That's what Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Anthony Shadid searches for in any story he covers. The Gargoyle takes a closer look at The Washington Post foreign correspondent, who visited Uni this week.

By Matthew Freeman
Gargoyle senior editor
Posted Friday, March 10, 2006, The OG, features

photo by Linda Song

Anthony Shadid has gone to great lengths for the story. He pursued it throughout the Middle East in the 1990s, continued to chase it after Sept. 11, 2001, was shot for it in 2002, followed it into war in 2003, and was rewarded for it with the Pulitzer Prize in international reporting in 2004. Shadid shared his story, for the first time speaking to high school students, when he visited Uni Wednesday.

Shadid, 37, is currently a foreign correspondent for The Washington Post, reporting on issues in the Middle East from Beirut. An Arab-American of Lebanese descent, Shadid has most notably reported on the lives of ordinary Iraqis during the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq in 2003 and 2004.

Shadid spoke to a group of about 50 students and teachers in Uni's South Attic during eighth period, a talk given mostly in question-and-answer format. Besides answering questions posed by the students, Shadid didn't feel it necessary to tailor his talk for the students.

“I think when I was a 17-year-old I wanted to hear it how it was,” Shadid told the Gargoyle in a phone interview Sunday. “I'm going to speak pretty much how I would speak to any other audience.”

Shadid's talk was just one of many done in Champaign-Urbana and on the University of Illinois campus during his visit co-sponsored by AWARE, an anti-war organization.

Although his Uni visit was in part to discuss his book, “Night Draws Near: Iraq's People in the Shadow of America's War,” Shadid spent much more time answering questions about his personal experience, something he mostly kept out of his book.

Shadid, whose interest in journalism started in high school, spoke of his love for the career that he has followed ever since. He spent 12 hours a day on his college newspaper at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and started a job at the Associated Press right after graduating. He broke into newspaper writing after 10 challenging years at the AP, first to work at The Boston Globe. But it was at The Washington Post that Shadid started working on his biggest story: the American invasion of Iraq.

If anyone knew the dangers of foreign reporting, it was Shadid, who was shot in 2002 while working for The Boston Globe in the West Bank city of Ramallah. In his talk Wednesday, Shadid was open about the fear he had about staying in Baghdad leading up to the invasion, and described having nightmares about the possibilities.

As he started to work, though, Shadid became too engaged in his stories to worry about himself.

“It actually became pretty easy,” Shadid said. “I was so unbelievably busy.”

So busy in fact, that Shadid made himself completely exhausted, only sleeping between 3 and 8 each morning.

“By the end of the invasion I was crazy,” Shadid said, the descriptive widening of his eyes eliciting laughs from students.

At the beginning of the war, Shadid was the only reporter from The Washington Post in Iraq. He experienced the same serious interferences as Iraqis, like the loss of electricity halfway through the invasion that forced him to run his vital laptop and coffee pot through a car battery.

The war also narrowed Shadid's focus to what he found most important throughout the invasion: the lives of ordinary people. One term Shadid especially dislikes is “war correspondent,” because he sees conflict as a backdrop for the more significant human drama.

Shadid relied on family and friends in the United States as well as U.N. and relief workers to connect with Iraqi people. He described finding one source through a friend and medical resident at Johns Hopkins University who pleaded with him to check on his father living in Iraq. The subsequent meeting provided Shadid with 20 interviews over the next year with the father.

“I'm a big believer in luck,” Shadid said of the encounter.

Bringing him closer to the sources and environment was Shadid's fluency in Arabic. In addition to being able to work without a translator, he also had the ability to pick up “background noise,” which often manifested itself in his stories as nearby announcements or writing.

“Trust is the cornerstone of a good interview, and it often helps achieve that end,” Shadid said.

Shadid built relationships with many of his sources that created a deeper perspective on many of his stories. One unlikely source was a 14-year-old girl who kept a diary on the invasion that Shadid later used for a story. He found out about it shortly after connecting with her family.

“I didn't ask her [if I could read it] until a year later,” he said.

The closeness with his subject matter also made for the heart-wrenching quality of some of Shadid's award-winning work, which took on scenes as horrifying as a young man, a suspected informer, being killed at the hand of his father and brother.

Shadid also faced stories that caused him to question his work. He was given an assignment to write about Baghdad's defenses, which he felt was of more interest to the U.S. military than the American people.

“I did the story, and I regret it,” he said. “I'm a spy in a way.”

During the talk, the honest contemplation with which Shadid took each question and the way he thoughtfully pored over the ideas gave his young audience a glimpse of what likely connected him so closely to those he interviewed. Despite his high level of achievement and recognition, his humility showed through as he spoke, fitting for a reporter whose best work comes from understanding and relating the feelings of common people.

“The goal of the reporting and the goal of book and the goal of articles I wrote for The Washington Post was in a way to be a vehicle for those voices,” he said. “I think those are the voices were most often missing in the broader debate. I think when we look at Iraq, when we look at it over the last 10, 15, 20 years, it's often been people who aren't there defining what Iraq is in a way.”

When Shadid speaks about current times in Iraq, a region that very few Americans are able to gain access to or report from at this time, he carries very little hope.

“If you saw the degree of violence you see in Baghdad in a place like New York, people wouldn't be talking about much else,” he said. “There's a lot of bloodshed, and it doesn't look like it's going to get better.”