‘A bridge to humanity’: Behind a Monitor series on an underreported story

Episode transcript

Peter Ford: Other media call themselves “papers of record.” I like to think of The Christian Science Monitor as the paper of record of unexpected success.

Clay Collins: That’s The Monitor’s Peter Ford, our Paris-based international news editor. He joined the show last in late 2022 to talk about surfacing stories from the world over that highlight credible hope.

As we near the end of 2024, a land war grinds on in Europe’s east and could now be drawing in North Korea. In the Middle East, a year-old conflagration rooted in decades of enmity appears to be widening those conflicts hold the world transfixed and, well, a US presidential election has pretty much taken whatever sliver of attention was left over.

The West tends to forget about the African continent, even in less distracting times. But Africa watchers know that there’s plenty there worth attention. In recent years, coups have roiled countries in a belt running from Guinea to Sudan. In sub-Saharan Africa, in particular, famine persists. There is also, of course, vibrancy and innovation, cooperation, resilience, and agency.

This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m Clay Collins. Peter joins me today to discuss a burst of Monitor stories this month about, and mostly written from, Sudan. They were orchestrated by a staffer on Peter’s team, Johannesburg-based Africa editor Ryan Lenora Brown, who joined this podcast herself recently to talk about finding African voices to tell stories from Africa.

Hey, Peter. Thanks for joining to supply a foreign editor’s view.

Ford: Very glad to be here again with you.

Collins: You’ve written from – and edited stories from – a lot of places many Americans don’t necessarily make room to think about. The situation now in Sudan is especially tough with war widening [and with] one UN observer of Rwanda from ’94 even hinting that such a genocide could be repeated – in Sudan. Why is it so bad right now, and do you have a sense of whether the sides, both of which have been accused of war crimes, can be separated maybe with outside intervention?

Ford: Well, this war’s been going on now since April [of] ’23, so it’s about 18 months. And the problem is that neither side seems to have a decisive advantage, but neither side is ready to give in or perhaps, you know, start some peace talks. There have been a couple of efforts in the direction of peace talks, but they’ve not gone anywhere.

You wonder whether outside powers might be able to help. The difficulty there is that the outside powers that are most heavily involved in Sudan, have intervened on behalf of either one belligerent or the other, they’re not intervening as peacemakers. The United Arab Emirates, for example, is known to support the Rapid Support Force, which is a paramilitary group fighting the Sudanese army. And Iran is backing the Sudanese army.

What makes it really grave is that both sides are using starvation as a weapon of war. A UN fact-finding team was in the country earlier this month and they issued a very stark warning at the end of their trip last week. They said, and I quote here, “Never in modern history have so many people faced starvation and famine as in Sudan today.” Now, that’s not the kind of news you could ignore, is it?

Collins: Right, right. It’s a brutal, intractable conflict. The Monitor, of course, works to counter the perception that conflicts like that, and crises don’t completely define even those places where they’re perennial.

That means looking hard. Ryan, for instance, has described her job as a journalist, as being, quote, “to draw the world in closer.” And she wrote recently [in a Monitor Weekly column introducing the Sudan series], “I think the best reporting is the kind that helps us brush up against people in situations that feel far away, inexplicable, or simply hopeless.”

Here’s Ryan from an episode on which she appeared in August.

Ryan Lenora Brown: I, from my region, get a lot of pitches or am responding to a lot of news that is bad news, that is a war, a refugee crisis, a natural disaster, something like that, you know, and the normal way, the straight news way to cover that is just, you know, this terrible thing happened. This many people died. Maybe if you want to go click further, like, this is why it’s as bad as it is. And so I’m forever saying to people that, you know, when we do a story on a topic like that for the Monitor, we want to do something, come at it with a slightly different lens, and it’s not to say that I want to … I want us to try to manufacture optimism about situations that don’t warrant optimism about terrible things happening in the world. I’m not saying that. But I think there’s always somewhere in a dark situation that you can find reasons for hope – even if it’s just watching some people extend a hand, to others, you know. It’s watching someone’s resilience in the face of very terrible circumstances, the ways that they find to go on, the way that ordinary life continues to exist in the margins of terrible things happening.

Collins: I want to talk specifically now about the short series of Sudan stories the Monitor ran earlier this month.

It included an anonymous essay from Khartoum about a journalist navigating being a new parent of a child who had a really rocky start; a remarkable piece, datelined Nigeria, about Sudanese community aid groups, community kitchens, rallying and improvising to share food; [a] quite chilling one from inside Sudan on a family of refugees and about the moral complexity of people who essentially smuggle such families; and a story from a settlement camp in Uganda about a man there using the food of his homeland, Sudan, really as a kind of identity lifeline.

Ford: Yes, well, these four stories really do talk to just what Ryan was saying back in August. You know, talking about resilience in the face of terrible circumstances. Our stories in and from Sudan are about how, even in the midst of disasters, people can rise above that chaos and the difficulties and they can find ways of working together to overcome their problems, which is, you know, when we do it well, covering wars and crises like that, from that sort of angle, gives readers a picture of ... a really different picture of life in Africa. It gives them a picture of humankind, really, at its noblest.

Now we can’t always do that, obviously, and of course we have to balance this sort of coverage with less positive aspects of reality, because we’re not blind to reality. But at the Monitor, we keep our eyes peeled for the positive. Other media call themselves “papers of record.” I like to think of The Christian Science Monitor as the paper of record of unexpected success.

Collins: Hmm. How did you and Ryan find and assign these specific stories and decide when you had a complementary set that was ready to run?

Ford: Well, Ryan’s always on the lookout for stories, prodding stringers whom we know, and ask them to pitch, and finding good ideas in pitches from people who don’t really know what we’re about, but, you know, send stories in, or send pitches in on spec, as it were. In this short series, two stories were written by stringers, two others came from an outfit called Egab. This is an organization we’ve been partnering with for some time, they commission stories from local reporters in Africa and the Middle East and then they present them to international papers like us, so it gives local reporters a much broader audience and it gives us a deeper pool of stories. And we can edit them, any way we like and we can go back to writers and we talk with them directly, and we found it really quite a fruitful relationship.

Collins: I feel like there’s a careful line to watch in covering crisis spots between not glossing over suffering where it exists, but also not supporting those hopeless narratives. And I think of that famous image from Sudan by Kevin Carter; it was a Pulitzer-winner of a small child hunched over with the vulture looming in the background.

You know, did that illustrate a need for action? Did it reinforce the hopelessness? And then I also recall a newsroom conversation in 2018 about sifting images from Africa for our Viewfinder feature, which is a photo showcase, and some of them were of a new light rail system in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. And at the time we talked about making sure to show a fuller picture, both with images and with words.

I want to excerpt Ryan again briefly on looking for the broader, more relatable human stories.

Brown: International reporters and local reporters, we’re really conditioned to feel like news is about important people. “Important” in air quotes, right? Like people in power, huge, sweeping forces. And that’s the level at which we want to talk about what’s going on in the world, or that it makes sense to talk about what’s going on in the world.

So it’s like actually not just for local reporters, but I think for international reporters maybe who have come from writing for more newsy outlets, you know, where they’re doing kind of breaking stories and stuff, and then come and do a story for the Monitor.

It’s a little bit of a change of pace and a change of perspective, the kind of way that we approach the news and who we tend to focus on, and the more sort of anecdotal, the more, “how has this big picture thing, affected this particular small group of people,” you know, “this particular group of students, whatever.”

It’s just sort of a different way of thinking about the news.

Ford: Yes, we try to find stringers – stringers are freelance correspondents – we try to find those who are already familiar with our sort of approach from work they’ve done elsewhere. And at the same time, we can send them examples of stories we’ve already published to give them a better idea of what we do and how we do it.

Ryan’s worked up a pretty comprehensive set of guidelines for new contributors and she works very closely with new stringers who show promise often over quite a long period of time. That’s all very well [and] good, but it takes a good deal of patience and dedication. But I think it’s paying off, because our Africa coverage is getting noticeably more diverse. It’s coming more closely in line with our values, and it’s generally, I think, more appealing to our readers. I mean, that reflects … among the things it reflects, is the fact that we have an Africa editor based on the continent, who has her ear to the ground and a good sense of where she’ll find Monitoresque stories. I mean, Ryan has lived in Africa for a long time and, frankly, it shows.

Collins: You mentioned patience and dedication as necessary virtues here. There are so many special challenges around covering so vast and varied a continent. The work is staggeringly hard, you know, logistically, emotionally, otherwise. As a foreign editor, what, to you, makes it worthwhile getting this kind of coverage executed and presenting these stories to readers?

Ford: Well, partly just the fact that it can be so difficult, and that makes just achieving it, feel worthwhile. There are letters from readers, some readers who are particularly touched by a particular story, they’re always encouraging. But in the end I think it’s, it’s the way we’re building a bridge between two very different worlds, between, what is the predominantly American readership of the newspaper, and a continent whose people are not well understood globally. It’s a kind of bridge of humanity, if you like, and I find it a very fulfilling job to keep that bridge maintained.

Collins: Well, thank you, Peter, for all of the remarkable bridge-building work that you and your team do and do so routinely and so well.

Ford: It’s a pleasure to do it, and it’s always a pleasure to talk to you, Clay.

Collins: Thanks, Peter. And thanks to our listeners. Find links to all of the Sudan stories discussed and to previous show appearances by Peter and Ryan in our episode show notes at CSMonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Clay Collins, and produced by Mackenzie Farkus. Jingnan Peng is also a producer on this show. Our sound engineers were Tim Malone and Morgan Anderson and Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt, produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024.