I just came back (alive) from a lecture at SIPA by Robert Young Pelton — you might remember him as being the CNN stringer who did the interview with John Walker Lindh.
Wow. This guy is really smart, practical, funny, perhaps slightly off-beat (re: crazy), but definately entertaining. When I went up to him afterwards and introduced myself as a journalism student he said: “Well, why would you want to go and do a thing like that?”
One woman started getting really flustered when she was asking Pelton how he got in with all these crazy groups, like the Taliban in 1995, the FARC in Colombia, et cetera. And it sorta dawned on me that it doesn’t take much more than a combination of desire, drive, and means to get there. Pelton doesn’t speak any of the languages of any of the places he goes to — he’s just a regular guy who’s interested in all these places. Doesn’t have a formal education beyond a high school degree in Canada. But he’s probably one of the most interesting non-journalist (he hates the term) “journalists” that I’ve met.
My friends at Columbia have asked me how I got to writing for the Times, and while it’s not quite on the scale of hanging out with General Dostum in Taliban-era Afghanistan, the principle is the same. You just ask around, talk to people, hang out, connect. If you want to do it, you can. If John Walker Lindh and Robert Young Pelton can get inside — honestly, how hard can it be? (Of course, you have to have a pretty high tolerance level for having your life possibly endangered and all of that sort of thing.)
Amazing.
