Correspondent Clarissa Ward makes foreign reporting feel relatable, finds untold narratives
by Brita Hunegs
Clarissa Ward has ridden in cars with Jihadi fighters. She’s walked the rugged terrain of Afghanistan with the Taliban and illegally crossed the border into Syria from Turkey to sit and talk with anti-regime forces. As a foreign correspondent covering global conflicts, she’s been in the crosshairs of some of the most politically consequential theatres of the 21st century, writing and broadcasting stories that few others have the tenacity to excavate. Still, Ward does not consider herself a political person.
“I like to travel to places that no one else in the world can get to make connections and find common ground and try to understand things better.” said Ward, now chief international correspondent for CNN.
Born in London in 1980 and raised between the United Kingdom and New York City, Ward cultivated an appreciation for dynamic conversation as a young child, listening in on the dinner party conversations of her parents’ multi-national cohort of friends.
In 2001 Ward was in her senior year at Yale University, studying comparative literature. Her passion for multiculturalism began when her father gave her a copy of Anna Karenina as a child. Her passion for the news, however, began after the terrorist attacks of 9/11 when she realized journalism was the tool to “trying to understand what was going on and why it was happening and trying to get to the root of dysfunction and miscommunication,” Ward said.
She began her career at the Moscow bureau of CNN, and eventually covered the Iraq War, and the toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime, from the ground, for Fox News.
Speaking seven languages and having lived in countries around the world including Russia, Lebanon, China, the United States and Britain, Ward is in a prime position to track common threads of humanity that have helped her cover all the various people and cultures she’s documented as a journalist, while maintaining an appreciation for the nuances that punctuate every stitch.
“There are things that you realize bind people all over the world, curiosity about the other,” Ward said. “When you experience that you understand that there is a lot more that joins us than which differentiates us, which is not to gloss over the very real differences in cultures and values and education and upbringing.”
Ward is excited by illuminating the lives of the people affected by conflict, “The goal is really to try to give a voice to people who don’t have a voice and let their stories be told.”
However, she’s careful not to conflate her journalism with activism. She sees herself as a vessel for people’s experiences, holding onto them until they can be handed over to the public.
“Your job is not to prescribe policy or to come up with solutions for some of the world’s worst problems. Your job is to shine a light on those problems, and present people with an accurate fair and in-depth assessment and understanding, both intellectual and emotional,” Ward said. “Then people can make their own decisions.”
Her reporting is helping policy decisions be made at the highest levels of government. Ward even addressed the United Nations in 2016, relaying her experience covering the battle over the Syrian city of Aleppo.
“We both understood in that moment that we were absolutely powerless to protect ourselves,” she told the Security Council of being under the siege of a bombing campaign with her colleagues and Syrian civilians.
In her pursuit of gathering all of the information, she’s become a target of disinformation. In 2019, her comprehensive investigation about Russian President Vladimir Putin’s private military groups in the Central African Republic sparked such vitriol within the Russian government, a propaganda outfit launched a smear campaign against Ward and the news package. A 15-minute video they released revealed she had been tracked and filmed while producing the story.
“On one level it’s sinister and quite frightening… but on another level it’s somewhat satisfying because it’s made it clear that our reporting is hitting a nerve and we’re telling a story that some people would rather not see told,” Ward said in an interview on CNN.
Though she’d had vast experience in international journalism, and all that comes with it, there was still something new Ward wanted to do and it had intimidated her for a long time– writing a book, “Usually if something scares you that much it’s probably worth trying to do,” Ward said. In September, On All Fronts: The Education of a Journalist, will be released.
Ward says she also wrote the book for her son, who was born in 2016, so he could “have a record of his mom before she was his mom.”
Above all, Ward advocates for listening, “Otherwise you get into this dangerous territory of echo chambers that I think we have, you know, perilously close to, particularly in the US, but all over the world,” said Ward.” Just because you listen to someone else’s ideas, it doesn’t mean it has to be a point of weakness.”
Ward is now based in London and, while we spoke on the phone, she was navigating the avenues of the city, heading to Downing Street to cover the news of the day. Pregnant with her second child, she’s covering the COVID-19 crisis from her home front, admittedly a different phenomenon for her. She’s continuing to report on and investigate from unique angles.
“I keep my goals pretty humble; keep telling the stories that need to be told that people aren’t hearing, and that other people aren’t telling, ideally. If I can get to a story that no one else is getting to then that’s great,” Ward said.
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