International journalists are hearing echoes. From countries around the world that have witnessed the rise of autocratic and populist leaders, they are watching the U.S. and warning of a characteristic of wounded democracies everywhere: an endangered free press.
This issue of Nieman Reports features insights from nine journalists abroad, offering advice to American reporters on preparing for attacks on press freedom.
“I want to become a journalist because I think it’s a job that makes the world aware of humanity’s serious problems,” I wrote in careful cursive letters for a middle school essay that my parents have kept to this day. “I could fight injustice in this world in my own way.”
Beyond the naïve and presumptuous writing style I used at the time, I had a sense that the best way to make sense of the complexities of the world — and of my own upbringing — might be through journalism.
We had recently moved to Paris after six years in Syria when I told my family about my interest in journalism. Before that, we lived in Egypt where my father, a French teacher, had met my mother, the daughter of a dentist from the Coptic upper class of Alexandria. Despite a nice childhood in which I was loved and spoiled, I saw from an early age signs that the world was a more complicated and dangerous place beyond the confines of my happy home.
The Middle East ran through my veins. Its landscapes, its climate, and its history shaped my young life. In 1982, we moved to Syria. That was the same year President Hafez Assad ordered his troops to crush an uprising in the central city of Hama, killing an estimated 10,000 to 40,000 thousand Syrians. To this day, the exact death toll remains in dispute. Those who dared to speak up simply disappeared. I would find out about the scale and details of the event much later, but I remember very clearly as a child my father mentioning that some relatives of his Syrian friends had vanished. He told me what he knew about the massacre and the horrors of Syrian prisons, but he made it clear that I should never talk about politics outside of our home.
I also understood early on that the school I went to was full of spies and my judo teacher was certainly a mukhabarat, which is Arabic for “secret police.” Some of my close friends were the children of people who worked for the regime, and I could never confide in them.
I knew instinctively from a young age that the world was brutal, yet strangely, believed it did not apply to me. I felt as if I was immune to danger. Maybe it was because I was a child in a loving family, maybe because I had a French passport, or because my name was Sandrine Rigaud. In the Middle East, I was a girl with a French name and blue eyes who spoke Egyptian Arabic. How could anything go wrong?
Ironically, it was not until my father moved the family to Paris in the late 1980’s for his job — a place I had every reason to feel safer in than the tumultuous Middle East — that I started to feel uneasy. It felt like the end of a golden age: I was becoming a teenager, my parents were having money issues, and I wrote my school essay about wanting to become a journalist.
I don’t want to unfairly judge my 12-year-old self, but I was likely more driven by a desire to stand out from the other students at the time of writing that essay than by a moral imperative to become a journalist. I wasn’t sure where my home was, and I didn’t know who — Egyptian? French? Syrian? — I really was. But journalism struck me as a vocation that could encompass all of it and allow me to hold on to my enchanted childhood. I wanted everyone to understand that I was a citizen of the world. In journalism, my various identities could be an asset and oddly, even a form of invisible protection.
Almost three decades later I became editor in chief of Forbidden Stories, a nonprofit that protects the work of threatened journalists and continues with the unfinished reporting of those who have been killed. It is not an easy job, and starting out, I questioned every choice I made. But I had no doubt I was in the right place.
Suddenly, the duality of my childhood made sense. I understood what censorship was. I had felt it as a child in Syria. But I was also conscious of the great privilege of freedom of expression, living in countries that embraced it. I was using my voice, freely, to report on what other journalists had been silenced for. I have investigated and led cross-border projects on narco-politics in Mexico, the lies told by mining companies in Latin America, state corruption in Azerbaijan, and the inner workings of the secretive world of disinformation mercenaries working almost everywhere on the planet. One of our largest global investigations, The Pegasus Project, exposed the illegal use of spyware by authoritarian regimes to surveil journalists, human rights activists, and others across the globe.
I am often asked if I feel scared to take over the investigation of somebody who has been assassinated for their work. My childhood experiences could have easily discouraged me from going down this path, but instead they had the opposite effect. I continue to feel drawn to the darker side of the world. But I am aware that I can look at the mess from a safe and privileged place.
