"I want journalists to know if journalists write stories that people
don’t want to believe, stick to your gut. If you are confident and you
keep showing through your research and reporting that you were right,
just stick to your gut."
WASHINGTON DC —
Editor’s Note: Keep digging and researching, and trust
your gut instinct when reporting stories that people may not want to
believe are true. That was the message award-winning author and scholar
of Cambodian history Elizabeth Becker had for journalists during a
recent interview with VOA Khmer’s Ten Soksreinith. Becker spoke about a recent article
in the Columbia Journalism Review about her 1978 visit to Pol Pot’s
Cambodia and her decades long dispute with another reporter on their
starkly different coverage of the country following their trip. That
year Becker and veteran journalist Richard Dudman, of the St. Louis
Post-Dispatch, were granted rare access to visit Khmer Rouge-controlled
Cambodia and report on what they found. Dudman and Becker left the
country after escaping an assassination attempt that claimed the life of
left wing British academic Malcolm Caldwell. They also left Cambodia
with two very different stories. Dudman believed Cambodia under the
Khmer Rouge was similar to other post-conflict countries struggling to
rebuild after a devastating war. Becker, guided by instinct and the
experience of living in Cambodia before the Khmer Rouge take over, knew
that what she had been shown by the regime was not the Cambodia she had
known before the war. Almost four decades later, while giving evidence
at the war crimes trials of former Khmer Rouge leaders Noun Chea and
Khieu Samphan, Dudman finally admitted that his account of Cambodia from
1978 had got it very wrong. Becker’s reporting from that trip had been
right all along about the brutality of the Khmer Rouge regime.
