Reflections with lessons to share
Reviewed by Steve Weinberg Posted Wed, Sep 17 2008
After five years of reporting from Moscow for U.S. News and World Report magazine, Nicholas Daniloff ended up in prison during 1986 on a trumped-up charge of espionage. After two weeks of public and private diplomacy, Daniloff walked out of the Soviet prison and returned to the United States.
Daniloff told about his arrest, imprisonment and release in his superb 1988 book, Two Lives, One Russia.
His new book, Of Spies and Spokesmen, covers the 1986 arrest and its aftermath, too. The main thrust of the new book, though, is a full-life memoir of Daniloff, born in 1934 and going strong as a journalism professor at Northeastern University in Boston.
How Daniloff worked the system effectively during his time as a Moscow correspondent in those long-ago years before the Soviet Union became something else is especially instructive for the Global Journalist audience.
Daniloff broke lots of news during an era of intense competition among American foreign correspondents, and provided vital context to news broken by his competitors.
The focus of this review, however, will be on Daniloff’s past 20 years in the United States, because his reflections and his actions contain numerous lessons for journalists who leave daily reporting but do not allow their expertise to become stale.
Lesson 1
As an example of a responsible, compelling memoir, Daniloff’s text is worth careful reading. Having decided early in his career as an international correspondent that he might write a memoir when older, Daniloff jotted down and retained copious notes. Furthermore, unlike many memoirists, Daniloff conducted extensive research in recent years to test his recall, rather than rely entirely on his own notes and his memory.
For example, he examined the files of the United Press International Moscow bureau from the 1970s, files donated by bureau chief Henry Shapiro to the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C. He also sought and obtained previously classified documents from government agencies in Moscow and Washington, D.C
It is especially vital in era of easily deleted emails to preserve documentation for posterity. History is indeed a good teacher, especially across cultures with widely varying values..
Lesson 2
Becoming a faculty member at a supportive university can provide professional satisfaction, including time for meaningful reflection. Because of his experiences covering repressive regimes, Daniloff decided he owed it to his students at Northeastern University to place the relative freedom of the United States in perspective, in addition to teaching the vocational aspects of journalism.
“I soon found myself promoting democratic values, especially freedom of expression, persuading my jaded students that they were wrong to believe the U.S. government, even after 9/11, had really destroyed freedom of expression in favor of censorship. They had no real idea how pervasive Soviet censorship and control had been.”
Journalism teachers should not shy away from transmitting values as well as techniques—especially when those values aid in doing the job well.
Lesson 3
Crossing a line between journalism and advocacy is not necessarily taboo. Daniloff, when invited to speak about journalism outside the United States, decided to say yes, especially to audiences in the Asian republics that had spun off from the Soviet Union.
Sharing how American journalists conduct themselves is not cultural imperialism if conveyed with appropriate respect for a different way of working.
In those forums, Daniloff spoke about the “benefits of free expression, of confronting reality head on, and even of airing dirty linen in public.” He became involved especially in the deep struggle of new nation Chechnya for the right to determine its own fate. Often wary of whether he was severing his journalistic vows by advocating on behalf of political candidates, he comments in the book
“How I migrated from journalistic voyeur to silent partner in Chechnya’s struggle for home rule and independence needs explaining.”
The explanations are clear and convincing, and seem quite likely to move journalists to question where they draw the line.
Steve Weinberg
Steve Weinberg reviews books regularly for Global Journalist, concentrating on journalistic technique rather than summaries of content.