Center for Strategic and International Studies

Bob Schieffer’s “About the News” with H. Andrew Schwartz Podcast

Subject: “CBS’s Holly Williams reports from the Danger Zone”

Speaker: Holly Williams, Foreign Correspondent, CBS News

Hosts: H. Andrew Schwartz, Senior Vice President for External Relations, CSIS

Bob Schieffer, CBS Political News Contributor; Former Host, “Face the Nation,” CBS News

Date: Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Transcript By Superior Transcriptions LLC www.superiortranscriptions.com

BOB SCHIEFFER: I’m Bob Schieffer.

H. ANDREW SCHWARTZ: And I’m Andrew Schwartz.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And these are conversations about the news. We are in the midst of a communications revolution. We have access to more information than any people in history. But are we more informed, or just overwhelmed by so much information we can’t process it?

MR. SCHWARTZ: These conversations are a year-long collaboration of the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University and the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.

Now, everyone knows Bob Schieffer’s a newsman, but not everyone knows how he became an anchorman. He wrote a song about it. Let’s have a listen.

(Music plays.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: (Sings.) Well, I left this job that I just took, started practicing my sincere look, they said I had the face of a man with heart.

They wrote me some lines, taught me a style, drew a happy face on the script where I should smile, and the key demographics went right off the charts.

I have to say, they pay me good, a whole lot better than Stuckey’s ever would, and a cute little stage manager gives me all my cues.

Selling tractor hats and pumping gas, that’s all part of my long-ago past; now I just sit there and read the news.

CHORUS: (Sings.) He became a TV anchorman.

MR. SCHIEFFER: (Sings.) A TV anchorman.

CHORUS: (Sings.) He joined the Eyewitness team.

MR. SCHIEFFER: (Sings.) Was that Channel 4 or Channel 9?

CHORUS: (From video.) (Sings.) With razor cut hair, and with bells up to there, it’s the new American dream.

(Music ends.)

MR. SCHWARTZ: So now you know. And here’s Bob Schieffer.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Joining us today is Holly Williams, the distinguished foreign investigative reporter and CBS News foreign correspondent. Before joining CBS in 2012, she was a producer for the BBC, and a producer and Asia-based correspondent for Sky News. Since joining CBS she has covered a range of important foreign stories, such as the Israel-Gaza conflict, the uprising in Egypt after the removal of President Morsi, and the deadly Nepal earthquake. She has gone undercover in a Bangladeshi clothing factory, where she uncovered labor safety violations. She posed as an ivory buyer to expose illegal trafficking of ivory from Africa to China. And in 2014 she was the first network reporter to enter Iraq and cover the rise of ISIS. She’s also been covering the Syrian civil war from inside that country, and in 2015 she received an Edward R. Murrow Award for her ISIS and Syrian coverage.

Holly, thank you so much for joining us. Your coverage of ISIS and the Syrian civil war has been nothing short of spectacular you’ve interviewed female Kurdish fighters on the front line and gained access to a prison believed to be holding ISIS terrorists. These sound like impossible and extremely dangerous stories to cover. How did you do it?

HOLLY WILLIAMS: Well, Bob, thank you for the praise. That’s very nice of you.

We managed to cover those stories because I have an amazing team of people that I work with: security advisers who know the area very well, excellent producers, brave technicians and cameramen. And most importantly, always, are the local people who work with us: translators and local producers who know the region really well, who have excellent contacts on the ground, and you know, are our best measure of who we can trust, because we’re nearly always traveling with local people. In Iraq and Syria, it’s nearly always with armed people, armed groups that are active in the area, and those local staff members, other people who tell us whether we can trust those guys that we’re operating with.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, you live now in Istanbul with your daughter. So when the most recent military coup occurred there, it hit, as we would say around here, pretty close to home for you. How did you realize what was happening there? And what were the first things you did to cover that story and report for CBS News?

MS. WILLIAMS: You know, it’s really interesting. When the first signs sort of started to emerge that this might be a coup, I really – I didn’t believe it, actually, because like so many other people inside Turkey and outside Turkey who watch the Turkish government, who watch politics in Turkey, I really believed that the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, had been successful in curbing the power of the military; that he had – you know, in this country with a long history of military coups, he had defanged the military and made another coup pretty much impossible.

When it became clear that it was, in fact, a coup – that I was wrong; that I had misjudged the situation – I actually – I mean, I covered the coup from the balcony of my house because it was unfolding just outside. I mean, I had, you know, fighter jets overhead, you know, flying really low overhead, and in some cases breaking the sound barrier, which was pretty terrifying. And one of the things that the coup plotters did pretty much immediately was block the traffic on the two big bridges across the Bosporus, which connect the entire city. And one of those bridges is, you know, within sight of my home. So it was one of those extraordinary – actually, not one of those. I think the only time when I’ve actually seen a major news story unfold from the balcony of my apartment.

MR. SCHIEFFER: So how is the situation there now? How would you assess the stability of Turkey right now?

MS. WILLIAMS: Well, I mean, that’s a – that’s a very interesting question. I mean, even before this coup, it was very clear that the civil war in Syria had spilled over the border into Turkey. For the last year or so we’ve had bombs going off in Istanbul; in the Turkish capital, Ankara; and in other places.

When I first moved to Turkey in 2012, it was such a strange feeling living in a country that felt pretty stable, a city that felt really safe, and yet being so close to Syria and Iraq, to places where there was conflict. And I think now that’s changed. I think the feeling in Istanbul is that events in Turkey’s neighbors have spilled across the border and are destabilizing the country.

MR. SCHIEFFER: There are clearly two, if not three or four sides to the Turkish coup story, as there is with any story in American politics. We always try to make sure, you know, that we talk to both sides. We talk to the Democrats. We talk to the Republicans. We talk to other observers. In foreign affairs, it’s not always quite like that. How do you ensure – and you touched on this in the beginning, talking about building confidence in your sources – but how do you make sure you’re getting the whole story in these very, very complicated things?

MS. WILLIAMS: Well, I think it’s difficult. I mean, I think that the coup is a case in point because, you know, as you know, the Turkish government has pointed the finger at an Islamic cleric who lives in self-imposed exile in Pennsylvania, rural Pennsylvania, a guy named Fethullah Gulen, who has a big following in Turkey and elsewhere, but they haven’t given us any facts to back that allegation up at this point. So what do you do, as a journalist? I think it’s certainly important to report the fact that the Turkish government is blaming Fethullah Gulen, and it’s important to report that Gulen denies that and so do his supporters. But then there’s a problem: How do you give any context to those allegations? I don’t think there’s an easy answer.

And then, of course, the other problem in a situation like this one is that following the coup there’s been a big crackdown. Thousands of people have been rounded up. Thousands of people have lost their jobs. And the impact of that is that – is that many people in Turkey are simply too frightened to speak to us, so we’re missing their voice. And once again, I don’t think there’s an easy solution for that.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Let me bring in Andrew Schwartz, our colleague here at CSIS. Andrew?

MR. SCHWARTZ: Thank you, Bob.

Holly, you’re always reporting from dangerous places where there’s a lot going on – you know, planes flying low and breaking the sound barrier, as you just said. Can you tell us about what are some of the dangers of cultivating sources in foreign and often hostile places? How do you build trust? And how do you know if your sources are believable and if you can trust them in terms of your own safety?

MS. WILLIAMS: Yeah, so I guess there’s two different questions there, whether you can trust them as being truthful. So I guess the idea there is that you want to have multiple sources, you know. If we’re reporting on what’s happening in Aleppo province, for instance, and we’re reporting from the Turkish side of the border because it’s simply too dangerous for us to go there at this point, then, you know, we’re not going to take the word of one commander who says that something is happening. You know, my local translators and fixers and producers who speak Arabic are making multiple phone calls to try and stand up, as we call it, that something has actually happened.

And then, in our reporting, I think that we need to always make it clear that we’re quoting people – you know, that we’re – if we haven’t seen something happen, that we are quoting people as saying that it’s – that it’s happening. The same goes with – I mean, one of the things that’s, I guess, changed in the last couple of years is that we’re increasingly using video that we haven’t filmed ourselves and that doesn’t come from one of the reliable news agencies; it’s something that’s online. And once again, there, we’re always trying to stand up that that video is what it claims to be. And you know, there’s a few different techniques for doing that. In many cases now in Syria we know the source. We know a source to be reliable: on multiple occasions, something that they filmed has turned out to be actually true. Or it’s in a place where we have multiple videos showing exacting the same thing, in which case we can be pretty sure that that event has actually transpired.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Are you scared, ever?

MS. WILLIAMS: Sure, yeah.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Can you tell us about that? The reason I ask is, you know, a lot of young people are going to be listening to this podcast who are going to be going into journalism. And I think, you know, one of the things that seems so exciting is being a foreign correspondent and covering foreign wars, covering conflicts all over the world. You’re actually doing it. What are some of the risks involved? And how do you, you know – you’re a parent. How do you live with them every day?

MS. WILLIAMS: Well, being a parent makes it different because you’re responsible for a small person, and I want to be around to bring my daughter up just as every parent does. I always say this: We don’t wander into situations unprepared. We spend a lot of time planning our trips when we go to dangerous places. We plan our route. Sorry, I’ll do that again. We plan our – (changes pronunciation) – route. We’re talking to a lot of different people on the ground. We’re not taking silly risks. That said, sometimes things, you know, don’t go to plan. And I guess those are the most – the most sort of frightening times.

I mean, the most recent example I can think of is we were on the front line near Mosul in Iraq, which is obviously occupied by ISIS. We were there the day after there had been a big push by ISIS to try to break through the front lines there that are held by the Peshmerga, Kurdish fighters. We’re really happy traveling with the Peshmerga. We find them very reliable, very honest to deal with. But it was the day after this big push. They had clearly lost a number of men. And we were standing there with their commander, and suddenly a guy on a kind of machinegun position started just firing wildly, and we couldn’t see what he was firing at. The day before, this big ISIS push had involved a very kind of typical ISIS tactic, which is to use vehicles, including armored vehicles, as suicide bombs. So we could – we could hear this guy firing wildly. Of course, in our heads we assumed that on the other side of the front line was a big, you know, explosive-laden armored vehicle moving towards us, which was terrifying and was not part of our plan for that day. Thankfully, it didn’t turn out to be a suicide vehicle. The guy on the – on the machinegun has spotted some people moving on the other side of the front line, and they were very jumpy. They were very nervous. But that was certainly a frightening moment.

MR. SCHIEFFER: You know, Holly, when I started out way back there – (chuckles) – back during the Hoover administration or somewhere – most of the reporters were men, not just in foreign assignments but also on the city desk. There were women who generally worked in what we called the Society Department who wrote about weddings and things like that. But I must say one of the things I’m most proud of at CBS News now is our core of foreign correspondents. And when you go down the line, most of you are women. These are jobs that women didn’t even get the opportunity to do. Nobody even thought about sending them to places like CBS News sends you. And you know, you – old Charlie D’Agata over there at the London Bureau, he’s doing a great job, but the rest of you, it seems to me, that go to these dangerous places are all women. How do you think this happened? And to me, it really is a remarkable change that’s taken place here.

MS. WILLIAMS: Well, I don’t know for sure how it happened, but clearly there were women who managed to break through that barrier. And I’m thinking about obviously Christiane Amanpour. I’m thinking about my colleague Elizabeth Palmer, who’s a tremendous role model. All I can say is that, from my perspective, once I started doing this work I – it just was never an issue. It’s just not an issue. It’s not an issue with my bosses. It’s not an issue with my colleagues, who many – and as you said, many of them are women. I mean, most of the producers that I work with in conflict zones are also women. It isn’t an issue. And of course, it doesn’t need to be an issue.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, I mean, you know, as the father of two daughters and the grandfather of three granddaughters, I mean, I really like it, I mean, and I’m really proud of the women at CBS News right, you know, down through the line. I mean, when I first came to the Washington Bureau, we had three women. One was a producer on the radio desk, one was a producer on “Face The Nation,” and one was a correspondent. And every time one of those three women left, they hired another woman to replace her. But we didn’t see any males get replaced by women in those days. And it is just an amazing thing to me that has happened.

Do you find – are most of your competitors now, are they mostly women now?

MS. WILLIAMS: Some of them are. Certainly it’s never a surprise to see another foreign correspondent who’s a woman, both for television and for print. I’m always running into them in the field.

I mean, it’s interesting what you’re saying. Perhaps we don’t celebrate enough, you know, how far we have come. And not just female journalists; women in general.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Because you weren’t here in the old days. (Laughs.)

MS. WILLIAMS: (Laughs.)

MR. SCHIEFFER: And you can’t remember, like I can, the way it used to be. It’s like, well, we all used to smoke. Now nobody smokes anymore. And the difference in the newsroom, unless you were there in the smoking days, you don’t understand how much better it is right now that, you know, they don’t allow people to smoke in the newsroom. We used to smoke in the editing booths. We smoked everywhere. We all smelled like smoke, you know? (Laughs.) But I think, unless you were there then, you can’t really appreciate the changes that have really happened.

But you know, we’re all very, very proud of our foreign correspondents, male and female, right now. And I think – I think they are one of the strongest parts of CBS News.

Let me talk to you about this, Holly. In this podcast, we’ve been – with other correspondents and reporters, we’ve been talking about how social media has sort of changed the whole industry. And sometimes it’s unclear if the impact has been positive or negative. I think, myself, for the most part, it has been positive, but there are downsides to it. A couple of things – you know, the 2011 uprising in Egypt to overthrow Mubarak some argue was initially mobilized by a Facebook page. There was no – there was no traditional leader, as we think of it. In the Turkish coup, when Erdogan used Facebook and Twitter to send a message of control to his people. And finally, of course, we have ISIS, which is using social media to radicalize and recruit supporters. What are your observations in general about social media and how it’s changed not only what we do, but also the battlefield?

MS. WILLIAMS: Right, so I think that’s really interesting. And I think that you’ve summarized it very nicely, which is that the internet and social media can be a force for good, depending on your perspective, and freedom, and it can also be used by people with evil intentions.

I guess – I was thinking about this this morning. There’s this kind of conventional wisdom, isn’t there, that social media makes people myopic, that they’re connected with people on social media who share their political opinions or share their worldview. And I was thinking, that’s really – in my experience, just personally – that’s not true, actually. I mean, when I look on my Facebook feed, I’m friends with people who I went to high school with, who I went to university with, who I’ve worked with in China and in the Middle East.

And one of the things that I’m always struck by is how diverse their experiences are and their opinions are, and how – I love that. I love soaking that up, you know? I have friends from university who – I have a friend who’s running for the state senate in Australia, who has very different political opinions to me. I have a friend who’s a police officer. I have a friend who I did a fellowship with in the U.S. several years ago and who’s a local journalist in Milwaukee. I mean, I don’t know anything about Milwaukee, but I love the things that he posts on Facebook, because they open up a whole ’nother world to me. So I think that it’s – you know, I think as you suggested, it’s both. It’s everything.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Let’s talk about things back in this country, and the American campaign. I’d be interested to know, as a foreign correspondent, what do you hear people in Turkey and in the places you go – what are they saying about our campaign and what’s going on in American right now?

MS. WILLIAMS: You know, it’s really interesting, sometimes I’m surprised by how much people know, the kind of level of detail they have on American politics, living overseas. And they’re very well-informed. And then there are other people who have very little knowledge, but they still have – you know, they still have opinions. Everyone has an opinion about American politics. And you’d be surprised.

You know, I was in Iraq recently. I was having lunch with some Kurdish guys. So these are people who are very much engaged in the fight against ISIS. And they – I asked them what they thought about the election and they said, we want the Bush party to win. OK, so, which – and they mean, the Republicans because in their head that’s the Bush party.

MR. SCHWARTZ: There might be some people who wish it was called the Bush party, these days.

MS. WILLIAMS: (Laughs.) Anyway, and so they said they wanted the Republicans to win. And at this point it was pretty clear that Donald Trump was going to be the candidate. And I think this was after he’s already made the statement saying that he wanted a temporary ban on Muslims entering the U.S. And I said to these guys, but, you know, you’re Muslims. Do you not find that offensive? And they said, oh, well, we don’t care about that. We just want someone who’s going to bomb more in the Middle East. And we think that’s what the Republicans will do. So I – you know, I think you hear a lot of opinions outside of the U.S. that are very surprising.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Well, as you’re gathering those, I want to ask you sort of a process question. How difficult is it to get foreign stories on the evening news, you know, especially during this campaign?

MS. WILLIAMS: It’s always going to be harder when there’s a – when there’s a political campaign, when there’s an election going on. And that’s true with U.S. television, but it’s also – you know, I used to work for British television. I was based in China and covering Asia. And when there was a British election happening, it was the same thing. It’s just more difficult to get foreign news stories on. You know, I don’t think that’s – I don’t that’s surprising. You know, it’s half an hour of news a day. News is inherently local. Editors decide the stories that are most important – or they think are most important for their audience on the day. And during an election campaign, especially the closer it gets to the election itself, it’s going to be harder to make the case for foreign news stories.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Well, you know, obviously if something’s breaking, like Turkey, it’ll get on the news. But otherwise, do you – could you put a – you know, a threshold? What does it take to get a foreign news story on in this climate?

MS. WILLIAMS: You know, that’s an interesting question. I just – I just – look, the CBS Evening News just paid for me to go to Ukraine to film an investigative story there, which they fully intend to run in the lead-up to the election. We haven’t edited it yet, but they paid for that story. It was not a cheap story. So I think that shows there’s still room to do foreign stories. You know, it’s just going to be – I mean, of course, naturally, it’s going to be more difficult to find the room for them.

MR. SCHWARTZ: Well, that actually brings me to my next question. You know, do you have the ability to work on longer-form stories, or are you tied to a beat?

MS. WILLIAMS: No, I mean, one of the great things at CBS has been that the evening news will – has a very open mind when it comes to correspondents and what they should be covering. You know, a couple of years ago I pitched a story about this new generation of legal chemical drugs, coming mainly from China to the U.S. And the story was in Arizona. And I pitched it to the evening news, fully expecting that they would say that’s a great story, Holly. We’re going to get someone else to do it. Instead of which, they flew me from Istanbul to Arizona to do the story, because it was my idea and my reporting and they wanted me to cover it. Similarly, I’ve done stories from – I’ve pitched, you know, investigative pieces from Australia and from Bangladesh. So you know, I love that about CBS.

MR. SCHWARTZ: These are the things that make it so exciting doing what you do. So would you have any advice for young reporters who are aspiring to do what you do?

MS. WILLIAMS: Travel, if you can afford it. If you want to be a foreign correspondent, you need to know as much as you can about the world. I know travel is expensive, and it’s not open to everyone, but if you can possibly, you know, backpack your way around the world when you’re at university, that’s a really valuable experience. Read widely. And you know, there’s no set way into this industry. Pretty much everyone who becomes a foreign correspondent tells you that they’ve had an unusual entry to the job. So there’s no – there’s no set way in. But I think wide experience, both internationally and in reporting, is going to help you.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, that brings me to this question. Tell us how you got into journalism, and what drew you to this? I know you grew up in Tasmania, if I remember. The only person I’ve ever known from Tasmania. (Laughs.) And I think your mom still lives there, if memory serves. How did you get from there to here?

MS. WILLIAMS: Yeah, I grew up in Tasmania. I went to high school on the Australian mainland. I was always really interested in journalism. I just didn’t think that there was any way for me to get into the industry. My family didn’t have any contacts. I was very, very lucky. I started studying Chinese when I was at high school. My high school had a very forward-looking principal who, you know, even in the 1990s thought that China might be the way forward. So I started studying Chinese. When I was 15, I had an opportunity to go to China for three months over the Australian summer. And that was just – I was 15. It was just at transformative experience for me. I’d never been outside of Australia before. And I opened up the world to me.

And as a result of that, I studied Chinese at university, and Asian history. And as a result of speaking Chinese, I got a whole series of jobs in my 20s, including with the BBC and then Sky News, that I would never have got if I didn’t speak Mandarin Chinese. I mean, I was kind of radically underqualified for those jobs. But because I spoke Chinese and I was in China, I got them. And then I worked very hard to sort of try and learn on the job. That’s the piece of advice that I left out for aspiring journalists – learn languages.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Well, tell us about what kind of stories, how did you become a reporter in China? And what kind of stories did you cover? And then what then took you to where you are today?

MS. WILLIAMS: Yeah. So I had been a producer for the BBC and then for Sky News, which is one of the BBC’s competitors in the U.K. And then I had done a little bit of reporting – not very good reporting; not very polished reporting. And then I was – I was lucky enough to do a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University which – for a year – which was just an amazing experience, and a much-needed kind of career break, just a time to think more broadly about the world and think about what I wanted to do.

And following that, one of my editors, who was a mentor and a supporter, said that he thought I should start doing more work on camera. And that coincided with the Beijing Olympics. So I went back after this year in the U.S., which has been incredibly enriching, and I went back to Beijing and brought all this new energy to covering the Olympics. And that went very well. And from then on, I was a correspondent.

MR. SCHIEFFER: And then you went to – went on to Istanbul and began covering the Middle East and all of the situation there. As you look back on it, what are the stories you’re most proud of, Holly?

MS. WILLIAMS: That’s a very big question. I’m very proud of the work that we did in Bangladesh, which you touched on earlier. I think globalization can be an amazing force for good, but one of the problems with globalization is that things that we’re intimately connected with happen half a world away. So the clothes that we wear are made by workers toiling in Bangladesh in unsafe factories, who are being physically abused. And I think that if, as journalists, we don’t cover that, we don’t – we don’t show the kind of dark underbelly of globalization, we’re failing in our jobs. So I’m really, really proud of that series that I did from Bangladesh.

MR. SCHIEFFER: It was great work. It was a wonderful series of stories. And I think anyone who saw it will remember – will remember that story. And I know you won some awards from that.

When was the first time you were under fire, or you really found yourself in a dangerous situation?

MS. WILLIAMS: You know, some of the most dangerous situations I’ve found myself were actually, I think, in China, when I wasn’t under fire, but where I felt very threatened nonetheless. I remember a story I did a few years ago, shortly before I left China, so it was probably 2011 or 2012. We had been reporting from a Tibetan area in Western China. And we were being followed by an unmarked car. And we were on mountain roads. We were in the middle of nowhere. And these were clearly government officials, but there was no number plate on their car, they didn’t speak to us. They were just following us. And it was very isolated area.

And that was very – you know, really threatening. I was followed in China on multiple occasions and detained by the police on multiple occasions. Those were – you know, they weren’t armed, but they were all pretty frightening experiences.

MR. SCHIEFFER: Holly, could you imagine yourself doing any other kind of work?

MS. WILLIAMS: I get asked this the whole time. I always think I would like to manage an airport, because I feel like there are problems in airports – and maybe I’m misunderstanding the nature of the problems – I just think they could be better.

MR. SCHWARTZ: I think you’re right. My wife actually once commandeered a whole airline desk in Jamaica because the plane was delayed about four hours and there were all these diplomats from Washington trying to get home. And so my wife is legendary in the diplomatic corps here in Washington because she improved the efficiency of the Jamaican airport.

MS. WILLIAMS: Oh, she sounds fabulous. I love it.

MR. SCHIEFFER: I’ll tell you one thing, if you can manage an airport as well you manage the job that you do for CBS News, that’s the airport I want to fly out of for wherever I happen to be going. I’m going to come to your airport and make sure you’re the one that makes sure I get on the right plane.

Holly Williams, you’re somebody that we’re all proud of at CBS News. And I really thank you for taking the time to be with us today.

MS. WILLIAMS: Thanks, Bob.

MR. SCHIEFFER: All right. And for Andrew Schwartz of CSIS, this is Bob Schieffer.

MR. SCHWARTZ: If you like this podcast, leave us a review on iTunes, visit us at CSIS.org, and check out the Schieffer College of Communication at SchiefferCollege.TCU.edu.

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For Andrew Schwartz from CSIS, this is Bob Schieffer.

MR. SCHWARTZ: If you like this podcast, leave us a review on iTunes, visit us at CSIS.org, and check out the Schieffer College of Communication at SchiefferCollege.TCU.edu.

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