Lisa Ling: From The View to National Geographic
By Global Journalist Staff Posted Oct 19 2009
Journalist Lisa Ling recounted stories from her work abroad and expressed disappointment with the low level of media coverage given to international affairs: “The highest rated news shows are the ones with old white guys telling you what to think. What does that say about the state of journalism—that we need to be told what to think? Opinions are masquerading as news.
Lisa Ling clearly remembers the moment when everything changed for her.
She was a young reporter with Channel 1 News in 1994, and her first overseas assignment was in Afghanistan. As she stepped off the plane, she was confronted with a crowd of young boys carrying guns much larger than their bodies. The image stayed with her, but she found it difficult to share her experience with friends and colleagues when she returned home. She says that is the moment when she knew she wanted to tell global stories, and she wanted to connect people in America with what was happening around the world.
Ling shared this anecdote and several others during a talk at the University of Missouri on Sept. 16 in which she traced her career path from fledgling journalist to mature foreign correspondent.
What shocked Ling the most about her trip to Afghanistan was that even though the U.S. was involved in Afghanistan in the 1980s, no one was talking about it stateside at that time. Even now, she says, “Unfortunately even though we have so much media, we have so many bona fide news outlets, we go home and we watch broadcast news, how often are we given the opportunity to know about what’s happening in the world?”
Ling has dedicated her career to international coverage. Even when she joined The View at 26, she was committed to international stories. She says she would pitch global stories, but executives would tell her Americans don’t care about what’s happening in the rest of the world.
“I knew Americans wanted to know what’s going on in the world,” she says. “They just didn’t have the opportunity to know because it’s covered so infrequently on our news.” In order to get her message across, Ling says she tried to say one thing provocative every day on the show. It was Sept. 11 that made Ling pause — she realized she had to get back in the field. She says she joined National Geographic because it was “an organization that really wanted to tell global stories.”
With National Geographic’s Explorer series, Ling covered not only gangs in El Salvador but also the drug war in Colombia and the adoption of baby girls from China.
More recently, she has been a regular contributor to the Oprah Show, and she says one of the first international stories she covered for the show involved gangs of guerilla soldiers entering the Democratic Republic of the Congo and gang raping women in the villages. Ling says the show reached nine million in the ratings and raised $2.5 million dollars for women in the Congo. To Ling, those numbers are proof that Americans want to hear international stories.
Ling says she often goes into a story with a defined, preconceived idea but discovers that the stories have many layers. “Always when I hit the ground, the story isn’t always what I’d originally thought,” she says.
In the end, Ling realizes that she can return home to her family but the people she covers live in those conditions every day and she wants to impart some of that in her stories. When talking about a recent story she’s worked on about young girls marrying older men in Ethiopia, Ling reveals her motivation for continuing as a foreign correspondent: “The ultimate reason I’ve continued doing this is because I’ve had this opportunity to be in the world and to be exposed to these stories. Some are tragic and heart-wrenching; some are moving and beautiful. But I can’t just be exposed to a story like this and turn my back and pretend they don’t exist.”