|
||||
  
 
 |
Former Beirut hostage, journalist Terry Anderson to visit USU to discuss threats to world press freedom By
the USU department of journalism and communication LOGAN -- In March 1985, Terry Anderson was chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press, stationed in Beirut, Lebanon. One morning on his way to work, radical Shiite gunmen stopped his car in the street, ordered Anderson out and took him hostage. Anderson spent the next seven years as a prisoner to international political terrorism during Lebanon's bloody civil war. He was chained, blindfolded, beaten and every day expected to be killed. Anderson comes to Utah State University on March 18 to deliver a Media & Society Lecture, sponsored by the USU Journalism and Communication Department. The title of his talk will be "Threats to World Press Freedom: A Conversation with Terry Anderson." The event will be at noon in the USU Taggart Student Center Ballroom. It is free and the public is invited to attend. Anderson's appearance at Utah State University comes 17 years almost to the day after his abduction in Beirut. And he comes to USU just one month after the kidnapping of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in Pakistan ended with Pearl's videotaped murder by his captors. "What Terry Anderson went through as a hostage in Lebanon in the 1980s, and how he not only survived that ordeal but grew from it, is unimaginable," said Ted Pease, head of USU's Journalism and Communication Department. "What is even harder for me to imagine is Mr. Anderson's reactions to the kidnapping and murder of Danny Pearl. That could have been him." Part of Anderson's response to Pearl's kidnapping and murder, he said in a telephone conversation last week from his home in southeastern Ohio, was to redouble his efforts to work on behalf of jailed and threatened journalists worldwide. Anderson is honorary co-chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which monitors attacks on the press around the world and works to free reporters from prison. In early March, Anderson will accompany a delegation from the Committee to Protect Journalists on a trip to Siberia in an effort to free a Russian reporter who has been jailed by the government there for four years. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, attacks on editors and reporters worldwide are up sharply this year, with a record number of journalists killed in the line of duty. "What we fail to remember is that journalists' duty around the world is to get information to us about what is happening in places we can't go," said Pease. "We are dependent on those people for our knowledge of people and cultures not like us. Without their work, which is so often deadly dangerous, we as individuals and we as a nation can't make informed judgments. The work that people like Terry Anderson and Daniel Pearl do -- and thousands of others whose names we don't know -- is essential to freedom." Pease added that the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 took the country by surprise in part because of Americans' lack of knowledge about the Middle East and Islam. "I think Americans need to pay more attention to what's happening around the world, how people in Pakistan or Malaysia or Zimbabwe perceive us," he said. "If nothing else, Sept. 11 showed us how little we understand the global village." Anderson, 54, was a journalist for more than 25 years, working in Asia and Africa before the Associated Press assigned him to the Middle East in 1983. His best-selling memoir, Den of Lions, chronicles his seven years as a hostage in Lebanon. Time magazine said it "belongs on the shelf of classics about surviving degradation with dignity and even humor." Since his release in 1992, Anderson has been a teacher, columnist radio talk-show host and activist on behalf of people who need help. In addition to his work with the Committee to protect Journalists, Anderson is co-chair of the Vietnam Children's Fund, which builds schools in Vietnam, and founder and director of the Jenco Foundation, which works with the people of Appalachia. Anderson has taught at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism and at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University. He graduated from Iowa State University, and served with the Marines in Vietnam. Anderson's award-winning documentary, Return to the Den of the Lions, about his return to Lebanon and that country's recovery from 16 years of war, will be shown at USU before and after Anderson's lecture. For further details, contact the USU Journalism and Communication department at 435-797-3292.
|
Archived Months:
January
1999 January
2000 January
2001 |
||