"Nothing beats being there": foreign correspondent Lindsey Hilsum on Afghanistan and eyewitnesses (Patreon)

I wrote this as an extra credit assignment for a journalism course. Earlier this week Lindsey Hilsum, International Editor of Channel 4 News, spoke to the journalism school I attend, and I chose to cover it. I was quite proud of the resulting words, so here's some coursework for you $2+ backers.

STONY BROOK, Ny., Oct. 27 — Reporter Lindsey Hilsum joins a Zoom call from her computer in London. Several Stony Brook University academics and students check in from their offices and classrooms. They’re mostly journalism and communications professionals, and students majoring or minoring in those fields. Everyone is ready for Hilsum’s virtual call with Stony Brook, a school she loves. Nobody here would miss this.

Hilsum is International Editor for the U.K.’s Channel 4 News, a title she regards as symbolic: “nobody would ever let me be in charge of somebody else.” She has recently returned from Afghanistan, where she covered the fallout of the United States’ August withdrawal from the country. When Hilsum arrived in the country, Afghans had swapped the airport, trying to escape. “There I was, desperate to get in, and men, desperate to get out,” she said. “That’s journalism for you.”

A foreign correspondent by trade, Hilsum has reported in the U.S., Syria, Iraq, Libya, and Rwanda, where in 1994 she was the only English-speaking reporter to cover that country’s genocide. She worked in Afghanistan previously, but until the U.S. withdrawal she hadn’t visited that country since 2010, a choice she now considers a mistake. “I lost concentration,” says Hilsum. “I got distracted by Iraq, just like the U.S. military did.”

Afghanistan in 2021 is not the Afghanistan of 2010, says Hilsum. “I realized I didn’t understand lots of things. I missed a lot.” She saw sights new to her: the Taliban held much of the country and dominated the roads. When she visited the Panjshir Valley, she heard gunfire, which turned out to be celebratory shots by citizens.

Hilsum interviewed the Taliban, who fed her while she waited to interview them. “The Taliban were very nice, very polite,” she says. “They offered us lunch but they weren’t going to let us go.” Before the interview, Hilsum and her producer Anna needed to be patted down, but the Taliban, considering touching women sinful, would not do it. Their solution was for the two newswomen to pat each other down, searching for weaponry. Hilsum says that as she and her producer complied with Taliban gender politics in one of the silliest ways possible, they laughed heartily.

The plight of Afghan women is close to Hilsum’s heart. She spoke about a private Afghan university she visited, where the Taliban were forcing women and men to attend classes on different days. Hilsum said she met a female Afghan Member of Parliament who was afraid for her life. She also met some more conservative women, who celebrated not having to share a classroom with men anymore.

On one occasion Hilsum interviewed a woman for whom she grew so concerned she arranged to move her to Pakistan. While Hilsum says she’s not supposed to do this professionally, she had human concern for these people, asking listeners “do you think I left that interview without giving a little something for the kids to feed them? Then you’re not a human being.” When she arranged for this woman’s move, she called her in Pakistan. The woman was distraught and traumatized by the move, telling Hilsum “I’m a broken person and I belong nowhere.”

Hilsum is intimately familiar with the human costs in reporting. Her Rwanda coverage is only one component of it: she has lost several friends who reported on human rights violations, including journalist Marie Colvin. Colvin, Hilsum says, snuck into Syria with rebels to cover the Syrian Civil War, a move Hilsum says most of her friends considered “beyond their danger’s threshold.” And yet “Marie went in,” Hilsum said, tearfully. In 2012, Colvin was assassinated by the Syrian government for her reporting.

Colvin’s death motivated Hilsum to visit Syria, although she “didn’t go to Syria for a year after that”. Unlike Colvin, she entered the country from the government’s side to avoid assassination. When I asked Hilsum why she’d been away from Afghanistan for so long, she cited Syria as a factor. She distinguished between geographic beats and subject beats, classifying her work the latter, while highlighting other reporters who stayed in Afghanistan long-term to cover the region.

She also spoke about visiting Bolsonaro, where President Jair Bolsonaro’s Covid-19 denial (as he contracted the virus multiple times) has contributed to a pandemic that has killed over 600,000 people. Seeing Brazil’s streets, Hilsum understood why the pandemic was so severe. “People are living cheek by jowl on top of each other,” says Hilsum. “Social distancing is impossible.” The sight that bowled her over in Brazil was her visit to the Amazon, where indigenous people had contracted the virus and treated and cured themselves with their own medication.

Covering the American presidential election in 2020, Hilsum saw the effects of Covid there too, where she met voters, including Qanon supporters in Michigan. She also visited Pennsylvania, a swing state, and Arizona, and Florida, where Republicans have heavily recruited among the Latinx population. “One of the great things about reporting in America is that everyone wants to talk,” says Hilsum. “When you have an English accent and you’re on TV, everyone thinks you’re related to Princess Diana.”

Hilsum had missed traveling. “Covid was a nightmare because it meant we couldn’t travel so much,” she says. “You had to assemble stories from agency feeds from different places.” She tells the group that going where the drama is happening and talking to people is the essence of reporting. “I wouldn’t have gotten that story if I hadn’t gone there,” she says.

Reporting for Channel 4 News, Lindsey Hilsum has written two books, one of which, In Extremis: The Life and Death of the War Correspondent Marie Colvin, a biography of her late friend, won Hilsum the 2018 James Tait Black Memorial Prize in Biography. Hilsum spent a year at Stony Brook researching the book. Hilsum is proudest of her work traveling abroad and speaking to people. “If you’re not an eyewitness, you’re not my kind of journalist,” says Hilsum. “Nothing beats being there.”