Terry Anderson’s journalism epithets

When Terry Anderson is talking to you, you stop and listen.

This is the man who was for a period of time the most famous journalist on the planet.

Anderson had been the AP’s Beirut bureau chief for two years when he was kidnapped by armed militias after a morning tennis game in Ain Al-Mreisseh, west Beirut on 16 March 1985.

He spent six years and nine months being held as a hostage by a group answering to the name Islamic Jihad. Often beaten and maltreated, he won the unwanted title of the longest-held Western captive in Lebanon’s 15-year civil war.

Anderson was in Beirut on Monday to talk about press freedom, a two word phrase, the facets and sum of which he knows plenty about.

Speaking earnestly, thoughtfully holding my gaze from beneath spectacles as thick as your thumb, Anderson said how important it was for a journalist to believe in what he was doing.

It’s a job that might get you killed, he said, so you damn well better see its necessity.

The question and answer session ended. Anderson, jokingly complaining of being offered too much acrid black coffee, addressed the room in general and me in particular. What followed was a serious of journalistic epithets, each concentrating the bible of reporting advice Anderson has collected during 25 years in the profession into truisms spanning a few lines.

Print these off and tape them to your notepad:

Finding and telling the truth is a good all by itself, even if that’s all you can do.

When the truth is one sided, so is the story.

Journalism has always been more than a job. It is a mission.

Anderson’s response to an IDF general who asked him why he wrote bad things about the Israelis:

Sir, if you stop doing bad things, I’ll stop writing them.

And my personal favourite, sound advice indeed…

All the best journalists I know have a sense of indignation to them. They want to reach out, take you by the shoulder and say: ‘Look at this. This is important. You have to know this.’ They feel this demand to find the truth and to get you to listen to it.