Global Journalist

As the U.S. finished its formal withdrawal from Afghanistan last month, many expressed outrage as the country fell quickly to Taliban forces. For the 20th anniversary 9/11, Global Journalist's Sean Brynda spoke with three veterans in Missouri and journalists around the world to look back on the war's impact at home.

Once cut-throat competitors, journalists are now more frequently working together — often across borders — to investigate social problems that authorities either can't or won't tackle. All too often, these stories involve the murders of reporters. Global Journalist talked to founders of several ambitious collaborative journalism efforts about what got them started and how they keep going.

Over the summer, at the insistence of President Trump, the Senate confirmed Michael Pack as the new director of U.S. Agency for Government Media. Since then, the venerable Voice of America and its sister broadcast outlets have been plunged into chaos. MU Journalism School students talked to two former VOA directors, a reporter fired by Pack and a lawyer for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press about the chaos enveloping what has been one of the nation's most effective vectors for "soft power."

Modern media offers accessible information to a worldwide audience, but barriers still remain. Thirty years after the Americans with Disabilities Act became law, inconsistent captioning, improper ASL interpretation, and obtuse design hinder many from receiving critical news. Moreover many who could provide valuable perspectives on what it's like to be "differently abled" are blocked from producing that journalism by newsrooms' failure to build accessibility into the process. In this episode, journalists look at what it will take to fix the problem — and why it matters. We thank the interpreters who assisted us in our interviews with some of the journalists. Theirs are some of the voices you will hear on this podcast. For a transcript of the program, click here.

Founded on Nov. 9, 1861 in Bloomfield, Mo. by troops under the command of Civil War Gen. Ulysses Grant, the military newspaper Stars and Stripes has followed U.S. troops into battle for more than a century and a half. But lately, government budget cutters have been threatening the future of a news outlet that has been a morale booster and watchdog for soldiers. Veterans talk about why they think the Defense Department should continue funding a paper that sometimes criticizes it.

Americans aren't the only ones awaiting the results of this year's U.S. presidential election with intense interest. Missouri School of Journalism students in Professor Beverly Horvit's International Reporting class interviewed journalists from all over the world about who people in their countries like in the 2020 campaign and why. The reporters know the U.S. well: They've all spent time here as Alfred Friendly or Hubert Humphrey fellows.

Three years ago this month, stories about movie producer Harvey Weinstein's predatory behavior prompted a tidal wave of revelations about sexual harassment in the workplace and the birth of the #MeToo movement. The newsrooms that reported on the phenomenon were not immune from revelations of gender inequality, and turned inward to examine diversity and inclusion in their own newsrooms.

Tol-on-tan! Tol-on-tan! More satisfying, perhaps, than a Pulitzer Prize was the tribute paid to Catalin Tolontan by a crowd of people chanting his name during a street protest. They were celebrating the Romanian journalist's role in exposing the oligarchs whose greed killed dozens of people. It's a scene from one of this year's True/False documentaries about a remarkable act of journalism and civic courage. In this week's edition of Global Journalist, we meet the movie director and his subject and talk to several Missouri School of Journalism professors about the function and future of investigative journalism.

Two journalists who covered Ebola when victims of an outbreak in Africa came to the United States for treatment six years ago discuss how that experience compares to today's COVID-19 pandemic. Ebola, which continues to flare in Africa, causes fever and internal bleeding and kills half the people who contract it, according to the World Health Organization.

For the second time in two decades, Singapore is grappling with a coronavirus. One of the hotspots of the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s, the country is putting the lessons it learned then to work as it faces COVID-19, the potentially deadly infection caused by another coronavirus. Missouri School of Journalism student Aqil Hamzah, quarantined in his hometown, interviewed two veteran newspaper editors about how coverage of the two outbreaks compares.

At first, it just seemed like an odd story to pursue during a quiet post-Christmas week in the newsroom in 2015. But New York Times reporter Donald G. McNeil Jr.'s interest in what would become the Zika epidemic has made him something of an expert on viral outbreaks. After his work on Zika, the virus that ravaged newborns in the tropics, McNeil now finds himself covering the even more deadly coronavirus that is causing COVID-19. In this episode, he gives a reporter's view of the ethics of covering a pandemic while a public health official, the University of Missouri's Lynelle Phillips, offers a different perspective.

Journalists are first responders too. While many reporters and editors are working from home these days, the women and men who bring you the images of a society in lockdown don't have that luxury. In a March 20 webinar sponsored by the Reynolds Journalism Institute, three West Coast photojournalists discussed the challenges they are facing and the new precautions they are taking while bringing you the news. We're airing highlights of that conversation on this edition of Global Journalist.

A new coronavirus emerging out of Asia, striking panic with the suddenness of its onset, the ease of its spread and the virulence of its impact. Sound familiar? In 2003, the coronavirus caused SARS, sudden acute respiratory syndrome. This from-the-vault episode of Global Journalist features a conversation with reporters who back then were on the ground at SARS infection hotspots: Beijing, Singapore, Hong Kong and Toronto. We're re-airing the program now because we think it raises some interesting questions: What stopped the SARS epidemic? And are there lessons we should have learned then that might have spared us some of the pain we're experiencing now?

During the coronavirus outbreak, Global Journalist is talking to some of the workers on the frontlines. They don't always get the recognition of doctors and nurses, but journalists also are risking — and in some cases — giving their lives to get information to the public. In this first in a series of podcasts. Missouri School of Journalism students interview a Voice of America reporter how he navigated China's closed society to report on the outbreak.

While Global Journalist is on hiatus from the KBIA airwaves, a team of student researchers are combing through nearly 20 years of past programs. This one ran 18 years ago this week. We thought you might be interested in reflecting on how things have changed since then — and how they have not changed. In this program, the late Stuart Loory , a veteran correspondent who served as the first Lee Hills Chair in Free Press Studies at the Missouri School of Journalism, interviews a panel of representatives from the Committee to Protect Journalists about international issues of the day and press freedom. Among the guests: Terry Anderson, who was chief Middle East correspondent for the Associated Press when he was abducted by Hezbollah militants . He spent more than six years in captivity before his release in 1991.

Two women journalists who launched online start-up publications in their home countries face eerily similar challenges -- not from the business climate but from the political climate. Global Journalist talks with Supriya Sharma and Maria Ressa about the way the government and business leaders under investigation by their publications are using social media to silence and discredit journalists.

Missouri School of Journalism alumnus Jim Lehrer talks about his career covering a presidential assassination, two presidential impeachments and 12 presidential debates in an interview at the Reynolds Journalism Institute. In this program, produced and anchored by Benjamin Brink, Lehrer also recalls his days as a cub reporter with the Columbia Missourian and discusses the challenges now facing journalism and democracy.

Stanley Nelson Jr. came of age as a filmmaker in the 1970s as Hollywood was making 'blacksploitation' films like 'Shaft.' But as the son of a librarian and a dentist, fictional stories of the ghetto didn't resonate with Nelson - so instead he became a documentary-maker. More than three decades after his first film appeared on PBS, he looks back on a career that includes documentaries about the Black Panthers, Freedom Riders, Miles Davis, and the murder of civil rights leader Emmet Till. On this special edition of Global Journalist, the winner of a MacArthur "genius" award and a National Medal in the Humanities sits for an extended interview with guest host Stacey Woelfel.

Marina Walker Guevara has managed two massive global investigations for the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Both the 'Panama Papers' and 'Paradise Papers' investigations of offshore tax havens and money laundering involved a global network of dozens of journalists working in six continents. On this special edition of Global Journalist, Guevara speaks with host Kathy Kiely about the leaks that revealed how some of the world's most wealthy and powerful people hid money offshore, and how ICIJ meticulously combed through millions of documents to make sense of it all.

After being threatened by the Taliban, filmmaker Hassan Fazili was forced to flee Afghanistan. Like thousands of others, he and his family set out for Europe seeking safety and a stable life.