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I was born along the border of my mom’s homeland, Mexico, but raised mainly on the opposite fringe, in the far-northern terrain of my father, in Maine. I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking about borders and, in my years as a news correspondent, crossing them.
I got my start as a reporter in New England, scribbling about the usual fare of small-town journalism: school board meetings, car crashes, local politics. But my eventual move to Los Angeles unlocked a world of big-time reporting opportunities at the Los Angeles Times, from shocking crimes to earthquakes to a four-year posting on the U.S.-Mexico border at a crucial moment—just as the Clinton administration was unfurling an unprecedented deterrence strategy aimed at stanching an epidemic of illegal border-crossing. The border beat soon had me chasing tragedy amid the desert scrub and frigid mountains of the California-Mexico divide, where smugglers were trying to skirt the new U.S. controls by steering migrants through some of the most inhospitable country in the United States. In the process of those dangerous treks, hundreds of migrants were dying, and my work tracking the deadly phenomenon led me to write Hard Line: Life and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border.
The paper later named me a foreign correspondent in Jerusalem, where I moved with my wife and our infant daughter to cover the Middle East conflict. I worked alongside the best in the business as story assignments took me to hot spots all over Israel, the West Bank and Gaza Strip—and farther afield to Jordan, Lebanon and the battlefield in Iraq. After four years, my family and I got to move to Mexico, my dream posting, where I could make use of my Spanish and my knowledge of Mexican history that I had studied in college. Mexico was descending into the mayhem of a bloody drug war at the time, and my colleagues and I covered it from every conceivable angle and location, winning the Times a number of journalism awards.
When my wife’s job carried us to China, I swapped daily reporting for a chance to teach journalism—real, Western journalism—to aspiring Chinese journalists. It was there that I began to look more deeply at the issues of press freedom and the struggles that American journalists faced over our own history to secure the rights we now enjoy. That topic has been the subject of my latest book, First to Fall: Elijah Lovejoy's Fight for a Free Press During the Age of Slavery. The book tells the heart-pounding story of a courageous newspaper editor who risked his life to fight against slavery at a time when the cost of doing so drew the wrath of violent mobs. Lovejoy's story is a reminder that the liberties we take for granted were ofen delivered only at great sacrifice. It is a celebration of the principled actions of a brave journalist.
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