War Correspondent Jane Ferguson on Her Memoir ‘No Ordinary Assignment’
Join Michael in his conversation with Jane Ferguson about her recent memoir, No Ordinary Assignment, which chronicles her journey from childhood in Northern Ireland in the midst of sectarian violence to becoming one of the most decorated war correspondents in a generation. With an open-hearted humanity, we rarely see in conflict stories, No Ordinary Assignment shows what it means to build an authentic career against the odds.
Jane Ferguson is a special correspondent for PBS NewsHour specializing in coverage of the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia. Jane also writes for The New Yorker. Jane has won numerous awards for her war reporting including the Alfred I. du Pont Columbia Award, the George Polk Award for Foreign Television Reporting, an Emmy Award for Outstanding Hard News Feature in a Newscast among others. This is her first book.
Jane Ferguson has covered nearly every war front and humanitarian crisis of our time. She reported from Yemen as protests grew into the Arab Spring; she secured rare access to rebel-held Syria, where foreign journalists were banned, to cover its civil war. When the Taliban claimed Kabul in 2021, she was one of the last Western journalists to remain at the airport as thousands of Afghans, including some of her colleagues, struggled to evacuate.
Living with sectarian violence was nothing new to Ferguson. As a child in Northern Ireland in the 1980s and ‘90s, The Troubles meant bomb threats and military checkpoints on the way to school were commonplace. Books by travel writer Dervla Murphy and war correspondent Martha Gellhorn offered solace from her turbulent family. An opportunity to study Arabic in Yemen opened the door to the life in journalism for which she seemed destined.
Without family wealth or connections, she began as a scrappy one-woman reporting team, a borrowed camera often her only equipment. Networks told her she had the wrong accent, the wrong appearance, not enough "bang-bang shoot-‘em-up." Still, Ferguson threw herself into harm's way time and again, determined to give voice to civilian experiences of war. In the face of grave violence and suffering, this seemed a small act of justice, no matter the risks.
