Engaging Today's Global Citizens

Zoom Out: Speaking Tour Crosses the Midwest

Following the 2005 assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, an estimated one million people—or about a third of Lebanon's total population—took to the streets in a massive demonstration of support for their slain leader.

But the president of Syria—the home country of Hariri's alleged killers—publicly downplayed the size of the protest, claiming that the television cameras showed a much smaller turnout.

During the next massive demonstration, some protesters in response carried signs that urged the cameras to "ZOOM OUT" to show the real picture.

With a similar hope of widening American perspectives on the region, the Stanley Foundation has organized a presentation in Indianapolis later this month titled "Zooming Out: Evolving Media Perspectives on the Middle East and Darfur."

The March 20 event at Marian College, cosponsored by its Franciscan Center on Global Studies, will feature talks by journalists from both sides of the Atlantic and kicks off a weeklong "speaking tour" that will wind its way through the Midwest before the last stop at Columbia University in New York City.

The tour will feature Habib Battah, managing editor of the Beirut-based Middle East Broadcasters Journal, and Jon Sawyer, former Washington, DC, bureau chief of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and director of the recently created Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting.

The two veteran reporters struck up a conversation in Beirut last year during a journalism workshop in Beirut cosponsored by the Reuters Foundation and the Stanley Foundation, and plan to continue their discussion stateside with a range of audiences including journalism students, working journalists, and interested members of the public.

Battah has been a print and broadcast journalist for some of the Arab world's leading news organizations, including Al Jazeera, and has also worked for nongovernmental organizations like the UN High Commission for Refugees.

Following a 30-year career with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sawyer now leads the DC-based Pulitzer Center, a nonprofit organization that funds independent reporting with the intent of raising the standard of media coverage of global affairs. Sawyer himself has reported from more than 60 countries during his career and recently returned from a month-long reporting trip to Sudan's Darfur region.

After the kickoff event cosponsored by the Franciscan Center for Global Studies at Marian, they will trek through St. Louis to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale on March 22 and the University of Missouri on March 23 before winding up the tour in New York City.

For more information on the Battah-Sawyer speaking tour, contact Loren Keller.