To Tell this World's Stories

Today I drive to one of Oregon's many red counties to read a story about a man who sacrificed everything to report on a besieged world.

I will think deeply about how he willingly and repeatedly went toward danger and discomfort when others stayed where it was safe, because he could, and he knew it was his responsibility to bring a story of how the world really was to a public that didn't seem to care, to a public that only seemed to want to hear what they thought mattered to them, even though he knew all this mattered to them. Even when given the chance to work in a safe job back home at a remove with better pay, chose a war zone. He, like many journalists today who we should value so much more, sacrificed his livelihood, and his life so that we could know the world.

To be clear, what I am doing is not the discomfort or sacrifice I reference, but what we must do as reporters will be on my mind as I read.

Bill Lascher

Bill Lascher an acclaimed writer who crafts stories about people, history, and place through immersive narratives and meticulous research. His books include A Danger Shared: A Journalist’s Glimpses of a Continent at War (Blacksmith Books, 2024), The Golden Fortress: California's Border War on Dust Bowl Refugees (2022, Chicago Review Press), and Eve of a Hundred Midnights: The Star-Crossed Love Story of Two WWII Correspondents and Their Epic Escape Across the Pacific (2016, William Morrow).

https://www.lascheratlarge.com
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75 Years Ago, When War Seemed a Million Miles Away

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Shanghai Takes it On the Chin