Greg Fabian Winter is a Foreign Desk Editor at the New York Times, responsible for Latin America and Africa coverage. He previously worked as a reporter, covering education and business. In the following interview, Winter discussess the challenges of providing foreign news coverage in these pressing times, when newspapers are cutting back budgets and the internet is replacing traditional mainstream media. A staunch believer in the power of truth telling, Fabian says The Times will continue to stick to its mission of delivering global news, at a time when the public may prefer celebrity gossip soundbites.
Winter takes us through the inside process of deciding the daily news and shares his insights on reporting such events as the Israel-Palestenian conflict.
How long have you been working as a journalist and how and when did you decide to be a journalist?
I actually have an untraditional, unorthodox path into journalism. I worked as a homeless advocate and public policy director in San Francisco after collage for a number of years building houses for homeless families and trying to develop a coordinated strategy for the city of San Francisco in terms of dealing with issues of poverty, substance abuse, homelessness, welfare things of that nature and I decided that I was tired of smashing my head against a very very solid brick wall. It was not moving at all. So I am very interested in writing and obviously interested in social issues so I transitioned to journalism about 10 years ago and what I did not expect actually is how much you can actually change things and move the ball within journalism. I was not always working as a foreign editor, I was a writer for five years of The Times and I wrote about education, business and national news. You know one story can spark legislation in congress and really change the major issues. It teaches you to be very careful about what you say and teaches you to be very, very attentive to details, what you write because people really watch them.
How many correspondents do you have all over the world right now?
Right now probably in the order of 40 correspondents working around the world in various bureaus and then those correspondents work also with a number of stringers, so for example, any given country (for example my area that I supervise is Latin America, Africa and UN) but we all have to dabble pretty much in everything because they are not enough of us in terms of editors. And one of my correspondents, for example, is based in Nairobi and he covers all of East Africa. It is impossible for one person to be in upwards of 20 countries at any given time, so he has a network of journalists that he works with who we pay locally in places like Somali, Uganda, Ruwanda, Congo- all over the place who can feed him information when things are developing so that he can know what is occurring around the region.
Do you think the quality for the coverage has been impacted by the recent cutbacks in the news industry?
Generally, around the country with regard to American media there has been major closure of bureaus around the world. For example just look at Iraq, if you are talking about the time of invasion you probably have upwards of 100 organizations that have permanent presence or some kind of continuing presence in Iraq. Now you have about five news agencies in the US that have a permanent presences in Iraq. The Times, like any news paper, has had major financial constrains, everybody probably read about, it has not yet impacted foreign coverage. There has been a very concerted effort on the part of the paper to maintain foreign bureaus not cut them back sometimes we trade one bureau for another. So for example we closed one in Jakarta but we are going to open additional slots in India for example. We may do some of that trading but we haven’t reduced the number of over all correspondents. I hope that doesn’t change. It is still very very expensive to cover foreign news. Our bureau in Bagdad for example costs more than three million dollars a year. It costs a hundred Iraqi journalists, as well as security guards, as well as translators who we hire, so these things are extremely expensive to maintain that is why there is a lot of pressure on Wall Street to especially for public companies to reduce your spending on news gathering. Locally at the Times we have a strange stock situation where the publisher, the family actually owns the controlling stock so while Wall Street always is calling on us to severely cut the newsroom the family resists. So I hope that maintains a balance quite a while.
When you send correspondents throughout the world how important is it that they speak the local language and have some in depth knowledge of the region they are covering?
It depends. Obviously it is always important as far as language training it depends on where they are going. If they are going to China for example we typically put the correspondent in a year language training before they go. Some people who are going to China have been experts in China for a long time they speak Chinese before they sign up for the post. Some people are neutral it is usually a mix. If you are going to Paris there are people who speak French already. We don’t have to put them into language training probably just insist person who knows French before hiring. So it depends on where you are going. But generally there is always primacy on the correspondent speaking a language but that doesn’t mean that they won’t rely on translators as well. Often times a correspondent will learn to be able to conduct all of their interviews in the local language within a relatively short time being there. Let’s say, after the first year and then they have a few more years where they can pretty much go on their own.
How do you go about covering a story like Israel-Palestine situation for example? And how do you maintain balance in covering something that is this sensitive?
Well, in truth nobody is happy with the coverage of the Middle East, you know nobody is happy. And sometimes that is a major sign that you are doing a good job because you are heading extremely angry responses from readers who are favoring the Palestinians and from readers who favor Israelis. Amazingly there is a balance in terms of angry response of them. And they are extremely vociferous. Personally I would hate to be the Jerusalem bureau chief. That is a very tough job. The strategy for covering something like Gaza is multiple, manifold. First of all, you have problem of not getting into Gaza yourself. So that is a very difficult problem luckily the Times has a correspondent who is Palestinian and who lives in Gaza. We had somebody there from day one. In fact, the moment the air strikes started, people were fleeing away from the buildings , she ran toward them. She has been there for a long time. She covered the Second Intifada, she covered the battle between Hamas and Fatah, so she started going straight toward the missiles, straight toward the hospital and she was there throughout the entire time and she wrote a number of front page stories from there. Now, she was very endangered by her coverage. First of all, she lived in Gaza she lived in an apartment building. She lived near various important sites that were constantly being bombed. She had a very difficult time of sleeping at night. She slept with the windows open since the bombs could shatter the glass. She slept under a table because of air strikes. In a situation like that I may know my neighbors a little bit but I don’t know who lives in the apartment down the way. I don’t know if that person is wanted by Israel or suspected by Israel to be some kind of a militant. I don’t know the family next door, maybe they are nice but I don’t know what is the status of their son. There is constant fear when she is reporting and she is going around to the various areas alone. She could not obviously do it alone. Later as the conflict started to wane we were actually able to also get Sabrina Tavernise who is the Istanbul bureau chief. She was able to come and she was a very experienced war correspondent she covered the Hezbollah War, she was in Iraq for a long time so she is very good in those situations but in addition to that we had two of our Jerusalem correspondents who were writing every day. We also had our Paris correspondent who used to be the Jerusalem bureau chief, he was going to the border of Gaza through Rafah after Egypt. Now how do you make sure that everything is fair? Now, first of all, any journalist has to apply the measures of fair journalism. You know, this really angers a lot of readers. Because Israel would say things and reporters would report it. Reporters might offer evidence or an assertion. Let’s take a specific example, the shelling of the UN school, outside of the UN school, innocent people were killed. Israel says fire was coming outside of the school, they were responding to the warfire and other types of militants there. So the story will include the assertion by Israel. The story will also include the assertion by the UN, saying “look, that is not true, we had no knowledge of any activity in the area. We have no reason to believe there are any militants there”. The story also found somebody who was in the area;”yes, I think, there was somebody who is known to be militant, but he was several hundred yards away…” These are all things that you do as a journalist. You try to report what each side says as well as you try find whatever independent confirmation you can. But all three of those things angers the readers depending upon where you are coming from. You will hear one side that says the U.N. especially INRA!(the organization working in Gaza) has historically had a bias so anything they say will be against Israel. You cannot possibly include anything they said. The problem you have as a journalist is that by doing your job you will be open to very vociferous criticism on both sides. The only thing you can really do is to try to be consistent in what you do. You do a story about Palestinians mourning the deaths of many civilians in Gaza. We did several of those and you make sure that at some point you are also doing a story about Israelis’ mourning deaths, when they occur as well. The question then becomes should you do more stories on the Palestinians’ dying than you do on Israelis’ dying. Of course you end up doing it that way because news drives in that way but many pro-Palestinian readers would say “Why would you even include any stories on Israelis’ dying when they were such a small proportion of those who die”. It is a very difficult balance in the end. It includes not only the articles that you write because each day you might have four or five articles on the conflict itself so you try to include the right mix each day as well as the right mix of pictures as well as the right mix of headlines but whatever you do you are going to be criticized very angrily. That is fine, that is part of democracy. I am not saying that you should not be criticized.
What kinds of measures do you take to guarantee the safety of your correspondents in these kinds of conflict regions?
Well, we give them flak jackets and helmets and body armor in Iraq, Bagdad we provide them armored cars secured with body guards.
Do they have bodyguards?
Yes, sure. Lots of bodyguards it used to be that you could go into Gaza when things were getting very heavy they sometimes would go around with a team of bodyguards. In some places you can’t operate without that. Three million dollars spent, a lot of it is security. It is over hundred people strong, the Iraqi staff and about a quarter of Iraqi journalists and translators but there are a lot of body guards, drivers, translators, security consultants. Ultimately however, if you are in a war, if you are going to a country like Zimbabwe, where may reporters often go, there is always so much you can do. I have many reporters arrested and held, sometimes by the government sometimes by separate agents who have a political ax to grind. We had reporters held by the Taliban in Afghanistan. In the end, it is the choice of the reporter whether they want to go. We do not force a reporter to go into that type of situation in which their life is going to be in danger. That is their choice. It turns out that most reporters who are foreign correspondents are motivated by an intense interest and desire to get the story. So we often times have to hold them back. I say maybe this is not the best time to go into Zimbabwe, given they have arrested reporters. Have you considered the security measures that you have to take? But it is very difficult to be the boss of somebody who is deciding to go risk their life. And people do get killed, we actually had two Iraqi correspondents killed in the past seven years. Sometimes just working for a news agency makes you a target. We had one person just recently killed in the past year in Bagdad who was clearly assassinated and the only reason is he worked for The New York Times.
Can you please give some details about the process of putting a story in the paper? For example how do you decide which foreign photos land on the front page?
We actually don’t decide which foreign photos land on the front page. Front page is its own entity, if you will. The front page web site is a separate entity. But I will talk about the paper. There are obviously multiple sections in The New York Times. There is foreign news which is obviously a very critical one. There is business and these days business is very important, obviously. There is national news, there is metro. There is sports. There is culture. There is dining. There are a million different sections. Some of them are never going to be in the front page. But everyday all of main news sections go to a meeting twice a day with the top editors of the paper, including the executive editor, the managing editors and the people who decide hear pitches from us, just like our reporters pitch stories to us and say I want to do this and we say that sounds good or I don’t know I would skip that focus and on something else. The heads of each of these news sections go to the front page and say ‘yesterday we had multiple foreign stories that we think you should consider’ we had the story about an investigation. There was a story about Hamad Karzais brother, the entrepreneur. There were further stories about the attacks on the cricket team in Pakistan. There was the international criminal court issue for President Basir of Sudan. These are a number of stories and these are foreign stories. So the front page editors have to decide which of all those they are going to put on front page. We don’t control that, we try to influence its best we can. But in the end the decision is not ours. The same thing is for the photo. Photo editors go and show the pictures. Sometimes it is a compromise. For example in today’s paper you notice that the picture of president of Sudan is on the front page but the article is inside the paper. You get half what you are looking for. So we don’t really control the front page. As far as the inside foreign section, however, we can have more control over that there is a separate picture editor but she will show us in the course of the day the kinds of pictures that she is looking at various stories. If we have a problem with one of the pictures because it does not match the story then we would say so. That becomes particularly important in issues like you are saying covering the Gaza war because we have a ton of pictures of dead Palestinians which we did and ran everyday. Then we might also say ok well in the next day let’s make sure we have a picture of funeral in Israel from a rocket attack. Again, it is a judgment- there is no science to it. It is all a judgment call.
So we can say that The New York Times isn’t just influential in the U.S. but all over the world. When The New York Times gives a certain story attention, the world will pay attention.
We would like to think so but I don’t know…
I am curious if American readers are really interested in what is happening in Sudan?
A lot of the stories that we put on the front page are not things that American readers necessarily are interested in. And we are aware of that.
What is the reason?
Because the people don’t necessarily want to take their medicine either but you have to give it to them just because Americans might be more interested in Britney Spears than in Omar Bashir. That does not mean we are going to change our approach to covering, what we think are the most important stories of the day. If you would govern by that then we would be a very different news paper. There is some attention to try to get what we might call a light story on the front page. Obviously the front page is dominated by bad news most days, most a lot of are news is dominated by bad news. So the front page is conscious of trying to get some kind of light feature, sometimes on the front page something that maybe a little bit more entertaining than just sad but that only sort of reinforces the notion that their primary job is to designate what we think that the most important stories of the day the most important occurrences and to signal that to the readers.
Can we say that NYT is an ‘agenda setter’ of the world?
It depends. I think that honestly the hegemony of the mainstream press has definitely lessened in recent years. My own personal theory (this is not the theory of NYT) is that while the proliferation of news outlets on the internet has been beneficial in many ways, it actually detracts from people’s understanding of what is going on the world. There was a time period in which you had a great powerful mainstream press and as a result you had a greater common understanding and focus of whats going on in the world. Now I am not saying that the picture of the world was always accurate or always perfect, but you did have a greater solidification or common set of understanding in principles of what was happening in the world. Currently what you have is if you are a believer of a right wing agenda or if you have right wing sympathies you have no reason to pay attention to what is necessarily in the mainstream press. You can go straightly to FOX news. And your view of the world will be entirely shaped according to your personal political preferences. So the same goes on the left you could read a blog or you could read a particular outlet that is suited to your own ideological preferences. As a result, the two readers that we are talking about have wildly different conceptions on what is going on in the world, what is actually happening people are operating not only from a different political perspective but from a wildly different set of facts. And I don’t actually think that that is necessarily a great service to public debate. You have a very scattered conception on what is actually happening in this country and in this world. And it does not necessarily serve political discourse because people end up being unable to talk to each other about the same issue.
Do you sometimes question the reliability of the stories sent to you from your correspondents and what kind of measures do you have for the accuracy of the stories?
You have to challenge if any time a correspondent is making an assertion in a story. First of all, if they are making an assertion in the story as a matter of a fact, as an assertion of fact. lf it is not understood to be a mutually accepted fact it needs to have attribution it needs to have a source. You have to say ‘where did you get that fact, is it coming from this particular government or agency? That is just basic journalism, it has to have attribution. If you feel like the reporter is making an assertion, for example, of a trend that is occurring or some other assertion that is not merely a fact, but an assessment. There are issues of fact and then there is “how did you bring these facts together” to say what is the story that were actually telling provides some analysis on what is going on. If the person is making an analysis you don’t think that substantiated by the fact. Then that is your job as an editor to make sure that any assertion or analysis is going to be substantiated by fact. That should be spelled out in the story more or less. Not every single attribution is going to be listed in the story because there is somethings we may have reported multiple times that we may know already to be fact. But for the most part everything should be well substantiated. As far as the agendas, is your question also is somebody is pushing a particular personal agenda? I think that most of the reporters you know over time and you know sort of what they think about ‘x’ and ‘y’, so you are able to police them. You are able to say ‘ok, I know you don’t like this person very much’ because you think that he is bad guy. But really you don’t need to call them a dictator; you can call them an authoritarian president. I think everybody would agree. So there are some ways of policing people over time just because they are human beings they have natural preferences. For the most part I don’t really feel like there are strong agendas on the part of the correspondents. Correspondent never let their personal biases getting in the way of a good story. For example, my own personal background is, I was an education writer for a long time as well as a business writer. I am personally in favor of affirmative action. In terms of an educational policy I probably should not be saying that but I am saying ‘I believe that affirmative action has been an important tool to rectify educational discrimination over the years’. But as an educational writer I certainly had to write stories in which new social science findings came out saying that affirmative action did not work for one reason or another or there is a new research study coming out debunking the affirmative action for this or another. So as a journalist you don’t let your personal feelings get in the way of a story. That is why you are there you are there to be deliverer the information and to provide an analysis, so the correspondents. They are seasoned journalists. They are not there because they are pushing an agenda.
I remember the story of your Istanbul bureau chief about the Gulen Schools. She is based in Istanbul and wrote about the schools in Pakistan. So how did the Pakistan reporter contribute? How did they cooperate?
This was a story about how the Turkish schools movement was actually quite moderate even though in Turkey it was a big controversial issue. But when you look at these schools they are actually quite moderate and they are nothing like necessarily the more religious schools, hard line schools you might find in much of Pakistan. First of all she is writing about a line of schools which are relevant in Turkey. And have been an issue in Turkey. When you are a correspondent you can travel all over the world. You don’t have to just stay in your area. While she is reporting the story in the course of her reporting leads her to Pakistan to illustrate a point about Turkey then it is just simple. First of all it is logical to do that. Secondly, she can tell the correspondents in Pakistan do you mind if I come and work on this topic as it relates to Turkey?
How would you characterize the importance of foreign news to NYT and its impact on the readers in the US and do you think American readers care enough about the issues out of the borders. Because sometimes it is said that before September 11 American people were not necessarily interested in foreign news, do you think that was true and if so, do you think September 11 has changed that?
I think that there was probably a lot more interest in foreign news immediately after September 11 than we could expect to be sustained certainly they are not interested in Iraq any longer certainly people probably their eyes glaze over when they hear the words Pakistan, Afghanistan, Uzbekistan you know what I mean. I think there is substantial numbers of American readers who are very interested in foreign news. Certainly the paper believes that it would not continue to spend so much money on foreign news coverage at a time when everybody is telling to cut back and spend less money. But as far as the Times is concerned they consider the foreign news one of the essential elements of its trade mark. If you are interested in foreign news you come to the NYT, you don’t go to USA Today. That is not only part of its identity but also its marketing strategy. I would say that it will continue for a long time as long as the paper stays in business, hopefully that is a long time.
It is very amazing that the news about Turkey takes place in the Europe section in NYT in the web site.
I think there is a strange quandary about Turkey in terms of how it is categorized. Geographically it is categorized in Europe or Asia or Middle East. I think that we generally categorize it in terms of technicality as Europe. I don’t know how that decision was made.
Where do you think Turkey is?
I guess if there was a quasi category that you could say spanning the bridge of the continents. But personally I think it is not terrible to list it as part of the Europe. But I am sure there is a plenty of room for debate over that.
Do you think that one day Turkey will be a member of EU?
It is hard to tell. It depends as much on the EU and what happens in the EU and anything that Turkey does. It seems like obviously the thrust for the EU in recent years to add the Eastern European members. The war in Georgia seemed like it will slow that process. The financial crisis exposed a lot of tensions within the EU even the referendum on the EU constitution did not exposed. So I actually don’t know.
Do you think that the image of Turkey changed in the US when the Turkish Parliament did not allow the American troops to use their territory to invade Iraq.
I don’t know if people were paying a close attention honestly. I don’t know what the American image of Turkey is right now. I know, we have read about Turkey and I think Turkey is in a very interesting moment politically, culturally with the tension between political power of religious groups and traditional seculars. I think it is a very fascinating time for Turkey. I would guess that most Americans have not paid attention to that.
Do you think that during Obama’s presidency the foreign policy for Turkey would change, considering the Armenian issue or Cyprus ?
I would be surprised if the Armenian issue changes under the presidency of Obama. I don’t think Turkey is its highest priority at this time. He clearly made Afghanistan is his primary priority.
Why is that?
First of all he is responding to intense pressure from generals there and the military establishment there who have been calling for more troops for Afghanistan. He seems to indicate that Afghanistan is a war he thinks he can wage and make a significant difference. Where in Iraq he has indicated that he wants to remove the emphasis there. I think in Afghanistan it’s clear that things are spinning out of control there and Afghanistan is in tremendous flux. So I don’t think it is an improper assessment to say that the war in Afghanistan has not been going very well for Americans and that if anything, destabilizing Pakistan to a significant degree. I am guessing he thinks Afghanistan is a big enough issue that it requires immediate attention. I won’t make any statement on whether or not it is right to send more troops. I am not even a military expert.
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