For three decades, The World, the public radio program from GBH and PRX, has crossed time zones to tell the stories that matter. For 30 years, it has delivered captivating global journalism — the first of its kind, and still the only program dedicated to bringing international news to U.S. public radio audiences every day.
Marco Wermen, host of the World, joined GBH’s All Things Considered’s Arun Rath to celebrate the milestone anniversary. This is a lightly edited transcript of their conversation.
Arun Rath: This is going to be personal because we’re going to talk about you on The World and some of the work I did on the on The World, but I want to first take you back to 30 years ago. I first heard you in the 90s reporting for Europe for Monitor Radio, and correct me if my memory’s wrong on this, because that was 30 years ago, but that was a show that aired on public radio stations produced by the Christian Science Monitor, and it definitely left a void when it went off the air. And so take us back to that point. When did you first hear of this concept that would become?
Marco Werman: Yeah, so I was at the time running the newsroom at a small public radio station in upstate New York, and it was the dead of winter in 1994. And I got a call from Neil Curry, my former editor at the BBC Africa Service in London, who told me he was moving to the U.S. because they’d just gotten this job of starting a new national daily radio news program about international news, and he wanted to know my thoughts. We had a long discussion. I told him I thought it was a great idea. Then, four years earlier, I had returned from freelancing as a reporter in West Africa, and then worked at the BBC World Service as a producer in London. I’d basically been away from the U.S. for six years. And what really struck me when I came back was the absence of real global perspectives on international news, really any perspectives.
NPR was on the big global stories at the time: the first US war in Iraq, Operation Desert Storm, the wars in the Balkans. But I was used to tuning in to this vast sea of global news on my shortwave radio in West Africa on the BBC World Service or whatever I could pick up. And I didn’t have that anymore. And The World was promising to deliver on that, and not just checking the international news box, but really diving into what makes our species tick everywhere and understanding the universality of what it means to be a human being on planet Earth any day of the week. Sure, there’s conflict, but there’s also discovery and fascinating undertakings. There’s music and art. There’s food and religion. And the idea really was to connect Americans to the rest of the globe in a way that, in the mid-90s when we started, was previously not possible. We suddenly started having devices, devices that could connect us to places we never thought connectable before, thanks to the internet and smartphones. So when Neil Curry called me and described what he was thinking, it just excited me. But I never imagined what the future would hold and just where our reporting would take us. And now, when we can’t get a clear connection to a place like Havana, which happened yesterday, We get frustrated. We almost take it for granted that 30 years ago, a lot of this wasn’t even possible.
Rath: Yeah, no, it’s amazing, Marco, to think about that media landscape back then. As you’re talking about it, if you didn’t have a shortwave radio outside of catching the BBC on occasion on public broadcasting, you couldn’t get that kind of news. Talk about your role in the early days of The World and what it was like those first few years.
Werman: Well, we were in the old building at WGBH. The newsroom didn’t exist. Actually, before I even arrived, they sunk a floor into the upper levels of the scene dock where Alistair Cooke used to do his entrance to Masterpiece Theater. So we had this really kind of low ceiling, and we had some plants and we have some skylights and it was a newsroom and we just got started on Jan. 1, 1996. I did pretty much everything in those early days. I was kind of rotating around. I was a show producer. I was copy editor. We were using the resources at the BBC because we were a BBC co-production. They had these incredibly deep systems, the monitoring service at Caversham, this little manor out in the English countryside where a BBC journalist would be on headphones and listening to shortwave from all over the world and digesting what they heard. And we’d basically take that copy and do kind of a roundup of what was happening around the globe. So I was doing everything when we first started. We were on about a dozen launch stations who were testing us out. And then we slowly grew, but it wasn’t until Sept. 11 that suddenly, that question everybody was asking the United States, “Why do they hate us?” A kind of disingenuous question when you really think about it. But you know everybody suddenly became interested in the rest of the world and our carriage on stations around the country went way up.
Rath: Yeah, I remember that as well. And as much as that was a horrible time, it was also a good time for international journalism and exactly that kind of coverage because people finally wanted to know. I started contributing to The World in 2011. That had been when I had been reporting on military justice for GBH’s Front Line. And that was back when the whole WikiLeaks happened and the arrest and court-martial of, at the time, Bradley, now Chelsea Manning.
Werman: What a moment. I mean, kind of pre all this social media, but this just giant kind of moment of transparency. I mean I think there are so many kind of pivot points in the last 30 years that we can look at when things really change. But that giant data dump to Julian Assange from, at the time, as he said, Bradley Manning, and putting all this stuff on WikiLeaks. I mean we were just getting our heads around the beauty of the user-generated wisdom of Wikipedia. And along comes this unbelievably massive trove of classified documents that made transparent so much about the way geopolitics work. Private First Class Manning downloaded hundreds of thousands of documents, including a quarter million messages sent by U.S. diplomats from U.S. Army servers and sent them to Julian Assange via an anonymized encrypted web interface. I mean, pretty simple. He was, of course, arrested, served time, but the impact of the data dump to WikiLeaks honestly was a game changer. Not because suddenly everyone around the world knew U.S. secrets. It turns out over time that we realized there was a lot of stuff, classified stuff, that was over-classified. Things written in private were often stated publicly by ambassadors, but you know, it was a transparency of things that just absolutely shocked us. The collateral murder video, you know? A dozen people killed in a U. S. military strike in Baghdad, including women and children, civilians, and two reporters from Reuters. There was also the revelation that the NSA, the National Security Agency, was listening in on more than a hundred different phone lines and Germany’s chancellery. A lot of embarrassing stuff that in the long run, say even people in government turned out to be not that damaging to the U.S. or national security. I pored through a lot those documents at the time and even today it makes for good reading. One thing I recall clearly is a cable from the U.S. Embassy in Tunisia, in which the president of Tunisia at the time, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was basically running the country like a mafia boss. And one of the U.S. diplomats had visited his son-in-law’s newly renovated home — infinity pool, Roman columns, frescoes, you know, the works. And he kept a pet tiger, according to the cable, which just smacks of Scarface vibes. And though the Arab Spring was still a couple of years away at the time, the revelations in WikiLeaks just really helped us understand why so many people in the Middle East and North Africa had had it with their leaders. And no surprise, the Arab Spring began in Tunisia.
Rath: I got to do some great work, was privileged to do some great with The World over the years. I’d have to say the most important area would be reporting from the military court in prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. And that’s one where, Marco, I’ve got to say, we were talking about coverage of international news. That is one where The World stayed with Gitmo and everybody else fell away. I remember the first time I was there for the arraignment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the 9-11 attacks. Everybody was there. They had satellite trucks, everyone was there, and then people just fell away from it, but The World did not. Here’s a snippet of our conversation on this subject from back in August of 2013.
Excerpt of Arun Rath and Marco Werman from 2013: Pretty amazing that you were in the courtroom to see that happen. I mean, I look on Twitter and it feels like you’re the only journalist who’s down there. How many journalists are covering this hearing?
Rath: It’s been kind of disturbing, Marco. I mean, we’ve all been commenting on this. There are 25 reporters down here, and actually a couple of have already left around midweek. This is compared to close to 60 back in May, you know, when they had people that were waiting to get in as well. When I was here in May it was much more of a big deal to win the lottery to get into the courtroom gallery. And this time it was pretty much if you wanted to go, you could get in one way or the other. I know it’s an election season, but you know let’s face it. Guantanamo detainee policy, the military commissions, it’s not an issue in the election. Nobody wants to debate it. And I think people’s attentions are just elsewhere.
Werman: Yeah, and isn’t it crazy that Gitmo is still a live story, and yet none of the active cases have gone to trial? Back in the day, when you would find yourself in that room with a lot of journalists and people were still covering, we’d get word that you were heading down to Gitmo again. We’d get you on the phone, and you’d give us the latest, which evidently is still the latest. If it hadn’t been for you and Carol Rosenberg, formerly with Miami Herald, now with the New York Times, I’m not sure how we would have told the Guantanamo story. You know, we spoke with Carol just last year in September for an update on what’s happening in Guantanamo. And this was after that plea deal that had been struck with the 9-11 families under Biden. They could have had that guilty verdict after the defendants would allocute to their role in the 911 attacks. But then as you remember, [former] Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said, no, they’ve got to have a trial. And once again, this inertia. So here’s the thing that Carol Rosenberg told us back in September, and you probably know this Arun: If these men die in Guantanamo before a trial, legally they die innocent, which would be really painful for the 911 families. Remind me, when was the last time you were there, and what were your impressions?
Rath: The last time I was there was about seven years ago now. It’s been a while, but it was actually a pretty wild trip. It was a follow-up trip for Front Line that I was doing about the Guantanamo detainee who had been in Serbia, and we made a follow-up trip down there and we made a tour of the prison. And what was interesting about that, it was the last tour they gave of the prison. We had an incident where one of the inmates, one of the detainees was shouting to us. And we had a whole sort of interesting conversation with him, which they made us delete the audio and video that we had of that. Not that there was anything dangerous or particular about what he said, but it was kind of an extraordinary moment to actually have this guy from inside the walls like shouting at us and talking to us.
Werman: Extraordinary.
Rath: We got to also talk about the story in our own backyard, the Boston Marathon bombing, which I was a part of some of the coverage, but on the day of the bombing, I was on the road. You were here.
Werman: I was in Boston, I was hosting the show on the Monday of the marathon, and about 10 minutes before show time, we got the alert that bombs had gone off the finish line on Boylston Street. So we continued to follow the story for the rest of the week. But remember, this is also spring break week for classes in Boston and Cambridge, and I was scheduled to take time off and go to Cape Cod with my family. So I wasn’t actually around when the really heavy police activity began in Watertown on Thursday. Of that week with the, you know, kind of concluding the days-long hunt for the two Tsarnaev brothers, the main suspects in the bombing. I was in Provincetown watching the whole thing live on TV... Right up to the night the police killed the older Tsarnaev, Tamerlan, and apprehended his younger brother. Interesting though, because I was recalling this whole week just a few days ago with retired local reporter Philip Martin. Who that night followed the Boston Police Department as they raced into Watertown from Cambridge. And he was covering it for GBH FM. And by coincidence, he happened to see our show engineer, Mike Wilkins, on a dark side street in Watertown and Mike said to him, “Hey, I know a shortcut through the houses to get to where the police are going house to house.” So a wild night, I knew you were there too. But what’s really interesting about this story, Arun, is that it was a local story. But it was also international, which is why our show was drawn to it. The Tsarnaevs, as you remember, had spent their teenage years in Boston. Dzhokhar, the younger brother, attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin. I know people whose kids went to school with them, but it 's a story that also connects the Tsarnaevs to the Soviet Republic of Dagestan, which had a lot of extremist actors. Investigators in Washington saw those years as having an impact on the two brothers. Dzhokhar also told prosecutors that he and his brother had learned how to make pressure cooker bombs by reading the al-Qaeda magazine, Inspire. So this was a story that was global and local. Your coverage must have been pretty intense too, Arun.
Rath: Yeah, well, it’s interesting. I think I got back into town right around the time when you left town. So I was there when that manhunt was going on. And this was this massive police staging area in the parking lot of the Target in Watertown, like just down the road. And because all the roads were closed, I would walk from the studios at GBH down to the police staging area [to] get sound, do recording, and then walk back to the studio. And do debriefs with... That was Aaron Schachter there at the time. And it was just literally like shoe leather reporting, right? Walking out and doing it. And it was an amazing moment. And I know you’ve probably had the same feeling many times, just happy to be working for a program like The World to be able to process something which I otherwise couldn’t process what was going on in my own town.
Werman: Absolutely. I was kind of chuckling earlier, Arun, in your introduction talking about our show The World being 30 years old while the actual world is over five billion years old. But it allows us to do our work in a way that, if I wasn’t a journalist, I’d be kind of like mushing this stuff around in my head without context. But I love my job and The World has been a great place to do it.
