![]() ![]() His novelty counterintuitively made people more ready to tell him their stories. ![]() And then there’s this very different approach, the Truman Capote approach: I am an alien, I come from another planet. There’s one approach where you go on and try to mirror the people around you and seem as much like them as you can, in order to put you at ease. ![]() I often think about the persona that a reporter has, when a reporter goes out into different environments. Fairly or unfairly, they immediately draw conclusions about the baggage that you’re bringing to that encounter. There’s a sense that if you’re from over there, the minute you open your mouth and people hear you say a few words - your accent - they plot you on a matrix. But I pretty quickly concluded it was helpful to be an outsider, in part because it’s such a divided place. Was that a benefit in your reporting?Īt the beginning, I thought it would be a disadvantage, just because the history is so complex there and I felt that there was a very steep learning curve for me in terms of grasping some of the politics and almost tribal dynamics of the place. You’re coming at this mystery as a total outsider. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |