Ling: ‘For every tragic story, you see humanity’

Lisa Ling wanted to immediately get one thing straight: she likes Whoopi Goldberg as a new member on “The View.” \nLing spoke to the packed audience of the Buskirk-Chumley Theater Wednesday about her time spent on “The View,” “Channel One News,” “National Geographic Explorer” and “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”\nLing began her career as a junior in high school on the Sacramento teen syndicate show, “Scratch.” \n“I used my time on ‘Scratch’ as a springboard into the field,” Ling said. “I would go into the newsroom at 4:30, 5:00 in the morning, run the teleprompters for the morning news, go to my classes then go back to the newsroom for the \nevening news.”\nAfter spending about two years at “Scratch,” Ling said she heard of auditions for a new broadcasting project in New York City called Channel One News, a news program seen in middle and high schools all over the nation.\n“Channel One gave me a desire to travel and introduced me to a world I had never imagined,” Ling said. “I was given this unique opportunity at age 18 to travel around the world, and at age 21, I was asked if I wanted to cover the civil war in Afghanistan.”\nDuring this time, Ling said she got her first taste of the world, seeing young Afghani boys carrying around weapons that were literally larger than they were.\n“They had this lifelessness in their eyes,” she said. “They could have shot me right then and there and thought nothing of it.”\nAfter covering the civil war in Afghanistan for Channel One, Ling said she realized that Americans in general knew little about international events and decided that international investigative journalism was what she wanted to do for her career.\nSoon after her trip to Afghanistan war zones, Ling was invited to take part on the television show, “The View.” Spending most of her time in an office, Ling stayed on “The View” until shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, after she was accused of anti-American comments.\n“After the terrorist attacks, I had said that what happened in America was one of the most egregious acts of terrorism,” she said. “I said that maybe we should be asking why this happened to us, which unleashed a fury of e-mails from a few supporters and an exorbitant amount of e-mails saying ‘you don’t know what you’re talking about, go back to China.’”\nLing took that advice to heart by joining the National Geographic flagship series “Explorer” and began covering stories such as “China’s Lost Girls”, which chronicled the beginnings of China’s one child policy that led to the murder, abortion and abandonment of thousands of baby girls, Ling said. \nLing went into China to investigate the effects of this policy, and found that, as with every story she had covered, there was another side of the story.\n“These women did not want to give away their baby girls,” she said. “But when she grows up, she’ll get married and go away to her husband’s family, and no one would be there to take care of them when they got old. There really wasn’t much of a choice for them.”\nLing continued working for National Geographic on investigative stories ranging from maximum-security prisons in California to the illusiveness of North Korea and the drug war in Columbia, until she was offered a job on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” as a special correspondent.\nDuring her time for Oprah, Ling investigated incarcerated mothers in international prisons, the mass gang rape of women in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the horrors of “bride burning” in India.\n“The reason I continue doing this kind of work, these heart-wrenching stories, is for every tragic story I’ve reported on, you see humanity,” Ling said.\nIn her closing comments, she left the audience with her favorite quote from Oprah Winfrey, in regard to international crises and issues:\n“Now that you know, you can’t pretend you don’t.”