A journalist recounts her involvement in the war effort.
For all the discussion in journalism circles about objectivity, the fundamental nature of reporting remains observation. |
Journalists watch, listen, ask questions and recount. In an effort to maintain impartiality, they generally avoid jumping into the fray. |
However, as a certain old-timey journalist from the days of telexes and typewriters once told a young newsman early in his career, "What clarity we get from noncommitment is paid for by putting us on the sidelines." (Good line, Dad.) |
But some journalists hop past those sidelines and into the game. George Orwell is a famous example. Intending to write articles about the Spanish Civil War, he ended up joining a Communist militia fighting the fascists. "At that time and in that atmosphere, it seemed the only conceivable thing to do," he wrote at the outset of "Homage to Catalonia." |
The Franco-Polish journalist Anna Husarska, whose guest essay this week recounts her volunteer efforts in the Ukraine war, is in that Orwellian (in the positive sense) mode. Ms. Husarska, a longtime chronicler of conflict, recounts her leap into the ad-hoc volunteer supply chain for Ukrainians on the front lines. With some whimsy, she finds a metaphor in Amazon — put in your order to the "everything store" for drones, batteries, underwear and pickup trucks and somebody will deliver it. |
It was the only conceivable thing to do. |
Make no mistake, Ms. Husarska was always a journalist with a point of view. She staffed the Paris information bureau of Poland's Solidarity union movement and worked at the pro-Solidarity newspaper Gazeta Wyborcza. She has brought strongly stated convictions about right and wrong to her coverage of numerous wars and has worked as a consultant and analyst for humanitarian organizations. |
"I don't believe in detachment," she told an interviewer in the 2001 book "Reporting the Post-Communist Revolution." |
Ms. Husarska has also been a translator, and one of her projects, not surprisingly, was rendering Orwell's essays in Polish. |
"I try to imitate him, and before turning in any piece I have written, I give it an 'Orwell read' and eliminate all the pretentious or boring words," she said in the book interview. "I check my pieces for political decency, if you see what I mean." |
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