Lyse Doucet

Even though your work involves reporting on wars and their aftermath, you never describe yourself as a war correspondent. Why not?

I don't want to be defined by war. Everyone I know who's lived in war wants nothing more than to get out of war. And I also don't want to think that my life of travel has been a life of going from one conflict to the other. It's been a life of ups and downs, of light and dark, of humor and happiness. And so I don't want to be defined by that horrible three-letter word war.

You make the distinction that international news is no longer foreign. Tell me more about that.

Where is the Syrian story or the Afghan story or the Iraqi story? It's down our street and the families who've moved in. It's in our schools where children of different ancestries all learn together. I always say about these stories of our time that even as in the most complicated and complex story, if you drill down, what are they in essence? In essence, they are about mothers and fathers and streets and neighborhoods and societies and these kind of human stories they cross borders.

What are your personal feelings about what's happening in Afghanistan today following the withdrawal of American troops last August?

Painful. Very painful. My pain, of course, is only of consequence to me and my closest friends … I don't want to say that there aren't Afghans who support the Taliban. This is a very conservative country. But this was not just a leaving of a country, a journey. This was a leaving of … for so many Afghans, leaving of themselves behind so much of who they were, what they had worked for, and who they wanted to be. In all of my years of reporting, I've never seen this kind of a situation. And now this is what's happening in Afghanistan. Not a day goes by without a new message arriving in my email, in my whatever social media platform, asking for help to leave the country.

Did watching your friends leave the country change your own views about belonging?

I have come to believe that the word home is one of the most evocative, the most powerful, the most beautiful words in the English language. And I felt it when I came back from months in Afghanistan. And I went home in a way that so many of my Afghan friends I knew knew that possibly they would never go home. And I went to my home, my little town on the Bay de Chaleur, the Chaleur Bay, the Bay of Heat, on the eastern corner of Canada, and I was overwhelmed by the beauty of the landscape. but also just washed in gratitude. I can come home. It didn't matter that there'd been a Federal election in Canada. It didn't matter who was in power or not. I had the right to go home.

You have said about your role: 'I don't believe in emotional broadcasting, but I do believe in empathy.' Tell me about the distinction.

My feeling is that getting emotional is not really part of our broadcasting. Sometimes it just happens and it's part of the story. There was a story they did from Afghanistan. I was at the airport, I was interviewing a journalist and she was in tears and you could tell my voice, it was caught in my throat, that I was also finding it really, really difficult. So I don't believe in emotional, because that means you sort of lost control of your storytelling. But empathy I absolutely believe in. Although people we get so many people emailing or messaging us, oh, you're taking sides, you're this biased, whatever. You know, I believe it's ingrained in all of us that we don't take sides in our reporting. But I feel no hesitation in taking the side of the people, the children in Syria who were targeted, tortured, traumatized. And I do see my job as a journalist to try to feel a little bit about what they are going through. They are no different from you or I. Put ourselves in other people's shoes.