My employer was never at any time aware of anything in my past beyond the writing I did, because, frankly, it isn't relevant to the job I was asked to do, which was to be a reporter.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I became a journalist partly so that I wouldn't ever have to rely on the press for my information.
I've been a reporter for 20 years, and I don't ever get things wrong. That's important in terms of my professional status.
Well, one of the things I discovered in the course of looking back and writing about what I saw in my memory is that I was a closely observant person long before I became a reporter.
I studied journalism at The University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill. I did my graduate work at Emerson in Boston, and I was actually a reporter for a year in New York and New Jersey. It dawned on me that I wasn't cut out for that line of work. I mean... there's a certain thing that really good reports have that I just didn't.
My job as a reporter is not to know what I think.
And I'm hoping that fair-minded people will stand up and say that what's been done to me is wrong, and that-that people's personal lives have no impact on their ability to be a journalist, you know. Why should my past prevent me from having a future?
And I wasn't a journalist any more than I was a trained nurse.
Before journalism, I had worked doing medical aid work in conflict zones. Then, as a journalist, I had written about hospitals in war zones.
I did not read newspapers until I became a reporter.
Everything I've ever done in my whole career, people might not know, I've never written anything down on paper.