Watchdogs of the Future

By Tina Romero

Standing behind the podium at the 30^th annual McGill Lecture, Middle East Bureau Chief  for McClatchy newspapers Hannah Allam said, “the public loses when they aren’t properly informed.”

With Election Day right around the corner, Allam stressed the urgency for Americans to be educated more than ever about foreign news during her speech titled, “Bullets, Budget Cuts, and Why we Must Preserve Foreign Reporting.”

Hosted by the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communications, the lecture was held at 4 p.m. Wednesday afternoon in the Miller Learning Center on the University of Georgia’s campus.  This annual lecture honors the life and memory of Ralph McGill, a southern Journalist who fought for civil rights during the 50’s and 60’s.  Each year, the University sponsors a leading journalist from across the U.S. to speak about what journalistic courage means to them. 

Allam is certainly one to speak about courage, who at the young age of 25 traveled overseas to witness and cover the war in Iraq.  As an Iraqi war correspondent, Allam learned the ins and outs about the world of foreign news reporting.

Allam began her speech by admitting that she was not attending the lecture to be a pessimist, but rather to enforce the idea that the world is more interconnected than ever and it is important to know what our executive branch is up to.

Allam said that it was her duty to report good news and called this her “watchdog” role.  She went on to say that this is a time in the world when “we need more watchdogs than ever.” Although in the past year conditions in Iraq have begun to improve, Allam stressed the fact that publications should not cut their overseas bureaus because we are seeing, “fragile gains that can be undone in any moment.”  She said it is still crucial to educate Americans on what is happening now and what is coming around the bend, especially when the elections are right around the corner.

Not only did she stress the role of the watchdog, but she also spoke of her role as an interpreter.  She did not mean an interpreter in a linguistic sense, but more like somebody who could, “express a world beyond readers borders.”  Allam said that it was important to interpret both political and social changes abroad to help Americans undue their usual stereotypes. 

Foreign correspondents are being cut from major publications due to the expenses of overseas reporting, but Allam spoke to the audience about several ways they were trying to improve that problem. 

Allam said that even blog sites such as Perez Hilton.com, a site dedicated strictly to celebrity gossip, are beginning to cover foreign issues.  This helped emphasize her point that Americans really do care and are interested in what is going on abroad, which is why it is important to keep reporting from overseas. 

Allam finished her speech with a few pieces of advice for the college students in the audience and ended by telling the students to pay attention to what is going on in the rest of the world because the young people are truly the “watchdogs of the future.”