Lisa Ling gives UC Students a World View
By: Margo Hutchinson
On Tuesday May 27th at 7 p.m., the seats slowly fill in the Great Hall of Tangeman University enter with adults of various ages, as jazz music plays from the speakers. The audience awaits the arrival of the speaker who has quite the story to tell.
Lisa Ling has been in the world of journalism since she was 16-years-old starting on Scratch, a well-known show in California for teens. Soon Lisa Ling would become a correspondent for the middle and high school news show Channel One, which would lead her to the type of journalism work she does today. She is introduced into the room by a University of Cincinnati student who read a quote from the book Lisa Ling co-wrote called, Mother, Sister, Bride: Rituals of Womanhood. Ling is welcomed in to the auditorium with applause. Ling’s appearance dispels ones typical idea of a journalist who reports from the most dangerous places around the world. Dressed like she just walked off a photo shoot for the clothing store Anthropologie, wearing a mini beige dress with open toed heels and a brown cropped sweater, she opens her hour and a half long lecture answering the questions that she is asked very often from fans. “ Yes I did like Rosie, I didn’t read Barbra’s book, and not I was not in any of the Charlie’s Angels movies.”
Lisa Ling has gone to the most dangerous and poor places on earth to inform the American people about what is not typically reported on news stations. Lisa Ling talks signifigant moments in her life. One moment she tells the audience was about when she visited Afghanistan in 1994. At the age of 21, she arrived to Jalalabad, Afghanistan to cover the Civil War for Channel 1 News. When she got off the plane in Jalalabad, little boys who held extremely large weapons greeted Ling. When she asked how old these children were carrying the large weapons, one man with her responded, “They don’t know, but if you ask them how to use a bazooka, they know.” This experience was so shocking to Lisa Ling, that when she came back to America with this story to tell, she was even more shocked to realize that her co-workers were so unaware of what was happening over seas. “If these stories so shocked me, what about the Americans who are unaware?” she said to the audience. This was the turning point in her life that inspired her to inform people of these events that go uncovered by news stations.
She talked to the audience in the Great Hall about her work and how Americans should have access to the world that lies outside American borders. She talks about how too often, many Americans and people from other countries grow up to believe that their way of life is the right way of life and in her specials that feature on the National Geographic Channel, she travels to places of danger and strict rule, to show the viewers that there are more layers to a situation. She showed the audience some clips from her National Geographic show to give the audience a better idea of things like the one child policy in China and what life is like in a prison that keeps the most dangerous criminals
Lisa Ling expresses how hopeful she is about the young generation, and disagrees with people who say that the next generation has not interest in the current events and the vast state of the world. She ends her lecture with questions from the audience, which has to be cut short due to the time. When she was finished she was given a standing ovation from the audience who would leave Great Hall of Tangeman with a different world perspective.
