David Brooks on the role of foreign correspondents

New York Times columnist David Brooks gave a talk at UCLA this week. He touched on the topic of Daniel Pearl, the Wall Street Journal journalist who was held hostage and murdered in Karachi in 2002. He also discussed the role of the foreign correspondent. The UCLA student rag, The Daily Bruin, has more,

“His passing was something that touched all of us profoundly,” said Brooks, who said he worked for the Wall Street Journal at the same time as Pearl but never met him.
Brooks went on to speak of the importance of Pearl’s work as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, sharing several anecdotes from his own career covering events in Russia. Brooks said that personal experience of world events that people like Pearl brought was essential to news coverage. “In order to actually understand what was happening in the world, you had to go to the places like where Danny went,” Brooks said. Brooks said his experiences overseas convinced him of the importance of the details, impressions and experiences provided by foreign correspondents in the field.
“To me, that’s the most valuable form of journalism: when you don’t just describe what somebody said, but you go out and describe what it actually feels like to live in a place,” he said. link