Career
In 1942, Lewis joined The Associated Press (AP) in New York and Washington. In 1945, the AP sent her to London, where she married Sydney Gruson, a New York Times correspondent. For the next 20 years, she was based in London, Jerusalem, Prague, Warsaw, Geneva, Bonn, Paris and Mexico City. European publishers included The Observer , The Economist , the International Herald Tribune in Paris, [2] The Financial Times in London and France-Soir in Paris. [1]
From 1956 to 1966, Lewis was a reporter for The Washington Post , where her work landed her on the master list of Nixon political opponents.
In 1966, Newsday published and syndicated her first column. [1]
In 1972, The New York Times appointed her foreign and diplomatic correspondent. The Times then had a rule against hiring wives of its correspondents, Lewis, however, contributed frequently to The New York Times Magazine and wrote for other publications. [3] She has the distinction of being the first woman to be given her own column on the New York Times op-ed page. [1]
Personal and death
From 1945 to 1972, Lewis was married to New York Times correspondent, editor, and publishing executive Sydney Gruson. She and Gruson had three children: Kerry (born in Ireland), Sheila (born in Israel), and Lindsey (born in Mexico). [3]
Writing for the Jewish Women's Archive, Ari Goldman described her thus:
It was a kosher home where Jewish holidays were observed, one family member recalled, but Lewis retained little attachment to traditional Jewish life in her adulthood. In her dispatches she often showed sympathy for Israel, but also felt free to criticize the Jewish state when she thought its policies were wrongheaded. She titled a 1990 column on Israel "Lament for Jerusalem." It expressed a sense of disappointment but also of love, especially for the city’s longtime mayor, Teddy Kollek (b. 1911). She wrote: "If there’s a living soul who embodies the city of Jerusalem, it’s Teddy Kollek. This is a lament for the city, and for him, because he has made his life's work trying to revive it, beautify it and bring it harmony." [4]
She died of cancer in Paris in 2002. [1]
Impact
For her obituary, the New York Times wrote:
Heads of government and ordinary readers in the United States and Europe, where she lived for much of her career, looked to Flora Lewis's columns not only for her access to people in high places, but also for the dogged reporting and the sophisticated analysis that resulted. [1]
Seymour Brody likens Lewis's life to "that of a juggler in trying to balance her role as a journalist, wife, and mother," concluding that her achievements in the male-dominated profession "opened the way for other women to enter and to succeed in the newspaper industry." Rupert Cornwell stated that "Lewis had formidable assets, starting with an access to those in power that often made her colleagues green with envy. More important, she possessed a mind that could cut to the essential of an issue with astonishing speed. To her writing she brought a clarity and analytical power that enabled her to explain complicated issues without ignoring all-important nuances." [5]
By contrast, columnist Eric Alterman wrote that at the Times, Lewis "filed from Paris what was quite possibly the most boring regular column in the history of journalism," which "certainly contained no hint that the writer was a woman." The New Republic ′s "World's Most Boring" headline competition was inspired by a Lewis column titled "Worthwhile Canadian Initiative." [6]
Sydney Hillel Schanberg was an American journalist who was best known for his coverage of the war in Cambodia. He was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, two George Polk awards, two Overseas Press Club awards, and the Sigma Delta Chi prize for distinguished journalism. Schanberg was portrayed by Sam Waterston in the 1984 film The Killing Fields based on the experiences of Schanberg and the Cambodian journalist Dith Pran in Cambodia.
Dorothy Celene Thompson was an American journalist and radio broadcaster. She was the first American journalist to be expelled from Nazi Germany in 1934 and was one of the few women news commentators broadcasting on radio during the 1930s. Thompson is regarded by some as the "First Lady of American Journalism" and was recognized by Time magazine in 1939 as equal in influence to Eleanor Roosevelt. Recordings of her NBC Radio commentary and analysis of the European situation and the start of World War II were selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Recording Registry in 2023, based on their "cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage."
Pierre van Paassen was a Dutch–Canadian-American journalist, writer, and Unitarian minister. He was born in Gorinchem, Netherlands, then emigrated with his parents to Canada in 1914. After entering a seminary, he served as a missionary to Ruthenian immigrants in the Alberta hinterland, where he helped with medical work. In 1917 he left theological school to serve with the Canadian army in France in World War I as an infantryman and sapper.
Noel Haviland Field was an American diplomat who was accused of being a spy for the NKVD. His name was used as a prosecuting rationale during the 1949 Rajk show trial in Hungary, as well as the 1952 Slánský show trial in Czechoslovakia. Much controversy surrounds the Field story. In 2015, the historian David Talbot reignited claims that Field was set up by Allen Dulles in order to create paranoia designed to undermine the Soviet Union.
Stanley Abram Karnow was an American journalist and historian. He is best known for his writings on East Asia and the Vietnam War.
Kati Marton is a Hungarian-American author and journalist. Her career has included reporting for ABC News as a foreign correspondent and National Public Radio, where she started as a production assistant in 1971, as well as print journalism and writing a number of books.
Marguerite Higgins Hall was an American reporter and war correspondent. Higgins covered World War II, the Korean War, and the Vietnam War, and in the process advanced the cause of equal access for female war correspondents. She had a long career with the New York Herald Tribune (1942–1963) and as a syndicated columnist for Newsday (1963–1965). She was the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize for Foreign Correspondence awarded in 1951 for her coverage of the Korean War. She subsequently won Long Island University's George Polk Award for Foreign Reporting for articles from behind enemy lines in Korea and other nations in 1952.
Roger Cohen is a journalist and author. He was a reporter, editor and columnist for The New York Times, and the International Herald Tribune . He has worked as a foreign correspondent in fifteen countries.
Ruth Gruber was an American journalist, photographer, writer, humanitarian, and United States government official.
Yevgenia Markovna Albats is a Russian investigative journalist, political scientist, writer and radio host.
Jane Perlez is a long-time foreign correspondent for The New York Times. She served as Beijing Bureau Chief in China until 2019, where she wrote about China's role in the world, and the competition between the United States and China, particularly in Asia. Perlez arrived in Beijing in February 2012, and left in 2019.
Anne O'Hare McCormick was an English-American journalist who worked as a foreign news correspondent for The New York Times. In an era where the field was almost exclusively "a man's world", she became the first woman to receive a Pulitzer Prize in a major journalism category, winning in 1937 for correspondence. Her husband's job led to frequent travels abroad, and her career as a journalist became more specialized.
Women in journalism are individuals who participate in journalism. As journalism became a profession, women were restricted by custom from access to journalism occupations, and faced significant discrimination within the profession. Nevertheless, women operated as editors, reporters, sports analysts and journalists even before the 1890s in some countries as far back as the 18th-century.
World news or international news or even foreign coverage is the news media jargon for news from abroad, about a country or a global subject. For journalism, it is a branch that deals with news either sent by foreign correspondents or news agencies, or – more recently – information that is gathered or researched through distance communication technologies, such as telephone, satellite TV or the internet.
Michael Elkins was an American broadcaster and journalist who worked for the American network, CBS, for the magazine Newsweek and then for 17 years with the BBC. He was the first to report Israel's destruction of Arab air forces on the opening day of the Six-Day War in 1967. CBS did not trust his report and he left.
Walter Cecil Dowling was the United States Ambassador to West Germany from 1959–1963 and the US Ambassador to South Korea from 1956-1959.
Alice-Leone Moats (1908–1989) was an American journalist and author who was born in Mexico to wealthy and socially prominent American parents. She attended convent schools in Mexico City, Rome and Paris, as well as the Brearley School in Manhattan and the Fermata School for Girls in Aiken, South Carolina.
Lynda Kinkade is an Australian journalist and a CNN anchor currently based at CNN's World Headquarters located in Atlanta, Georgia. Since August 2014 she has anchored the weekend editions of CNN International's Newsroom and once anchored several weekday programs filling in on the European primetime show The World Right Now, the Middle East primetime show Connect the World and the Asia breakfast show CNN Today.
Leah Nora Beloff was an English journalist and political writer. She worked for The Observer for three decades, from 1948 to 1978, and became a political correspondent in 1964, making her the first woman in such a role for a British newspaper.
Susan B. Glasser is an American journalist and news editor. She writes the online column "Letter from Biden’s Washington" in The New Yorker, where she is a staff writer. She is the author, with her husband Peter Baker, of Kremlin Rising: Vladimir Putin's Russia and the End of Revolution (2005), The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III (2020), and The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 (2022).
