a helicopter or a plane is coming for you, or that you can hop back in your car and drive away from the refugee camp after you have collected all the stories you need for your own purposes. All these women have to be able, sometimes, to turn off, to ignore the fate of students fleeing armoured personnel carriers, or a hungry child, just to get the job done.

And many of these correspondents have children of their own. I was six months pregnant covering Tiananmen Square, and I fretted about the risk to the baby of too much adrenaline or a dose of tear gas – a misplaced fear as it turned out – the Chinese army instead used tanks to quell the demonstrators.

I had toddlers climbing over me as I filed for Newsweek in Singapore on the collapse of Barings Bank, the canary in the financial coal mine disaster of the GFC. Other correspondent mothers talk about keeping the facts of the stories they cover from their children. Then there is the question of who manages the logistics, like finding schools, a home, a nanny. “The wives usually take care of that,” Emma Alberici was told by the ABC. Unfortunately, she did not have one, just three children under three. We all worried when we were with the children that we should be filing – and that we should be with the children when we worked.

There is also the gender question for those you interview. I was expected to make the tea for PNG Prime Minister Paias Wingti during a media briefing. But it can be an advantage, winning you a different kind of access. In those places where local women are excluded from public life, many correspondents talk of being a neutral gender. They say they are accepted as honorary males in exchange for delivering the men’s message to the outside world. They are also permitted into the women’s tent, the private world where men are banned.

These trailblazing Australian women correspondents far from home are the equal of any. What drove them to become correspondents? Perhaps it was a thirst for knowledge, or adventure.  Perhaps they were driven to have an intense experience of life. What shines through for me is their engagement with the people they meet.

Like Ruth Pollard, from the Sydney Morning Herald who told us that it wasn’t her sheltering from helicopter gunships, it was the Syrians whose stories she was covering. She was just sheltering beside them. Or Kirsty Needham, with her concern for the ill-equipped Hong Kong mothers, who joined the demonstrations to act as human shields. And Diaa Hadid who writes movingly of the people in blockaded Gaza, helped to find love through a matching making service run by Hamas, the terror group that would eventually force her off the strip.

The women in this book are all tough, talented and resourceful. They have to be. It’s a white-knuckle life, covering the big stories. There’s turmoil, disaster and war.

There’s also glamour and an entrée into a world where an ordinary Sydney girl might have only dreamt of going – diplomatic balls, world premieres, cocktail parties with future kings. Through Her Eyes shares the stories of the lives of a tough bunch of women and the stories they cover. And some of them are ripping yarns. There’s CNN correspondent Anna Coren on embedding with a US Special Forces team in eastern Afghanistan and sheltering behind a mud wall with machine gunfire coming from three directions. Video journalist Ginny Stein writes of being picked up and questioned by Zimbabwe’s feared secret police; Cate Cadel, now of the Washington Post, ran afoul of China’s oppressive surveillance system.

With so many extraordinary women filing from around the world, it can seem like all the battles have been won. But the carpeted halls of management are often still bastions of the white, male and middle class. There’s plenty more to do. Says Lynne O’Donnell, former AP Kabul Bureau Chief: “Maybe there’s more of us now, but our bosses are still men. They are still the ones having lunch with the Prime Minister and informing policy. We’ve come a long way, but were not there yet.”

We also need more diversity among the women who have made it. In our book, there are leading Australian correspondents, whose families came originally from China, via Malaysia, and from Lebanon. But hearing from more Australians with different backgrounds and different outlooks can only help us better understand the world. As Mao famously said, women hold up half the sky. They make up half the world, and a varied lot they are, too. If we don’t hear from them, if we don’t hear about them, we are only hearing half the story.