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Laura Ling, a Vanguard correspondent, producer and vice president at Current TV for five years, appeared on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" on Tuesday, along with her sister (and Oprah contributor), Lisa Ling.
Laura talked about the story that drew her to North Korea, her imprisonment, interrogation, trial and eventual release, and about the book she and Lisa have written, Somewhere Inside, out now from HarperCollins.
From the show's recap, she also shares the story of how her captors wanted President Barack Obama to serve as envoy in negotiating her and Euna Lee's release:
[T]he most important relationship Laura developed was with her investigator. "In the beginning, he was very, very stern. One look from him could send me into a state of nervousness and fear," she says. "But over time, I feel like I developed a relationship with him and that he wanted me to go home. And he was trying to convey information to me that I could convey to Lisa that might help me get home." The interrogator told Laura that the United States needed to send an envoy to negotiate her release. "At one point, we were talking about who would be an acceptable envoy," she says. "And I was trying to say, 'Well, what about the chairman of my company, Vice President Gore?'" Instead, President Barack Obama was suggested. "I said, 'Sir, with all due respect, if you think President Obama is going to come here, you might as well send me to the camp right now," she says. "And he said, 'Well, what about past presidents?' That's how President Clinton's name evolved." Laura convinced her interrogator to let her call Lisa to relay the information. Soon, the sisters were the only channel through which the governments of both countries were communicating. "It was unprecedented [that] they let Laura call me," Lisa says. "That's how the information was getting across, and that's how eventually it was communicated from Laura to me that the envoy had to be Bill Clinton."
Hear more from Laura, and watch never-before-seen footage from her investigation about North Korean refugees, in a special Vanguard episode. "Captive in North Korea" will air Wednesday, May 19 at 10/9c.
Watch a preview:
Laura Ling, a Vanguard correspondent, producer and vice president at Current TV for... more
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shana
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2 years ago
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Dear Vanguard Fans:
After five memorable years, we are sad to announce that Vanguard’s executive producer Laura Ling will be moving on from Current Media. In a letter addressed to the staff, Laura felt it was time to focus on starting a family and the writing of a book with her sister Lisa Ling about her captivity last summer in North Korea and the bond they shared that helped them get through it.
“Working at Current and leading the Vanguard team has been the highlight of my career.” wrote Laura Ling. “It has been challenging, but thoroughly rewarding; intense, but fun. I’m extremely proud of the Vanguard team, which is working so passionately to raise awareness about some of the most important issues affecting our world. I will continue to be a champion of their work and of Current as a whole.” Dear Vanguard Fans:
After five memorable years, we are sad to announce that... more
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Yesterday morning, outside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, I stood in a long line for two hours with thousands of other people. We were all braving a pretty cold morning for Southern California, but we weren’t lined up for tickets. The line was over half a mile long, and ended in a big circus-style tent. Inside, amidst many helium filled balloons, 50 nurses were dispensing H1N1 vaccines. Lots of little kids were crying. “It’s just like the county fair,” I observed to my son, “except with shots.”
We were all there because swine flu vaccine is scarce, and the Pasadena Health Department was making it available to people who are under 24, over 65, pregnant, or facing chronic health issues. Most of the people standing in the line were not eligible to get the shots themselves, they were parents. There were a lot of strollers. Other people brought little chairs for their toddlers, which they kept moving as the line moved, ala Woody Allen playing the cello in the marching band in “Take the Money and Run.” Kids left the line to play nearby when they couldn’t bear it any longer. My son got a bit restive also, but since he’s in high school, and has a driver’s license, I gave him the keys to my car and 20 bucks, and he left for an hour to get breakfast.
All in all, we were an orderly bunch, and everything went smoothly. And that’s what struck me. Among the many different subjects I’ve covered over the years are disease outbreaks. In April of 2003, I covered the SARS outbreak in Hong Kong and China. And in November of 2005, Laura Ling and I covered Avian Flu in Vietnam—a flu that unlike H1N1, swine flu, never produced a serious outbreak in people.
Battle Against Bird Flu (Video)
Pandemic (Video)
But what struck me yesterday in Pasadena, and struck me on those previous stories, is that there are some situations which don’t seem like they’ll get better unless government is efficient, and everyone is willing to cooperate in an orderly fashion toward a common goal.
Recently on the Vanguard Blog:
- Does Sri Lanka offer lessons for Obama? - Darren Foster
- Kaj’s robot and weapon firing skills are put to the test - Lauren Cerre
- What Do You Want to Watch? - Mitch KossYesterday morning, outside the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, I stood in a long line for two... more
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Happy? Or scared?
Today’s big economic news is a report showing the US Gross Domestic Product grew 3.5 percent from July through September, the first GDP growth in over a year. Wall Street was happy. Stocks on the Dow Jones average rose nearly 200 points. The Obama Administration’s $787 billion stimulus program, combining tax cuts and government spending got some of the credit. At the same time, another report this week showed that American consumer confidence is down, partly due to unemployment continuing to climb. It’s almost at 10 percent now, while wages are mostly flat and home prices remain low, 401Ks are not recovered, blah, blah, blah…
If you’ve looked at a newspaper, or TV screen, or the Internet in the past 18 months, you’ve seen all the dismal stats.
So now that the GDP is growing again, which way are things going for you? Not in the next six months, but in the next six years. What kind of economy is going to emerge from the greatest economic decline since the 1930s? That’s the big question, and it points out one of the big dilemmas of journalism. You would think that the really important stuff would be stuff that you would want to pay closest attention to but the important stuff — the average American’s position in the economy — often builds over a lot of time, sometimes over many years, in the way that you’re supposed to boil a lobster, starting with the water at room temperature, so that by the time he or she is cooked, he or she doesn’t notice (so they say). So although this present recession seemed to start abruptly, the factors behind it kind of crept up on us. And that’s what’s tough to cover, and tough to follow.
As I've said before, at Vanguard we try to look forward. In May, we did a documentary mini-series in which we tried to look at the economy that we’ve had in the US since the 1980s, against the backdrop of its collapse. Laura Ling went to Las Vegas, formerly the fastest growing place in the US, for "Lost Vegas."
Adam Yamaguchi went to China’s manufacturing center for "Outsourcing Unemployment."
And Lauren Cerre and Tracey Chang went to Argentina for "Thank You, Recession."
Basically, we were looking at what kind of economy will emerge from this present downturn. Will we manage to go back to the system we’ve had since the 1980s? There we had tremendously high levels of consumer spending on cheap stuff — cheap because we’ve outsourced many of our manufacturing jobs to places where wages are lower. And our wealth creation came from real estate, stock, and equity inflation — essentially a series of bubbles. Or we could go back to the system we had in the ‘50s through the ‘70s, where there wasn’t so much economic separation in the US — we were essentially middle class — and wage growth was the key to economic improvement.
As we travel around the world, there is also another model that we see in globalized economies: Those economic engines of the developing world, like China and India, where the “developed” portion of the economy, the economy that we see and which looks like ours, doesn’t include all the population, or even most of it. Many, or most citizens, in these countries are invisible in economic terms. In fact, when Tracey Chang interviewed the COO of Infosys, the poster child of India’s high-tech development, in Bangalore India, he pointed out to her that India’s growth was not including most people.
So where are you going to emerge? Right now there seem to be three directions.Happy? Or scared?
Today’s big economic news is a report showing the US Gross... more
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I was about to tell you about how Vanguard’s office here in Hollywood is located in the unofficial transgender street hustler capital of Los Angeles County, and about the effect that recession seems to have had on them, when my colleague Darren Foster mailed me this link.
I can switch subjects because even though, in March of 2001, Laura Ling and I shot an hour doc for MTV on street hustlers one block from where my desk at Vanguard now is, Laura and I also shot one last fall on the war among Mexico’s narco-traffickers.
When considering the size of the recent raids around the US against what’s happening in Mexico, one question is why the narco war down there isn’t up here, given how big the narcotics distribution networks here seem to be. The standard answer is that the cartels in Mexico didn’t used to be particularly violent either, until the federal government started to pressure them. In the old days, before the year 2000, when Vincente Fox was elected Mexico’s first president from a party other than the PRI in 70 years, cartels could maintain their position as multi-national corporations pretty much in the way that other multi-national corporations maintain their positions in their host countries—they were too big to fail. But once Fox, and his successor as President, Felipe Calderon, started to act against the web of corruption that bound the cartels to law enforcement and government officials, the cartels were obliged to maintain their positions the old fashioned, Chicago-in-the-1920s way, by shooting it out.
Another view might be that we seem to have just passed out of one of the more violent epochs in American history, the roughly 40-year period from the mid-‘1960s, until just a few years back. And if you look at all the urban homicides we had in that period, and look at how many were related in some way to narcotics, then maybe we already had our narco war. It was simply that, unlike what’s going on now it Mexico, ours wasn’t organized, just low-level dealers and users committing murder, often against each other. And where violence by powerful organized criminal groups can be viewed as a threat to the state, unorganized violence is just a threat to the neighborhood.
On the third hand, we seem to be in an era where globalization brings us all sorts circumstance that we don’t seem to have seen before, and sometimes when you’re in the middle of something, it can be tough to see which way the trend line is moving.I was about to tell you about how Vanguard’s office here in Hollywood is located... more
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Last week, the US dollar hit a 14-month low against the euro, coming just shy of the point where it takes $1.50 to buy one euro. Commodities priced in dollars, such as oil, went up in price to off-set this decline, and the weak state of the US greenback set off a certain amount of discussion in the media. But in keeping with Vanguard’s mission, we warned you about this decline nearly two years ago… Sort of.
In this story, which was shot mostly in the fall of 2007, Adam Yamaguchi looks at the reason behind a phenomenon that we’d been noticing first hand as we traveled the world on stories: In recent years, the dollar seemed to buy less and less. In July of 2000, when the US government had a surplus, I was shooting for MTV in Germany with Laura Ling, and less than $0.90 US bought a euro, and Europe was charming.
By the time “The Poor Dollar,” was shot, Europe was challenging. Scenes of Adam experiencing first hand the weakness of the dollar versus the British pound and the euro, of Tracey Chang witnessing the weakness of the dollar versus the Canadian dollar and Filipino peso, are interspersed with Adam’s look at the causes of the dollar’s decline: The US trade deficit, the US government’s budget deficit, and overspending by US consumers—throughout this decade 70% of the US economy was based on consumer spending. In fact, our spending what we didn’t have was the engine of the world’s economy.
And, indeed, throughout the first half of 2008, just as we told you in "The Poor Dollar," oil prices skyrocketed, in part due to speculative frenzy—the stock bubble had started bursting the previous fall, driving speculators to new areas—but in part due to the dollar’s downward spiral.
So at that point, we felt that Vanguard had fulfilled its mission of giving you an early heads up on important changes in the world. But, when we’re doing our job properly, we’re just an early warning system, not prognosticators. In looking at the dollar’s decline, we didn’t factor in the effect a dose of worldwide financial collapse would have on the greenback. As America plunged into the deepest recession it’s had in 70 years, Americans cut back spending and started saving. The trade deficit dropped also. Oil prices collapsed. And the dollar got stronger.
But as the US economy revived a bit during the summer and the US government hit its highest proportional deficit since 1945, the dollar has been sinking again, and you can take another look at "The Poor Dollar." Our warning seems to be germane once again.
Last week, U.S. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner warned that after the recession is over, the US government dials back on deficit spending, the only way the dollar can be strengthened is if Americans learn to live within their means. And that raises a larger question, one that Laura and Adam looked at this spring in "Lost Vegas."
That is, can we continue to base our economy on US consumers supporting the world, and on stock, real estate, and commodity bubbles that go with that, or is the only way to avoid our country declining like our currency is to find some other way forward? We don’t know, but we’re pointing out the question.Last week, the US dollar hit a 14-month low against the euro, coming just shy of the... more
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