For the Record

The retired CBC journalist Brian Stewart is renowned for his coverage of the 1984 Ethiopian famine. His reports accompanied by shocking images of the starving victims brought the scope of the disaster to world attention. They mobilized an international relief operation to bring tonnes of food to millions of those afflicted. Only the CBC and the BBC were permitted by Ethiopia’s Marxist regime to enter the country, and Stewart’s team spent the most time there exposing the horror. In reviewing the footage from the field, journalists in the newsroom back home broke down in tears before sending it to air. After Brian Mulroney watched one report at home with his family, he immediately committed his Progressive Conservative government to mobilize international efforts to save Ethiopia’s suffering people.

Stewart’s distinguished career spanned almost six decades, mostly as a foreign correspondent. Although he covered major stories from the 1960s to the early years of this century, he recognizes that his reporting on the Ethiopian famine stands out for having the greatest impact of any of his journalistic achievements. He therefore devotes the first chapter of On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent to it. Foreign correspondents are sometimes stereotyped as hardbitten cynics. In Stewart’s assessment, they are a “mixed lot,” though many of them are “deeply committed professionals who, at personal risk, [bear] witness to history in the making.” In Stewart’s case, that professionalism was also imbued with a deep sense of empathy, which, beyond his reporting duties, moved him to personally assist a famine survivor.

In a visit to a Sisters of Charity relief camp in Makelle, near the start of his assignment in Ethiopia, aid workers drew Stewart’s attention to a girl believed to be moments from death. His crew recorded her desperate condition and moved on. Toward the end of the day, a nun summoned the team to return to the same girl —“awake, alive, safe.” He stammered, “Sister, I see we had a little bit of luck today.” The nun explained, smiling, “Yes, we felt a surprise pulse and we gave her one last shot and rehydration, and she will survive.” The girl’s name was Birhan Woldu. Her image captured by the CBC was later broadcast as part of Bob Geldof’s 1985 Live Aid concert in support of famine relief. Its impact was said to open the hearts of donors so instantly that the phone banks receiving pledges were overwhelmed. During a later visit to Ethiopia, Stewart and his producer, Tony Burman, decided to look for Birhan. Using government records, they were able to find her and her father. Stewart immediately committed to helping her, first with a surreptitious cash gift and later with money to get her an education. He has remained in contact with her and her family since.

Stewart began reporting in 1967, covering the rise of Quebec nationalism for the Montreal Gazette. His recall of those years is fascinating. He resurrects Jean Drapeau’s early reputation as a visionary mayor, before he was saddled with the corruption scandals of the 1976 Olympics. Stewart was hit by a bottle during the 1968 Saint-Jean-Baptiste Day parade, when Pierre Trudeau defied rioters by refusing to leave the reviewing stand. He was inside Concordia University, smothered in smoke and gazing at swirling punch cards, when protesters set the school’s computer centre alight. He was on Trudeau’s campaign plane for the 1968 election, and he vividly reminds us how someone who, in a senior editor’s words, was “a not very impressive know-it-all” metamorphosed into a stylish enigma who gained Canadians’ confidence and, among other things, brought in the socially transformative Charter of Rights and Freedoms.

The lively Montreal scene was not enough for the aspiring foreign correspondent, however. The CBC lured him to its Ottawa bureau, which proved to be his launching pad for assignments abroad — and the fulfillment of a boyhood dream.

If, as the saying goes, journalism is the first draft of history, a memoir of this ambition risks being only a light summary. There are moments, particularly in describing his early years in television, when Stewart’s effort to contextualize his story seems to supplant the accounts of his actual reporting. His summaries of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, civil conflict in Central America, and the Falklands War betray some of that flyover quality. It’s a defect endemic to foreign coverage that Stewart recognized in his mid-career stint as a star correspondent for NBC News, being flung from one hot spot to another. (He was briefly lured away by an American network, as have been many Canadian reporters.) But the memoir finds its groove when he focuses on his own — as the title advertises — reports on the ground.

Stewart regales us, for example, with how he managed to avoid media minders during the first Gulf War to ride a bus ahead of advancing armies into the centre of Kuwait City. He tells us of his face-to-face interview with a suspect in the 1986 Air India bombing. He was in Berlin when the wall was brought down, then headed east a few days later, “stopping at a random village to see how life was playing out.” Many East Germans, he found, were determined “not to join the surge to the west.” Embedded with Canadian forces in Afghanistan, he concluded that our 2,800-member contingent was under-equipped and could not succeed in securing Kandahar province, its intended goal.

In several stories, Stewart underlines the grave danger that foreign correspondents face in theatres of war. They expose themselves willingly but nonetheless suffer heavy tolls on their health. In his case, he succumbed not to post-traumatic stress disorder but to conversion disorder: “a condition that reroutes (converts) emotional distress into physical symptoms.” At unexpected times away from the field, he explains, his speech and thoughts would become scrambled, his limbs would shake, and a general numbness would set in. Earlier in his TV career, he confesses, he would regularly suppress stage fright before broadcasts with a glass of vodka and some Valium. He alludes to an occasional return to this aid on some later foreign assignments.

Toward the end of On the Ground, Stewart offers an assessment of the current state of foreign news coverage. He reminds us that — as in the case of Ethiopia in 1984 — human catastrophes may be unfolding beyond our notice. Can we say, for instance, that the famine and slaughter under way in Sudan are receiving the attention that their victims need? With minds turned elsewhere — Gaza, Ukraine, trade wars — can the public absorb another catastrophe?

Stewart laments the fragmentation of today’s media landscape, so far removed from the public square journalism of his day. The world’s eyes could be more readily drawn to a single scene to gaze upon an unfolding calamity back then. The gradual reduction in funding of CBC News in successive decades since the ’80s, Stewart argues, has limited the broadcaster’s ability to inform Canadians. More generally, across the breadth of news media worldwide, Stewart sees “modern TV journalism, particularly in foreign coverage, as a massive vortex sucking us deeper into a swirl of blindingly complex events. The media’s push for continuous breaking news heightened the public’s sense of rudderless impermanence.”

The splintering of news into a smorgasbord of social media, podcasts, digital outlets, and other fevered offerings undermines human connectedness and degrades solidarity around urgent causes. The relatively optimistic narrative of the peacefully evolving international order after the Cold War has vanished. It has been displaced by a negative chronicle of democratic erosion, widening geopolitical instability, and the precarity of the natural world. The reaction to the Ethiopian famine eventually paved the way for the United Nations Millennium Development Goals, to which most countries officially agreed. But international cooperation has become disjointed and increasingly defensive in the face of, for example, growing waves of migrants fleeing hunger and war.

In this bleak landscape, Birhan Woldu’s travails haven’t ended. She and her young family have had to suffer through the recent civil war in Ethiopia; her native Tigray province is at the conflict’s epicentre. Woldu’s young children “are in one of the rare local schools that remain,” while she works with a local charity. But there’s a plaintive note here. Although Stewart highlights this small spark of hope for Woldu’s family, violence, hunger, and instability still fester in a region where many observers expect war to resume.

Stewart’s stellar career reached a surprising pinnacle of humanitarian engagement. Was that an event that brought the world to a new plateau of awareness of human tragedy, one of those “never-again” moments? Are we now better able to communicate suffering to respond to evolving crises? Not by Stewart’s assessment. The stories that his journalistic successors tell will be hampered by a scramble for scarce resources, much less support from trusted and reliable media organizations, and a chaotic onslaught of information and disinformation from a myriad of sources.

These days, Stewart is seeking a more contemplative space. “Ambition satisfied,” he writes, “I thrive on the calmness of days, enjoying the feeling of life slowing down as it was meant to do. . . . I’m happy to be beyond that swirl of events that I now watch only from afar.” May he, like Voltaire’s Candide, retire to watch his garden grow and avoid the frantic distraction of today’s tragedies relentlessly delivered to our screens.