Crisis Coverage Quotes

Given the multiple crises we are living through, investigative journalism is all the more important.

I covered Katrina, I've covered the tsunamis, all of them, the Haiti earthquake... you get to a certain point in your career where you say, 'I want to now cover what I want to cover.'

Most of the mainstream coverage of most of the crisis - the economy, the road to get here, and the Tea Party - has been very much lacking.

News reports following a natural disaster are almost always dominated by stories of looting and violence, but in many cases such stories turn out to be unfounded speculations based on rumour.

If you look at photojournalism, it's largely driven by current events... always chasing a crisis or disaster. I follow a narrative that is much looser than current events.

On September 11 one of the messages on our answering machine was from The New Yorker saying get down here right away for a special issue we'll be doing. That seemed so irrelevant to me, considering the cataclysm. I went to my studio for a while and I was processing the news. Because when we were in the thick of it, it just felt like Mars Attacks!, Is Paris Burning?, and I had no perspective. For a while, I thought I should go down and look for bodies. At the same time, since The New Yorker was looking for images, I thought, "Well, I'm more trained to look for images than for bodies."

I got a message from one of my friends in Puerto Rico, who said, 'Sonia, there's nobody working in Puerto Rico - they're all glued to the television'. And I got a similar message from a friend in Spain.

It was with 9/11 that I came to fully appreciate and embrace NPR's irreplaceability as a sanity preserver, its unique virtues as first responder on the burning scene.

I think I'm still chewing on my years as a foreign correspondent. I found myself covering catastrophes - war, uprising, famine, refugee crises - and witnessing how people were affected by dire situations. When I find a story from the past, I bring some of those lessons to bear on the narrative.