On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent by Brian Stewart
The thrill—and trauma—of being a foreign correspondent
Brian Stewart tells what it was like being On the Ground
Each day, on its front page, the Washington Post warns about democracy dying in darkness. Without journalists, who would illuminate what’s happening?
A timely concern, given the cliff dive in newspaper subscriptions and TV news ratings. Instead, people are turning to social media sites that excite, enrage and entertain them with biases and conspiracy theories.
But even with a diminished presence, journalism, with apologies to Edna St. Vincent Millay, still gives a lovely light. One of its most noted luminaries, Brian Stewart of CBC News, has now published On the Ground: My Life as a Foreign Correspondent, a memoir of his thrilling, frightening and inspiring four-decade career.
As any journo knows, a story lead must be gripping to get our attention—and Stewart does just that in his opening pages. Recalling his 1984 reports on famine-stricken Ethiopia, he describes both the horror of starvation and the deadly mix of what caused it, from government mismanagement and soil overuse to drought and insect infestations.
As savvy journos also know to do, Stewart focused on the sufferings of one individual to illuminate those of the wider population. In a series of reports, he followed the life and near-death of a young girl, Birhan Woldu.
When he and his crew met Birhan, she was glazed-eyed and breathing, just barely, with loud, painful rasps. He and his crew got Birhan and her family to a clinic.
Showing Birhan to the world proved a turning point. David Bowie screened Stewart’s stories at televised concerts, viewed by an audience of 1.9 billion in 150 countries. Donations surged. On a visit to Ethiopia, UK Prime Minister Tony Blair made a point of visiting Birhan—prompting yet more coverage of the famine.
CBC News anchor Peter Mansbridge told Stewart how the supposedly cynical newsroom erupted in tears at the Birhan stories. Turned out all those tears, at CBC and worldwide, created a watershed moment. As Stewart relates, the political climate changed. Humanitarian causes became a much higher priority in Western foreign policy.
You might expect such an adventure-prone reporter to have had a wild, Indiana Jones-type youth. Not so. Like many of us who chose journalism as a career, young Brian was geeky, obsessed with news stories. Click, click! went the TV dial as he endlessly switched between news shows, absorbing every tidbit of info he could. He annoyed teachers by badgering them with questions about the news, e.g., a Latin teacher about the 1956 Suez Crisis. Needless to say, the teacher—well, declined to oblige.
As a student at Toronto’s Ryerson School of Journalism, Stewart interned as a copy boy, that is, taking copies of pages to editors for proofing, at The Globe and Mail. His first post-j-school job was city hall reporter at the Oshawa Times. Low pay, Stewart recalls, but fascinating. He found that government, whether in Oshawa, Nairobi, Ottawa, or Brasília, always provided a colourful mix of personalities to report on.
Stewart thrived on drama—only to have it, by the 1990s, come back to bite him. He began having shell-shock-type flashbacks of all the suffering he’d seen. Consulting a doctor, Stewart became patient zero in an international study about the psychological hazards of war coverage. Reporters can now access help from such resources as the Toronto Moral Injury Scale for Journalists.
At 83, Stewart is long retired from work, but never from curiosity. The Order of Canada recipient has become a history buff—and, on one notable occasion, an interviewee. On her TV show in 2004, Oprah Winfrey reunited Stewart with Birhan Woldu, to a standing ovation. From famine to feast, one might say.
About the Author
Born in Montreal, Brian Stewart worked as foreign correspondent for the CBC’s The National and The Journal, as well as for NBC News. Among the historic figures he interviewed were Nelson Mandela, Margaret Thatcher, Salman Rushdie, and Henry Kissinger. On retiring, Stewart was appointed a Senior Fellow at the University of Toronto’s Munk School of Global Affairs.
About the Reviewer
A Vancouver freelance writer/editor, Melanie Jackson is the author of such award-winning middle-grade/YA novels as the Dinah Galloway Mystery Series and Medusa’s Scream. The latter, a Canadian Children’s Book Centre Best Book of 2018, earned Melanie a TD-CCBC author tour.
Book Details
Publisher: Simon and Schuster Canada, September 16, 2025
Language: English
Hardcover: 320 pages
ISBN: 9781668052150
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