Kurt Pitzer is a former commercial longline fisherman and relief worker who has reported from many of the world's turbulent regions, including the Balkans, the Middle East, Afghanistan, and Iraq.[…]
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Above all, journalists should make us see through a different lens, Kurt Pitzer believes.
Pitzer: I think journalists, if there’s one thing that we should be doing, is to surprise people a little bit. I think so often we have ideas about the world that are seem fully formed, and too often the media, such as this just reinforces those things partly out of habit and partly out of laziness, I think. I think the role of the person, the farthest filler out there which is the journalist in the field is to challenge assumptions and [there] to provoke questions about those assumptions that Iraqis are like this or Afghanis are like or we’re engaged in such and such a conflict for this or that reason, and to try to break through some of that.
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