Clarissa Ward Says She Decided to Become a Journalist on 9/11

CNN chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward said that she made the decision to become a journalist on September 11, 2001 as she watched the events of that day unfold.

Ms. Ward sat for an exclusive interview for Mediaite’s The Interview podcast this week, which also marks the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

That subject came up when Mediaite editor in chief and host of The Interview Aidan McLaughlin asked Ward “What made you want to become a reporter, and specifically a foreign correspondent?”

Ward’s response:

So I decided that this was the work that I wanted to do after 9/11 or really on 9/11.

To be honest, I think like many Americans, I was glued to my television set. I was a senior in college and I was studying comparative literature. I was very into the arts.

And suddenly it just seemed to me that the only important thing in the world was what was happening in the world, and how I felt very much that I have been disconnected from what was going on, that I hadn’t understood it, that I hadn’t been paying attention, that there was a real breakdown in communication in the world between the U.S. and and the places where the 9/11 attacks were planned.

And so I just wanted to be able to be involved in that somehow, and involved in telling those stories. And acting as kind of a translator. I mean, I was twenty two years old, so there was a lot of idealism and some hubris involved at that stage.

But that’s how it started. And it never really, it was a very, it was like a thunderbolt from the blue, and it it never really left me. That still fundamentally is what keeps me interested in doing this work. The idea of, like, connecting people from very different orbits through shared human experience.

Watch above, and download the full episode now, and subscribe to The Interview on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.

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