Jane Ferguson

Finding The Good

The world seems appallingly bleak at times, the news more than depressing. Yet, the reality of the wider world around us, even the most difficult places, speaks to a much more complex and rich experience. Time spent in war will attest that misery is unsustainable to the human spirit. From American veteran volunteers to Afghan prosthetics specialists and Somali teachers, Jane Ferguson shares with audiences the characters she has met who have responded to the extraordinary challenges around them to help others, excel in service, and inspire others around them to do the same. 

Building an Authentic Career

People look at Jane Ferguson’s career — the awards, audience, and applause — and presume this has been a clear and straight path to success. Yet, the very reason Jane wrote her story down in her memoir was to help people understand the very real struggles behind building a career that is authentic to her and helped her grow as a storyteller. Journalism is a deeply competitive business, being a foreign correspondent on TV even more so. To push past the challenges, Jane had to stay focused on the things that she knew mattered most to her as someone privy to the world’s calamities and countless individual lives caught up in them. Along the way, Jane would go broke, sleep on friend’s couches between assignments, learn to film and edit her own stories, make Afghanistan, Yemen, and Lebanon her homes, and get more under the skin of the stories she was telling than she could ever have imagined, all while putting her life on the line repeatedly. Here, Jane will share with you the things she learned on that road.

How Women Changed War Reporting Forever

The number of women reporting from conflict zones as writers, broadcasters, and photographers, has ballooned in the last 20 years. Nowadays in many wars, Jane Ferguson reports from, the majority of war reporters are women. Building on the legacies of the greats from before, such as Marguerite Higgins and Martha Gelhorn, the new generation of female reporters is not just taking their place on and behind the cameras and in bylines from across the world. They are changing the way stories of war are told.

The female gaze can be seen shifting the focus in stories from Ukraine to Israel, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Once under pressure to replicate all forms of reporting dominated by male counterparts, women reporters are increasingly confident in their own lens through which tough combat reporting is accompanied by humanitarian stories and voices from communities most impacted by war. Female range in story-telling is broadening the range of voices and images the public is accessing from places where human suffering is at its most intense.

America Has No Foreign Policy

America faces a foreign policy failure that is threatening global security, human rights, and the broader liberal world order. In the years since the clear disaster of the war on terror, the Iraq invasion, and broader overreaches post 9/11, America’s overcorrection and withdrawal from the world has left dangerous vacuums that have been filled by those like Putin and Iran, and emboldened dictators to commit a growing number of human rights atrocities with impunity. This is a broad, bipartisan decline in policy and leadership, from Obama to Trump and Biden. As foreign policy experts like Madeline Albright, John McCain, and Richard Holbrook have passed away, so too has their grasp of America’s place in the world, and what is at stake when domestic politics embrace isolationism over the global reality and needs to push back against despotic creep and abuses. Arming Ukraine has offered an opportunity for the US to return to meaningful engagement and leadership in protecting democratic norms, but the US political class has yet to acknowledge that it is this very withdrawal from the world that, in large part, led to the invasion in the first place.