Former CBC foreign correspondent Brian Stewart is well-known for his decades of work bringing the world home to Canadians.
This included reporting from conflict zones and natural disasters around the world, and interviewing leaders like Margaret Thatcher, Pope John Paul II and Nelson Mandela. He is also famous for being one of the first western reporters to tell the story of the 1984-85 famine in Ethiopia.
Now, Stewart has gathered his memories of his over 40-year career as a reporter into a new book titled On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent (Simon & Schuster).
In an interview with Canadian Affairs, Stewart, 83, spoke about the highs and lows of his time in the field, including the personal cost of seeing so much death and suffering.
“I witnessed horrible things,” he said, adding he was surprised not to have experienced post-traumatic stress disorder like many other foreign correspondents.
What he did suffer was something called “moral injury,” a form of psychological trauma previously covered by Canadian Affairs. In his book, Stewart describes moral injury as “a wound on the soul, an affront to your moral compass based on your own behavior and the things you have failed to do.”
“I was just a reporter, standing around with my hands in my pockets,” said Stewart, of watching aid workers save people dying of hunger in Ethiopia during that famine. “I had no skills that would help people in need.”
Due to that injury, Stewart experienced a breakdown in the 1990s. Through professional care, he has recovered. But “there is no escaping the heavy spiritual lifting from it,” he said.
Stewart knows his reporting made a difference to those suffering from lack of food in Ethiopia during the famine. This included when his story about Birhan Woldu, a three-year-old girl who almost died of hunger, was used at the 1985 Live Aid fundraising concert — that featured musicians including Queen, U2, David Bowie, Elton John and Madonna — to spark an outpouring of donations from around the world.
“I did some good, no question,” he said. “But I didn’t do as much as I could have done, or as much as those incredibly magnificent aid workers.”
‘Clear spiritual hunger’
Stewart says he sought solace during the hard times from religion.
One way he did that was by visiting a church in London while stationed there with the CBC. “I would sit there and listen to the choir practice, or sit in silence. It was a tremendous comfort,” he said, adding he also read the free Bibles in hotel rooms. “I needed the guidance that religion provides.”
He also found himself reflecting on the importance of organized religion in telling stories about world events.
“I was surprised to see how relevant religion was for my reporting,” he said, adding that, like many others at that time, he believed religion was a spent force.
“I came to see that religion was part of many major stories, although it took a lot to convince my editors that was true.”
This was especially true during the Ethiopian famine, and other natural disasters in Africa, where he was amazed to constantly find Christian aid workers at what he called “the front lines” of major disasters.
“I never reached a war zone, or famine or crisis anywhere where some church organization was not there long before me,” he said, adding they were “sturdy, remarkable souls who were usually too kind to ask ‘what took you so long.’”
Today, interest in religion is waning in Canada and other western countries. But Stewart still believes the media should be paying attention to it.
“There is a clear spiritual hunger everywhere,” he said, citing how the Pope can attract hundreds of thousands of people to special masses. “Religion needs to have more light cast on it by the media. Reporters need to rediscover its importance around the world.”
But the lack of foreign correspondents working for Canadian media today makes that challenging. “I think you could get all of them in one mini-van,” Stewart said.
Of his own spiritual journey, Stewart calls himself a “Christian agnostic.”
“I’m not a full-blown Christian,” he said. “But I have enormous respect for the kind of Christianity that responds to the needs of people around the world. It helps me see that this 2,000-year-old institution had more strength than modern media give it credence for.”
