retired foreign correspondent Brian Stewart looks back at a lifetime of groundbreaking coverage

At the age of 14, Brian Stewart dreamed of seeing history being made. That dream eventually came true more than once.

He would report from a total of 10 war zones, from Lebanon to Afghanistan. He would interview many of the leading newsmakers of his era – including Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Salman Rushdie, and Henry Kissinger. And he would be acclaimed for his decades of reporting for the CBC.

But today, the subject isn’t a foreign war or some international figure. This time, it’s himself. His new memoir – On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent – is a thrilling look back at not only a remarkable media career but also a heady era of journalism the likes of which we will likely not see again.

“Canadian journalism was flourishing and had not yet begun the decades-long retreat it appears trapped in today.”

In TV news, you’re taught to open your story with your strongest visuals. And the book opens with perhaps the best-known example of Stewart’s reporting: the Ethiopian famine of 1984 to 1985.

“It was beyond anything I could visually imagine. It was like a world after a nuclear holocaust. An apocalypse, absolutely,” he said.

Stewart and his CBC crew were among the first to transmit those shocking images of devastation to the world. One image in particular, that of a starving girl named Birhan Woldu, stirred a huge global reaction, culminating in the Live Aid charity concerts of 1985.

“Little did I know that that clip of her face would become world famous when it was played later at Live Aid by Bob Geldof and David Bowie and others. It went around the world to an audience about 1.1 billion and she became the face of famine.”

“Years later, I went back to try and find her. I did find her, and we did a documentary on her and we’ve been in touch ever since. It was a remarkable human story.”

“It was such a poignant moment in history that changed the whole atmosphere of the 1980s,” he said.

John Ackermann speaks to Brian Stewart, author of On the Ground

From Ethiopia, Stewart turns the clock back right back to the beginning. He recalls catching the news bug at age 14 while attending boarding school in London. It was 1956, which, on balance, was quite the year for news and for history. He nicknamed himself Radio Free Brian as he breathlessly passed on the latest to his classmates.

“At night, I was mesmerized by the TV coverage of the Suez Crisis, the Hungarian uprising, and also by cultural events, like the arrival of Elvis Presley on the scene, which we had never heard of before.”

“So, I would go in every day and, of course, the students weren’t getting any news at all. And the masters were usually ill informed as well. So, I would become kind of like a Radio Free Brian over lunch and tea breaks and the rest of it.”

“So, that was my kind of role at the time, and I had decided after seeing this on television that I wanted to be there, where history was being made,” he said.

So, I wrote an essay saying, when I grow up, I want to be a foreign correspondent. Nobody really understood why anybody would want to do this. But I thought, who doesn’t want to sit at the ringside seat to history and see remarkable things happen before you?”

Like many successful TV journalists, Stewart got his start in newspapers. Working out of Montreal, one of his early assignments was covering the 1968 Liberal leadership race. He figures he was likely the first to use the term Trudeaumania while covering a large Toronto rally for then-leadership candidate Pierre Trudeau. Yet, Stewart admits to feeling petty for pointing that fact out now.

“I got back to the paper in Montreal later that day and a very grumpy city editor came up to me and said, ‘Why? Why did you have to use that word now? It’s out there all around the media. Everybody started using it which will give this awful guy a tremendous advantage!’”

“I was made to feel guilty by my editors, so I never felt particularly proud of having done it. To this day, I’m a little embarrassed, quite frankly. Certainly knowing the misuse to which it was subjected at times,” he said.

Much later in the book, Stewart talks about leading an investigative unit for The Journal, the CBC’s nightly newsmagazine program. One of his assignments brought him here to Vancouver to look at the causes of the 1985 Air India bombing.

“It was an ongoing investigation that didn’t seem to be getting nowhere. And I had done a lot of investigative work,” he said.

His reporting foreshadowed what a public inquiry would only get around to uncovering 25 years later – that the RCMP and CSIS weren’t communicating, and, in fact, around 150 hours of wiretap evidence was destroyed.

“We came across this remarkable story that a source told us that tapes of the bombing suspects had been erased by the new security service, CSIS, and partially by the RCMP. So, there was some kind of weird cover-up going on and I was able to break a story that remarkably the RCMP had very strong evidence of pre-planning of what was going on before the bombing and I thought this was a real intelligence scandal.”

Forty years later, Air India Flight 182 remains Canada’s deadliest terror attack, claiming the lives of 329 people, the majority of whom where Canadians. Sikh militants on the Lower Mainland were blamed for the bombing, but only one person has ever been convicted in the case.

Of course, the heart of the book is Stewart’s whirlwind career as a foreign correspondent. For instance, in one eight-month span, he went from covering the famine in Ethiopia to the tragic war in Lebanon, and then the miners’ strike in England, and then soccer hooliganism. There were happy stories too, like covering Pope John Paul II’s first Canadian visit. But Stewart realized a certain fatigue has begun to set in.

“Years later, I was to find out, as many foreign correspondents have, that there is a scar tissue that builds up psychologically and also emotionally and spiritually that can make you pay a very, very heavy price,” he said.

Stewart became what he calls “patient zero” of a landmark international study, the first-ever to investigate the trauma and psychological damage risked by foreign correspondents due to the hazards they run and the horrors they cover. In his case, he didn’t suffer from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, as such, but from something called Moral Injury, which can happen in response to acting or witnessing behaviors that go against your values and moral beliefs. In Stewart’s case, he would often have flashbacks to the Ethiopian famine and feel wracked with guilt for not having done more to help those whose suffering he witnessed.

“It doesn’t only affect foreign correspondents, it affects a lot of aid workers, humanitarians, and a lot of soldiers as well. It’s very hard sometimes to be in these situations and, frankly, not feel a bit guilty because there’s always things you’re not doing,” he said.

Does he miss the work of daily journalism? In a word, no.

“It can be a very fulfilling life, it was certainly for me, but it also can be quite unhealthy.”

But he feels that the work is more important than ever.

“The world absolutely does need good foreign correspondents that shine light in the darkness,” he said.

“And, boy, is there a lot of darkness.”

On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent is published by Simon and Schuster.