Word: daniells
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...Daniel Pearl's beard had not grown much since our last glimpse of him, in the e-mailed pictures with his hands in chains and the gun to his head. So the videotape of his execution, discovered last Thursday, left investigators to conclude that the Wall Street Journal reporter had really been murdered weeks ago, and we had been living on faint hope and false promise since then...
...their lives to cover extreme situations in faraway places and report the truth, and the best in the room will get a gleam in their eyes--a little ignition of trench-coat wanderlust, their minds flickering in black and white for a moment, a few frames of '30s movies. Daniel Pearl, I gather, had the gleam. A sheer avidity to know things is the most endearing trait of any journalist. Long ago, the novelist and journalist John Hersey wrote in a sketch of Henry Luce, "He was amazed and delighted to learn whatever he had not known before." Curiosity...
...polar opposite of Daniel Pearl's intellectual curiosity was the sort of dogmatism that took his life. An ideologue with a closed mind killed a splendid young man with an open mind. Not the first time that the desire to know has been murdered by the need not to know. Half the world belongs to candlesnuffers--to people who have no curiosity to find out, so to speak, how to take off or land...
...bias. Commentators, left and right, howl dogmatisms. Some of them take fat fees from companies like Enron in exchange for a few hogsheads of bloviation. But there should still be enormous respect and affection for the curiosity that you find in the eyes of real journalists, people like Daniel Pearl--not the mere shuck-and-jive entertainers and careerists but the intelligent ones who ask questions and respect facts...
Still, I think I would rather have dinner--in Belgrade or Islamabad or Jerusalem--with people like Daniel Pearl than with either the faculty of Harvard University or the first 100 names in the Boston telephone book. Why? It's their knowledgeable, companionable talk, the stories that their curiosity has unearthed and accumulated--their confidence that the world is a fascinating place and that journalism, though it may sometimes be wrongheaded or squalid, is also critically important and, quite often, a huge amount of fun. Correspondents like Pearl are the true students of the world's diversity (as opposed...