China Seminar | 8 October 2009

Covering China: A Veteran Journalist’s Views

Todd Carrel is a journalist who covered Asia for more than a decade as the ABC News bureau chief and correspondent in Beijing and as an Associated Press reporter in Japan. He has been a journalist-in-residence at the East-West Center in Hawaii, a Knight International Press Fellow in Hong Kong, a special fellow for the Independent Journalism Foundation in Cambodia, and a visiting lecturer at the UC Berkeley’s Graduate School of Journalism. He has worked for National Geographic on many projects, contributed numerous freelance stories to newspapers, and produced an independent documentary aired on PBS stations.

Carrel covered the 1989 protest movement in Beijing for ABC News. On the third anniversary of the military assault on civilians that ended the Tiananmen protests, he and his cameraman revisited the square only to be attacked by Chinese plainclothes police. He suffered severe head and back injuries that left him disabled. Despite his physical limitations, he has returned to China to file occasional print reports and seek medical help. His article “Beijing: New Face for the Ancient Capital” was published in National Geographic (March 2000). Another article about a return visit to Tiananmen (“The Edge of a Frozen Square”) was written for the Knight International Press Fellowship program in 2001 and is available online. The budding digital journalists he has trained at Berkeley have published many multimedia reports from China and Asia.