Nelofer Pazira walks quietly but confidently into our fourth-year journalism class. Her golden-brown hair falls just below her hips and each ear is pierced by three or four earrings. With her coloured scarves and jeans, she arrives like an international woman of mystery. I would be lying if I said I wasn’t intimidated. Once a classmate asked a question, Pazira’s Persian accent dominated the room, telling stories of growing up in Afghanistan during war and then going back to cover it as a reporter.
She talks of going to Syria for work, being hunched behind the seat of a truck. As bullets whizzed by, she placed her laptop in front of her face hoping it would stop a bullet from hitting her brain – and knowing it wouldn’t.
The most exciting breaking news I’ve covered was the campus arrest at STU last year. The accused didn’t even end up having a gun.
And here was Pazira — someone who had seen more blood and desperation than I ever will — still standing, making jokes and far from broken.
Later that night, at the Dalton Camp Lecture, Pazira again spoke about covering the Middle East; this time about how the Western media is covering it all wrong.
She said media framed the situation as good guys versus bad guys. Then we found out we were wrong. In the “Syria-ization” of the world, you realize there are not a lot of white hats.
If reporters take sides, said Pazira, then they won’t get access to all aspects of the story – especially in places and cultures they don’t understand.
“If you don’t go, you don’t know,” she said.
Pazira said reporters are not just doing a poor job when it comes to covering the Middle East. Today’s journalism has too many clichés and spin and not enough facts and substance.
As technology improves, our journalism is getting more stupid, she said. We are occupied with these gadgets, but we are not smart enough to use them.
Pazira said, as journalists, it is our duty to ask the tough questions. It is not our job to help politicians push their agenda, and it is not our job to cover all the same stories as other journalists. It is our job to find the real story and to hold politicians and the government accountable.
This notion spoke to me. As a young journalist, my professors are always telling me to ask uncomfortable questions and ask questions no one else is asking. This is where the juicy stories come out. This is where the stories not being told but needing to be told have a chance to be told. And I want to tell them.
This year especially, I have noticed that it is easier to make friends with the people in “government” or in the AQ’s case, the Students’ Union. These are students you may have known for years – some may even be your close friends.
One night the STUSU president gave me a hug after a student representative council meeting. I took a step back, forgot our friendship and asked him the tough questions. It’s not easy. But, as Pazira suggested, being a journalist isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s not doing anyone a service to take the easy way out.
This year, I’d like to think the AQ has asked the tough questions. So far, we’ve written about low enrolment, the potential death of liberal arts and the exclusion of political parties from a televised debate. But I know that we could be doing better. Sometimes, you do get caught up in what the communication director’s agenda is or want to take the easy stories – because it’s easier.
Even if I have done some tough stories, Nelofer Pazira opened my eyes. If I want to make it in the journalism world, if I want to stand out in a field of applicants, I have to ask the tough questions, and I can’t take the easy way out. It was a privilege to have Nelofer Pazira remind us of that.
