A Winning Writer

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Author: Caroline Olsen-Van Stone

Andrea Elliott, Occidental alumna and Pulitzer Prize winner, provides what readers have been asking for since 9/11: coverage of the majority of Muslims-who are not terrorists.

Elliot spoke of her adventures and lessons learned while covering the beat she created herself, Islam in America for the New York Times. She will also use her experience to advise students interested in pursuing a career in journalism on Wednesday’s Journalism Students Lunch. She won her Pulitzer in 2007 in feature writing for her thoughtful and informative article series on a Brooklyn imam, Sheik Reda Shata called “An Imam in America.” Elliott joined the investigations department of the New York Times as a projects reporter this year, though she has plans to continue writing about Islam in that department as well.

She has been working in this niche for the past 5 years with the New York Times.

Elliott started her Journalism career at Occidental, with the Occidental Weekly. “I was stubbornly dedicated to my trade the day I arrived,” she said. Elliott went to the newspaper office before she was a first-year, and gave the staff samples of her work. “Isn’t that obnoxious? I think they were overjoyed to see such dedication and enthusiasm. I quickly became what we called a Newspaper Rat,” she said.

Reporting has always fascinated Elliott, which is why she became intensely interested in documentary filmmaking after taking a documentary class with Prof. Esther Yau in the Art/Film Department during her last year at Occidental. “I was momentarily flung into documentary film because it was a new way to tell stories,” she said.

Eventually, though, she got back to her first love, the written word. There is a “real liberating simplicity of working with paper and pen,” she said. Looking to the future of print media, she said that her experience with documentary film may come in handy, as newspapers are already scrambling to keep people reading, even if only online.

After graduating Occidental as a comparative literature major in 1996, she got her Masters in Science from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism in 1999. Though she graduated first in her class at Columbia, the New York Times was still a few years into her future.

She began her work as an intern at the Miami Herald from 2000 to 2003, working with night cops to cover dangerous stories like triple homicides. “I witnessed a lot of ugly things in a short amount of time,” she said. “I grew up fast as a reporter.”

Her interest in the lives of Muslims began after 9/11, but really peaked in 2003. She was assigned, as many reporters were after 9/11, to gauge the terrorist attacks’ impact on the Muslim community. Her editors told her to “Go to a mosque” and get reactions. She also wrote what she called a “slice of life” article on Special Registration, a counterterrorism measure enacted Dec. 2003.

After these stories, she began her work with the New York Times covering the Muslim experience in America. “I never saw this as a religion beat. My interest is more in the lives of Muslims,” she said. Her articles cover a diverse mix of Muslim experiences in America and Morocco, and in each one a different blend of “social trends, immigration, politics, and religion.”

The range of her stories is broad: imams, immigrants, Muslim and Black Muslim relationships, the path to becoming a Jihadi for boys in Morocco, and Muslims in the U.S. Military.

Her coverage of Muslim life is markedly different from the dramatic, stereotyping stories that the media usually publishes or airs. “The press has covered Islam through a narrow prism: terrorism,” she said.

She attributes this not to general disinterest in balanced accounts of Muslim life, but to reporters being under constant pressure to write compelling and dramatic stories, which usually fall at the ends of the spectrum.

Elliott explains that many immigrants feel they cannot trust the press, as it “constantly sends out a message lacking in real diversity of thought. Why would anyone believe that anything else could come of talking to a reporter?”

This creates further obstacles for reporters who want to get a different perspective. “Building trust was a huge obstacle,” she said. The New York Times gave Elliott eight months to work on her imam story, for which she feels extremely lucky.

She wanted to find an imam to interview who was willing to spend the necessary amount of time with her, have a compelling story to share, and be a “rich character.” She interviewed eleven imams before finding imam of the Islamic Society of Bay Ridge in Brooklyn, Sheik Reda Shata. He is the subject of her series “An Imam in America.”

In her three articles about Shata, she delves into his daily life, which is brimming with reconciling modern American life with Muslim traditions. Her work about Shata is unique because he isn’t at either end of the Islamic spectrum: “neither a firebrand nor a ready advocate of progressive Islam. Some of his views would offend conservative Muslims; other beliefs would repel American liberals,” she writes in “A Muslim Leader in Brooklyn, Reconciling 2 Worlds.”

At first, Shata was skeptical of Elliott, as she represents the sensationalized press that exaggerates and misrepresents Islam and Muslims. Elliott says that it took a long time to earn his trust, but she felt when they first met that he would be willing to help her-eventually. “That’s why I kept trying,” she said.

Shata, himself is an Egyptian immigrant, and received training at Al Azhar, the high caliber university in Cairo. He was hired to work at the Bay Ridge mosque in Brooklyn while working as an imam in Stuttgart, Germany. Elliott addresses the unfortunate assumptions many readers may have by interviewing not only Shata, but city employees.

“The senior F.B.I. counterterrorism official in New York, Charles E. Frahm, described his interaction with Mr. Shata as ‘very positive’,” Elliott wrote in “To Lead the Faithful in a Faith Under Fire.” She also notes Shata’s feelings about 9/11 as an event that impacted non-Muslim Americans very deeply. “‘It will take them a while to come to terms with us,'” she wrote in “To Lead.”

Among other challenges, many imams face informants disguised as congregants in their mosques. These informants report to the police if they find an imam spreading an extremist message in the mosque and a tolerant one in public, called “double speak,” according to Elliott. In her article, she explained that Shata wasn’t afraid of an informant in his mosque by saying “My page is clean.”

Both informative and sympathetic, Elliott’s articles not only offer a different side of the story, but also attempt to inform the public about the religion and culture itself. She takes the time to carefully and clearly explain practices as they come up in her articles.

She also covers the difficult role that imams play in America: religious leaders, “intermediaries” between immigrants and their new home and “diplomats for their faith.”

Elliott locates herself as an outsider to Islam as a culture and religion, and doesn’t speak Arabic-though she is currently learning to. She believes, however, that her outsider status sometimes helps, though it did cause major trust issues in her interviews. She described the reporter as a “perpetual outsider,” with whom people sometimes feel more open to talking about taboos. “I don’t believe that as reporters, our status as outsiders should impede on our willingness to pursue these stories,” she said.

Part of Elliott’s work for the Miami Herald involved interviewing native Spanish speakers. She explained that interviewing people in that context was much easier because she is fluent in Spanish.

This experience, she recalls, “was amazing,” but she values her work with Sheik Rada Shata for teaching her lessons both hard and rewarding. “It was the story of a lifetime,” she said.

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