Above and Beyond the Usual TV Journalism

What did you do on your vacation? Christina Gonzales spent hers in famine-ravaged southern Sudan, where hundreds of thousands are in peril of dying from starvation.

“I didn’t mind using my vacation,” she said last week. “I don’t have the money to give [relief organizations] a large check. So this is my way of donating to them and to the cause of getting good stories on the air.”

Very good stories, in fact--sober ones about tragedy that, without preaching, represent advocacy journalism in the very best sense.

Gonzalez’s two stirring reports--totaling 13 minutes--first aired last week and were repeated during the weekend on Fox’s KTTV-TV, where she has been a reporter throughout the ‘90s, and where last year her stories about the plight of Sarajevo children and other victims of the Bosnian conflict earned awards galore.

Now she was at a United Nations feeding center in Bahr el Ghazal, Sudan’s most devastated province, an arid, fly-ridden hell where birth and death compete and where she and cameraman Colin Finlay chronicled the suffering of the starving multitudes, the most vulnerable being small children who are little more than walking skeletons.

Gonzalez in a makeshift cemetery: “Every one of these white mounds you see here is a person.”

Poor harvests and years of civil war head the causes of southern Sudan’s famine, and the pair of KTTV stories personalizing this calamity brought a huge response from viewers. “We’ve had hundreds of phone calls from people wanting to know what they can do to alleviate the suffering,” said Lovisa Stannow, West Coast director for Doctors Without Borders, a nonprofit group whose work in southern Sudan was featured by Gonzalez.

If only we had more journalists without borders.

“The crisis in Sudan has obviously been overshadowed by domestic events in recent months,” said Stannow. “But these pieces on Fox confirm what we have believed all along, that people do care once they get the information.”

Gonzalez and Finlay, who isn’t on staff at KTTV, were not assigned this story. While vacationing in London, they embarked on it on their own, paying their own way. “Because you can’t fly into Sudan with an American visa, we got on a plane and showed up at the U.N. offices in Nairobi [in Kenya],” Gonzalez said. That was Sept. 10. “And they put us in a C-130 cargo plane on one of their relief flights.”

Before returning to Los Angeles on Sept. 20, Gonzalez and Finlay had visited four sites where Sudanese gather to receive food, all of them makeshift camps beside landing strips except for Ajiep, a blip of a village where they spent most of their time.

Gonzalez said that she and Finlay will put in for their expenses, but that she doesn’t plan to ask the station to credit her for working during her vacation. No problem, said KTTV news director Jose Rios, who lauds them for their enterprise. “It started off with her saying it’s just a possibility, that she was on vacation and didn’t even know if she could get in. I told her to go ahead and we’d play it by ear.” But when she got in, he said, “at that point, in my mind, she was working for us.”

And perhaps also for the nonprofit Unheard Voice Foundation that Gonzalez says she and Finlay are forming. Its purpose? “We want to document the hardships of children in areas of conflict,” Gonzalez said, “and not necessarily war zones, but whether it be Chiapas [in Mexico], Bosnia or South-Central L.A.” Or some of the other turbulent locales, from Rwanda to Northern Ireland, where Finlay, who is best known as a still photographer, took the pictures that are in his book “The Unheard Voice: Portraits of Childhood.”

The idea for last year’s Bosnia venture came from Finlay, who accompanied Gonzalez and her regular camera operator, Patti Ballaz, to Sarajevo, where they distributed cameras, donated by Canon, to youngsters and asked them to photograph their war-maimed city.

“The first pictures they took were of themselves,” Gonzalez said. “Then their families. Then they took pictures of graves and things that had meaning to them. A 15-year-old stopped and said, ‘Look, there is a flower growing out of this rubble.’ ” And photographed it.

Photographs of Sarajevo by these young Bosnians and by Finlay were published in Natural History magazine last year, with a text he co-wrote with Gonzalez. They hope to return to Sudan and distribute cameras to kids there, too. Under the aegis of their foundation, they are contacting museums to explore having these photos exhibited, said Gonzalez, so that they can “keep putting out the word” about suffering kids.

Their Sudan coverage certainly did that, while also highlighting the valor of medical and food relief workers operating there under dire conditions. “Why are you here?” Gonzalez asked one of them, an African woman, who seemed almost puzzled by the question. “I’m here to serve,” she said, “to serve my people.”

And why, when local news coverage of Sudan is more likely to consist of a chopper following two Sudanese chasing each other on a freeway, is KTTV bothering with such stories?

“What’s nice about being at Fox is that they allow us the freedom and the latitude to take some chances,” said Rios, whose station’s 10 p.m. ratings lead all other newscasts in that time period. Why didn’t he do the customary thing and hold those powerful Sudan stories until the November ratings sweeps? “I think these people need help now,” he said.

Which makes Fox and Rios sound like candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize. “I’ll leave that to Christina and Colin,” he said.