Patty Vest: Welcome to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona college. I'm Patty Vest. Mark Wood: I'm Mark Wood. Patty Vest: In these extraordinary times, we're coming to you from our various homes as we all shelter in place. Mark Wood: This season on Sagecast, we're talking to Pomona faculty and alumni about the personal, professional, and intellectual journeys that have brought them to where they are today. Patty Vest: This episode was recorded in the studios of KSPC prior to the campus shutdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Today we're delighted to talk to award-winning journalist and returning Sagehen, Anjali Kamat, class of 2000. Mark Wood: Welcome, Anjali. Anjali Kamat: Thank you. Thank you for having me. Mark Wood: Since Pomona, you've gone on to build a really interesting career in investigative journalism. Let's start with what you're doing now. What are you doing now? Where are you currently? Anjali Kamat: I live in New York, and I have spent the past year and a half at New York public radio, WNYC, which has been fantastic. I've been an investigative reporter there focusing on Wall Street. So looking into how Wall Street affects the lives of daily people, so looking at consumer finance, looking at housing, real estate, why is New York so unaffordable, questions like that. Mark Wood: That's a question we ask about California too. Anjali Kamat: Absolutely. Yeah. Patty Vest: Tell us a little bit about your day to day. You say you're in New York examining the very important topic that affect a lot of people. Anjali Kamat: Yeah. Patty Vest: A huge amount of people. Tell us a little bit, how do you go about your day to day? Anjali Kamat: As an investigative reporter, my beat, in the past couple years, has accidentally become real estate, and finance, and business, and how it affects regular people. I fell into that because, after the election of Trump in 2016, I was really struck by the fact that one of his first foreign visitors were Indian real-estate developers. I was so surprised by that, that I started digging into the Trump organization's business deals in India and realized that the largest foreign portfolio of the Trump organization is actually in India. Anjali Kamat: I spent a year and a half, with the support of Type Investigations, which used to be called The Investigative Fund, digging into this and just got really interested in money, and real estate, and the way it flows, and questions of money laundering, and who's buying an apartment, and why is it so difficult to know who buys an apartment, and how people hide their money in luxury real estate, and doing this in a transnational scale. So I got really interested in that. Anjali Kamat: And then, digging into Trump's own history as a real-estate developer in New York City, got really interested in understanding the really complex tax codes and zoning that governs New York City housing. If you had asked me about this five or six years ago, I probably would have been bored, been like, "No, I do international reporting," or, "I look at race and the criminal justice system or social movements." Patty Vest: [crosstalk 00:03:20]. Anjali Kamat: Yeah. But I've come to realize this stuff is actually what lays the groundwork for a lot that's really fascinating. Even if we look ahead to the Bloomberg campaign, a lot of my reporting and research has somehow ended up being like, "Wow, the Bloomberg years are years of when Mike Bloomberg was mayor of New York City, which was for three terms." Resulted in massive displacements and making New York City a place that attracted a lot of capital and real-estate investment, and a large part of why there is a large homeless population in New York and why so many families have gotten displaced, mostly working-class Black and Brown families. Anjali Kamat: These are the questions that I'm interested in. That shapes my day-to-day life, which when I've been at NYC, it involves going into an office every day and working with my colleagues and I'm part of the investigative team. But I'll shortly be leaving them and doing my own thing for a while. A lot of what I do is in partnership with other journalists, with journalistic organizations, and talking to people. With housing, it's talking to a lot of housing lawyers, talking to people who are in housing court, talking to advocates, talking to real-estate developers, talking to urban planners, trying to get a sense of what's happening and who's getting affected, and why is it happening really? Anjali Kamat: What does this tell us? What's the story it tells us? Because I think one of the reasons I got into journalism is I love stories, and everybody has a story. Every country has its mythology. Every political campaign has a narrative it wants you to believe in. How do we, as storytellers, as journalists, whether it's fiction writers or as people who traffic in facts, what are the stories that we're hearing? How can we make sense of the world and put together a story that might not be the story you're hearing? How can we make it as inclusive as possible and something that just makes you sit up and think, be like, "Oh, is this really what's happening?" Anjali Kamat: I didn't understand that... How do you connect all those dots? I think, for me, investigative reporting really goes back to my training as a history major in Pomona. How do I sit and go through documents? How do I find these documents? What are the archives- Mark Wood: How do you analyze them? How do you interpret what you're seeing? How do you put it together into something that makes sense? Yeah. Anjali Kamat: Exactly. I mean, these are questions that, when I was doing breaking news, or when I was reporting from conflict zones, it wasn't so much of a question. But now that I'm doing more investigative work, it's everything. It's like, what is data? How do we get data sets or get documents? How do we question the source, question its veracity? Really try and understand what piece of the story is it telling us, and is it a useful piece? Mark Wood: Yeah. You mentioned that you worked on this for like a year and a half in the era of the 24-hour news cycle. That seems like a luxurious amount of time to spend working on a story. How do you approach that kind of in-depth journalism and the demands for producing things along the way? Anjali Kamat: I was very lucky. I had another job, because there's not a whole lot of money in journalism and you can't really support yourself doing long-form investigative work. But I was lucky for two reasons. One, I had a teaching job at Brooklyn College. I was a visiting professor there for a year, which was fantastic. So I had some time. And then, I also got support from Type Investigations, which supports independent freelance reporters. Combined, I had a little bit of time and just enough money to do the reporting and the research. Anjali Kamat: I wasn't working for a daily news organization at the time, so I didn't have the pressure of needing to publish. At WNYC, I was brought in on a grant for investigative reporting. I mean, in the Trump era, I think across the country, news organizations and funders are realizing that investigative reporting is actually really important and not something that should be just done away with. Mark Wood: Yeah, right. Anjali Kamat: I mean, the piece I did ended up as two episodes of the Trump, Inc Podcast from WNYC and ProPublica, which, if I'm not mistaken, is one of the first audio investigations. How do you have an open investigation into a current administration that people can listen to and not just read? Because, again, we're also talking about this time of social media and people's very limited ability to focus for long periods of time. Your attention is constantly taken away, whether it's by the news cycle, or Twitter and you want something that just fits into a tweet. Anjali Kamat: People have found that people are actually more willing to spend time listening to something than maybe reading something over a really long period of time. My investigation was a 12,500-word piece and I don't know how many people read that, but a lot of people did listen to the two 25-minute podcasts. Patty Vest: How have you seen that evolution? Because you're right, people's attention has significantly decreased. And in your investigative work, was visual more important before? Talk to us a little bit about how visuals, versus audio, versus reading a long, long, long article, how has that evolved? How have you seen that change? Anjali Kamat: I spent 10 years in television. I was at Democracy Now! I was a producer, then a cohost with Amy Goodman, and a correspondent covering the Arab uprisings. That was both TV and radio. Mostly I think people watch it online. That was wonderful. Has a huge audience and a very dedicated audience, people who really like Democracy Now! and are committed to it, which is great. And then I worked at Al Jazeera making documentaries, and some of them were investigative documentaries. Anjali Kamat: That was fantastic because there is something really gripping about a visual narrative, and especially when you're in a place where there's dramatic changes happening and you're able to capture that on camera and bring that to people. I mean, everybody wants to see it, whether it's a short little... With the transformation of technology and how cheap it's gotten to make high-quality videos. But even before that, just with cell phones having cameras and everybody being able to take a video to a protest, or record an act of police brutality, or bear witness to something happening and have their own video of it and be able to share it immediately. Anjali Kamat: The landscape of video and how quickly it can be shared has changed. What we focused on when I was at Fault Lines, which is the flagship current affairs documentary program at Al Jazeera, was how do we make really excellent quality video? How do we put our investment into that, but also really gripping stories where that involves people actually being on the scene of something happening. That was a real challenge, but also I learned so much because it was making 25-minute documentaries on a range of topics, from what was going on in Sinai, to garment factories, disasters in garment factories in Bangladesh, and tracing the supply chain backup to Gap or Walmart, to trafficking of labor on US military bases in Afghanistan, to women's prisons in California, to what was happening in Ferguson a few years ago. Anjali Kamat: We were able to make all these films and Fault Line still continues. I was there for five years and it was a great run. I think I transitioned away from video and film because one of the things I was missing was, as a reporter, how do I have an even smaller footprint in interacting with people? Because the more complex the stories were getting, the harder it was to show up with a camera. So when I'm digging into something like corruption in real-estate, or corruption in the presidency, it's a little bit hard to expect anyone to be really willing to talk on camera. Patty Vest: Sure. Sure. Sure. Anjali Kamat: It's a lot easier to just go in as a print reporter, just put like even just your cell phone on the table to record. So it's not even super high-quality audio at the time. But it's just more like, "Let me understand the story. I know you're at a lot of risk at speaking out." I mean, of course, people who make films and TV do this all the time. And we've used, when it was justified, used hidden cameras or spoken to whistleblowers who spoke at great personal cost and said, "Okay, we won't show your face. We're going to just show your hands or something, and your silhouette, so nobody will recognize you." Anjali Kamat: We've done that, but as the stories got more complex, it's like some stories are good for TV and some stories are just hard to show on TV because what are you seeing? The stories that are good for television and video are often something's happening. It has to be gripping to watch. And so, I think I started just getting more and more interested in complex stories like real estate, finance, housing, which weren't necessarily a natural fit for television. I think the challenge for me was like, "How do I make it interesting for print or audio?" Anjali Kamat: Working with the people I've worked with at WNYC has been really great to really think about, how do we tell the story in a way that people will care about it and people will understand it, and hopefully people will be a little upset about it? Mark Wood: Yeah. The way you describe the differences between the media is interesting to me. You've done both print and- Anjali Kamat: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Mark Wood: Do you have a preference? Do you like working in one field of the media more than another? Patty Vest: Choose your favorite child. Anjali Kamat: I know. It's a hard question. I really like all three media. I mean, I've never worked in a newspaper or in a traditional newspaper. I mean, all the print pieces I've done have been magazine pieces, or I've written for newspapers but as a freelancer. So I don't have that attachment to a newspaper news room. Mark Wood: Service daily. Yeah. Anjali Kamat: Yeah. But I've done that in television and radio. I've worked in daily newsrooms, which is... There's a lot of adrenaline. It's exciting. There's a lot going on. Mark Wood: It's much better when you're younger. Anjali Kamat: Yes. I mean, I had a friend- Mark Wood: You can handle all the adrenaline. Anjali Kamat: Right. I had a friend who left TV for a while and got a master's in urban planning. I remember she emailed me and she was like, "Hey, I see there's some jobs at Al Jazeera. I was at this event the other day, and I saw these people filming, and I saw the pile of cables and I had this rush of nostalgia. I just want to get back into TV. I miss it." And so, I think it's a little bit like that, trying to choose. For me, I think about it more as a type of story, because some stories are just really good fits. I mean, you can make any story into video or print or TV or radio. It's just a question of, is it best suited? Anjali Kamat: There's sometimes certain nuances and complexities that are harder to translate on TV and some stories that the magic is just lost in print. Like you have to see it because you just see the way the light falls on this person's face. And that's what stays with you or that expression in somebody's eyes. Mark Wood: Yeah, and the immediacy of video is the power of it, right? Anjali Kamat: Exactly. Mark Wood: The humanity of it, the just immediacy of experiencing something rather than just reading about it. Anjali Kamat: Yeah. Exactly. I think all of them have a certain kind of magic, and obviously writing well and words are central to all of them. I think I was surprised when I first got into documentary, how important a good script was. It's not just having excellent video and a great editor. You really need to use words minimally, but know how to use them. Patty Vest: You mentioned earlier that you wouldn't have imagined covering real estate, or housing, or Wall Street. Obviously, the 2016 election sent you to different type of areas that you probably didn't think of covering before. How has reporting changed in this climate? We face a different political climate within the last, let's say, four years. How has that affected the way that you do your reporting, or what do you find the most challenging about doing reporting in this type of climate? Anjali Kamat: I mean, I think many things. I think having done a lot of international reporting, it's been very interesting to see American reporters who just do domestic reporting change the way they interact with government sources and authority, and deal with them with much more skepticism the way we're used to doing overseas. So I think the change in power with a president who makes repeated and open comments, criticizing the media, leading to threats against the media, constantly discrediting the media, have led to a much more adversarial relationship with the press, which I think is good on our part, for us to maintain an adversarial relationship with power because that's our job, is to hold power accountable. Anjali Kamat: So I think in that sense, I'm heartened by that. I think we're all now seeing a government the way we should be, with a healthy degree of skepticism and not believing every press release, not simply regurgitating it, which we used to see a lot when it came to foreign policy. We're not really critically engaging with a civilian death toll. Like, "Let's question this. This is coming with a certain interest in mind." But it's also, of course, made things much harder I think for all of us in terms of just getting basic information. And I think with a lot of agencies... Anjali Kamat: The kind of work I do would be difficult under any administration, because a lot of it is looking at private companies. So there's no FOIA for private companies and it's a total black box. We live in a world where private companies have more and more control over our lives, and it's harder and harder to get disclosure about what exactly is going on. It relies entirely on human intelligence and whistleblowers and leaks, which people have to pay a greater and greater price to do, and people are nervous about doing it. Anjali Kamat: That was with the case with the government, like, yes, you can FOIA things, but it's always been known that some agencies are more open to FOIAs. There's always exceptions when it comes to Freedom Of Information Act, especially when it comes to questions of national security or intelligence. It's very, very hard, if not impossible, to get information without a leak. I think what's been different under this administration is the sense that a lot of agencies are being stacked with loyalists. So it's getting harder to find sources who would be willing to talk to you, which might have been the case in previous administrations where someone would be like, "Yeah, here's what's going on. There's this many detentions," whatever it is. Anjali Kamat: I think the biggest challenge I see for a lot of reporters, including myself, is how do you find trustworthy sources when so many people in different... I mean, leave aside the fact that multiple agencies are left understaffed. We're in almost the end of the first administration and they're still severely understaffed, so there's that piece of it. But then, when everyone is just very scared to speak up, and we saw this with the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, like- Mark Wood: When we've seen in the last few days why people are scared to speak up. Anjali Kamat: Exactly. Exactly. With what's happening with the justice department. Yeah. Mark Wood: I just did something I shouldn't have done, I think, which is to peg this to a certain time. Patty Vest: Date it. I know. I just thought about that. Mark Wood: Date it. So we may end up cutting that one out. But yeah. We'll see. Patty Vest: We can say that she's here for the fake news, so that they'll know. Mark Wood: Okay. Patty Vest: [crosstalk 00:20:44]. That's [inaudible 00:20:44]. Anjali Kamat: Is that going on air? Patty Vest: It's a bit of [inaudible 00:20:44]. Mark Wood: Let's talk about some of the other things you've covered. I mean, you reported on the Arab uprisings in Egypt and Libya. Anjali Kamat: Yeah. Mark Wood: Can you talk to us about what that was like? I mean, we look back on it now and it feels different than at the time. But what was it like at the time? Anjali Kamat: It was exhilarating. I mean, it was definitely the most exciting time of my life. I mean, it felt like I was in the middle of history being made. I remember having a conversation with my dad and he was so happy that I was there and he was like, "You're in the middle of history." And I was like, "Yeah, it's a moment you don't think about." I think growing up, I certainly didn't think about being in the middle of a revolution, or a popular uprising. That felt like something of a different era. It didn't- Mark Wood: Yeah. Things you read about in history books. Anjali Kamat: Exactly. It didn't feel like something that was possible in our cynical generation. It was very, very exciting. I think, partly because I spent time in the Middle East, and I studied Arabic, and I was very familiar with Egypt and had lived there before I studied Arabic in Egypt, and I'd worked there and had a lot of friends there, so I ended up... I was supposed to go to Egypt. I had a ticket to Cairo. I'd taken a year off of Democracy Now! I wanted to spend some time with my dad. I was dating someone in Egypt, so I was like, "I'm going to go spend some time with this person in Egypt." And I had a ticket for January 25th, 2011, which I'd bought in October. Anjali Kamat: And then, a couple of days before, my dad had a fall. And so, I was like, "Oh, I'm going to stay a bit longer in India with my dad." I remember my partner at the time was like, "You know, there's stuff happening in Tunisia. The president just got deposed. I think there's going to be some protests in Egypt. But you know Egypt. They're just going to crack down on it. It's probably going to be over in a couple of days. But you shouldn't delay by too long because you don't want to miss this. It could be interesting." I was like, "Yeah, yeah, but I've got to be with my dad." Anjali Kamat: And then, the 25th happened and I was watching these protests, the 26th, the 27th, they kept going. And I was like, "I cannot believe I'm not there. This is insane. I had a ticket to get there." And then, I think my dad got so tired of me complaining, because all we were doing was watching BBC, and CNN, and Al Jazeera, and I was so upset that our internet connection wasn't very good and I couldn't watch people's live reports from- Mark Wood: Well, your mind was in Egypt, so you might as well have the rest of you there, right? Anjali Kamat: It's exactly what my dad said. He said, "Only your body is here. Please leave. I'll be fine- Patty Vest: Thank you for the company. Bye. Anjali Kamat: Just go." So I got there a few days later and... When I got there, I was the only foreigner on the flight, was the only foreign woman, certainly. It was mostly working class Egyptian men who were coming back from low-paid jobs in the Middle East, and the Gulf, and the Persian Gulf, because I came from East to Egypt. I remember I had talked to my partner at the time and he was like, "Well, the protests are ongoing. They're about to cut off the phone lines. So make your way to this address. You know Egypt, you know Arabic. Figure it out. I can't come to the airport. It's too crazy." Anjali Kamat: I was like, "Okay, fine." I mean, it was just totally fine for me. And then I get there and it's this abandoned airport, and there is tires burning, not a single cab. It was quite something. Mark Wood: Sounds like a scene from a movie. Anjali Kamat: It felt like it. I walked for a bit. It was getting dark and I was like, "Am I being silly?" And then I finally found some cab driver who I was like, "Look, you've got to take me. You can't leave me here alone." Kind of appealed to his sense of decency. Mark Wood: Humanity. Anjali Kamat: I was like, "Really, are you just going to leave me here alone? Just take me somewhere. Just get me out of here." I finally managed to get in, and then we went to Tahrir Square. I mean, it just felt like magical. There were thousands and thousands of people. It was just walking around, banners saying, "The people demand the fall of the regime." It was like part carnivalesque. There were people selling food, and dancing, and singing, and people setting up camp. It just seemed like magical. Anjali Kamat: And then a few days later, the counter attacks started, and you started to see people attacking the square and supporters of Mubarak. And then you had this whole propaganda war where the state television was just showing images of the Nile flowing peacefully, refusing to show pictures of the protests. Patty Vest: Oh my gosh. Anjali Kamat: So it was also early lessons in how propaganda works and how it doesn't work. It fails miserably. But it was the 18 days in the square that it took for Mubarak to be brought down. I feel very grateful that I was there for a large part of it and see how people can take care of each other. What a magical experience it is to be a part of a movement with people from completely different parts of society, who you wouldn't normally interact with because of your class background, or gender, or religion, or ideological beliefs. Anjali Kamat: It was a really magical thing I think for everyone, where you just had this vision of a different possibility, a different world. And then, when Mubarak finally stepped down on February 11th, there was just disbelief and joy. And then, after that, in many ways, it was a series of disappointments that got more and more and more grave and- Mark Wood: How do you process that, having been there and having felt what you felt? Anjali Kamat: I think that's a question that I'm still trying to figure out because, as I watch protests in other places, and I see people from other countries get really excited, especially what's happening in India now with a lot of the protests that I've been watching from afar, and jealously wishing I was there to see this, because I never expected something like this in India. But, again, the lesson I think is, we can't get stuck believing that this is the only way things will go. There's always a possibility of some sort of change. Anjali Kamat: I think a large part of our role as journalists is also not to just accept the status quo, but to be able to imagine different possibilities and be ready and willing for that. But it's also hard, I think, given what I've seen and what I've seen my friends go through. And so many friends who were arrested, people who were injured by rubber bullets, who lost their eyesight, people who died, people who are still in prison, people who have had serious mental health issues because of the trauma of what they went through. Anjali Kamat: The way it ended, with a military coup and a massacre, it's difficult to... I can't say it's not worth it. I talk to friends from Syria or Yemen, or many other parts of the world, it's like, "Was it not worth it? Do you just wish you could go back to the way it was?" Very few people will say, "Yes, I wish we could just go back," because sometimes maybe, but it's a hard thing to say. It's like, "Well, we're in this hard place and we don't know how long this hard place is going to last, but- Mark Wood: But they got a taste of... I mean, that makes a difference, having a taste of freedom, of democracy. Anjali Kamat: Yeah. I mean- Mark Wood: That doesn't go away. Anjali Kamat: I think so. I mean, I remember having dinner with a Libyan novelist, Hisham Matar, a few months after the uprisings. His father was disappeared by Gaddafi's regime in Libya a few decades before and he'd never seen him. The Libyan uprising was also happening and he was talking to me and some of my friends because we had gone into Libya and he hadn't been able to go back yet. And he was contemplating a visit, but he was also very wrapped up in his own pain. Anjali Kamat: I remember we were all complaining like, "Things are so bad. Nothing's moving. All the demands are being met. This is just so depressing." And he was like, "Don't despair." Everyone who was there had a window into a different possibility, and that's going to stay with them, and that's life-changing. Even if it doesn't change right away, there's something to that, that glimpse into something, that's so important. But I think it's hard to hold onto that when you're living under it. My friends and former colleagues in Egypt are trying, and some of them run an independent newspaper, but there's a constant crackdown. So it's very difficult. Anjali Kamat: I mean, I think what I've learned from them is we can't sink into apathy or despair. But maybe we just have to wait a little. And how do we keep going and keep doing our work without assuming it's all for naught? I think about this in our context here too, when I talk to people who are very concerned about the Trump administration and concerned about, Trump winning again, which is a big possibility. What do we do? Is that just going to freeze everyone?" I hear people saying, "Oh, I'm just going to move," or, "I can't do this again. I can't do another administration. I don't even want to wait to see what's going to happen." It's what do we do during dark times? Patty Vest: What do you say to them? Anjali Kamat: I mean, I think I just say what I say to myself, which is we have to keep going. There will be singing even in dark times. Even if you're living in the middle of it, I think all the lessons we've learned from people who've gone through this around the world and in different points of history, is I understand the pressure and the desire to give up, but we can't. Patty Vest: How do you balance, in the reporting that you do, to remain objective? Because there are stories that are really tough that you cover, not only nationally, but internationally. How do you check yourself like, "Oh my goodness"? Because you said that you, in a way, why you gravitated toward audio more, on audio storytelling, was because you wanted the story to tell itself. How do you manage that? Anjali Kamat: I think a lot about, what does it mean to be objective, and the whole concept of objectivity. I think there's an idea that journalism has to be unbiased and objective. I think one of the things I always think about is like, what does that mean? What do we mean when we say an older generation of journalists was more objective, the younger generation is less objective, at the same time, that journalism is becoming more diverse? There's, I think, this implicit assumption that a certain way of looking at the world was objective, when really it's just one way of looking at the world. Anjali Kamat: I don't think there is such a thing as objectivity or being completely unbiased or neutral. I think everybody brings a perspective, and each perspective is different. And your perspective, if you grew up in a particular part of the country or the world, for the particular race, particular ethnicity, particular gender expression, particular sexuality, your view of the world is going to be based on a lot of those experiences and what you went through. I think when we talk about diversifying newsrooms, this is what we're talking about. How do we bring all of these perspectives and to better cover the reality of the world we're living in and of the majority of the people? Anjali Kamat: So that's one way I think about it. But also just, no matter what we bring in, how do we cover a story giving full humanity to the people we're covering, whether or not we like them? That, to me, is the question, and constantly framed by this commitment to holding power to account. It's not about being civil, or nice, or are you nice to this person? No, it's a question of like if someone has a lot of power and I have evidence that they've committed a lot of abuses or a lot of abuses have gone on under their watch, I have to ask them about it. Anjali Kamat: It's not a question of objectivity or whether I like the person or dislike the person. It's just like, "Hey, here's what I have. What do you say about this? Here are the stories of all the people who say that you've harmed them. What's your response?" And so, how do we think about objectivity in that context, where you're holding power to account, but also forcing yourself to treat people the way you'd want to be treated? If I did something wrong, I would want to be treated that way, right? Mark Wood: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Anjali Kamat: So it's just a question of like, yes, see people as fully human, no matter where they're from, no matter what your biases are. Maybe you've never met someone from a particular country, or maybe you grew up with a particular bias about something. Check your biases, right? Mark Wood: Yeah. I sometimes think though, the biggest change in journalism today isn't the questions of objectivity, it's questions of time. I read a piece by a journalist, an older journalist, who... He was award-winning journalist who had covered Vietnam. He was talking about how they would cover a story, that they would hear something, he would go there. He would try to confirm it. He would try to get two or three confirmations. Sometimes it would take a week or two weeks. He would pursue it until he knew the story was real, and then he would report on it. Mark Wood: He said, "Of course, in a 24-hour news cycle, you can't do that because someone else is going to tell the story." How do you deal with the problem of how you confirm a story versus the pressure to air, because someone else is going to beat you to it if you don't. Is that something you deal with? Anjali Kamat: I'm very lucky because I don't work in breaking news anymore. I think, yes, the 24-hour news cycle is now even faster. I mean, it's just getting harder and harder to- Mark Wood: You have to break in with seconds now I think. Anjali Kamat: ... confirm stories in a... The easiest way is just to look online. We were just discussing this at the Fake News Colloquium, which is, what are the pitfalls of doing that? How do you verify sources online? Somebody might say something on Twitter. How do you not know it's a rumor? How do you track down the real person and how do you trust them? Mark Wood: How do you know it isn't a Russian troll. Anjali Kamat: Right. Mark Wood: Yeah. I mean, it's... Anjali Kamat: I mean, it's extremely difficult to do this kind of work. And I think what's interesting is there are efforts in some newsrooms to have a breaking news investigations team. You're actually putting the skills of investigative reporters onto a breaking news team. So while people are in that mad rush to get the story first, there is also some people who are just really going through public records, trying to understand, what's the story here, and maybe have a slightly longer timeline, maybe closer to like three or four days rather than five to eight minutes, because it's extremely difficult in that kind of environment to just be like, "We're hearing this," I mean short of just saying... This is what one person said, "We have no idea if it's true or not, but we're just telling you because we're hearing it and we- Mark Wood: And you keep [inaudible 00:37:31] the news. Anjali Kamat: All the time. Mark Wood: All the time. Anjali Kamat: Yeah. I mean, now people are at least saying that, right? Mark Wood: Yeah. Right. Anjali Kamat: They're putting that caveat around it. Mark Wood: At least. Yeah. Anjali Kamat: But it's a hard thing and I don't envy them, and I don't want to be in that particular kind of reporting. I mean, I'm lucky I have been doing deep, long-form stuff. Or even before that, at least it was a daily news show. It wasn't minute to minute breaking news. Mark Wood: Yeah. Patty Vest: You mentioned that you're back on campus because you were part of that colloquium on fake news put on by the college's humanities [inaudible 00:38:04]. Have you been back to campus since you graduated? What's been your impression since you're back on campus? Anjali Kamat: It's great to be back. I mean, it's funny. You spend such a formative time of your life here when you're 18 to 22, and it's always interesting. I've been back a couple times, but it's now my, what, 20th year since graduation?: And so, it is funny to notice how it feels to recognize certain sites and certain buildings, and then also be completely lost in some other parts of campus and be like, "Wait, what is that? Wasn't that where we used to... The computer lab? I mean, a concept that doesn't even exist. We used to go and write our papers in a computer lab. Patty Vest: Go print there. Anjali Kamat: Yes. Exactly. So it's been fun. I mean, I think the best part has been reconnecting with some of my old professors who are still here and who were so formative in my life in setting me along different paths, and just wonderful to see them again. Patty Vest: Did you already have plans to go into journalism when you were a student? Anjali Kamat: I did not, no. I was a history major. Patty Vest: What were your plans and how did those change? Anjali Kamat: I was a history major and I think I wanted to be an academic. I think I assumed I would maybe go to grad school and get a PhD. I remember, my professor, Sam Yamashita, the history department encouraged me to take some time off and do something completely different. A few others also suggested that. I think I thought about maybe teaching in a high school. And then, I remember talking to one of my professors who did the Peace Corps in West Africa, and he was like, "It is really great language training." And he's like, "Here's a secret. You can leave whenever you want. You don't have to do the full two and a half years." Anjali Kamat: Some of my other professors were like, "Oh, don't go to the Peace Corps. It's imperialist." I didn't really want to go to the Peace Corps. I was just trying to think about different things. I think one thing I did want to do was go overseas. Even though I grew up in India, I was like, "I don't want to go back to India right away, because if I go back then I won't go anywhere else. And I don't want to stay in the US right now." I was like, "How can I go somewhere else?" So I ended up going to the Peace Corps, even though my dad was very upset. He's like, "Everyone's going to think you're a CIA agent." She can't tell you. Mark Wood: She can't tell. Anjali Kamat: But it was really wonderful. I went to the meeting and I had studied Spanish here at Pomona, and I thought, "Okay, maybe I would love to improve my Spanish, maybe go somewhere in Central America or Latin America." The recruiter looked at my list of classes and was like, "Oh." Completely random, she was like, "Oh, you took a class called Women in Islam with Zayn Kassam." And she was like, "Well, do you want to go to the Middle East?" I was like, "Sure, I've always wanted to learn Arabic. I never really thought about it." She was like, "Great." Anjali Kamat: And so, I ended up in Jordan. It was quite accidental, but it ended up being really formative to my life because I was in Jordan and started studying Arabic. I was there when the Second Intifada broke out in Palestine. I was sitting in this village, just learning Arabic. There was one house in the village with a satellite TV dish. So that was where everybody would gather to watch what was happening, because we knew there was something happening next door, and you could see something over the hills, but you weren't quite sure what it was. Anjali Kamat: So everyone would gather in this house and there was... Al Jazeera had just started, Al Jazeera Arabic. So people were watching Al Jazeera. They would occasionally switch to BBC for me in English, or CNN, or one of the Jordanian or Israeli English channels. I just remember that was the first time I really critically experienced what I had read about in college about manufacturing consent or these ideas of media bias and how different countries have different bias and how different channels create media narratives. It was just watching it in real time. Anjali Kamat: I think that's when I just started getting really interested in the media and how it works, watching how all these different channels covered the same incident of one young 12-year-old boy getting shot down by the Israeli military. I just started reading more about it. And then, there was a new journalism school that opened in my hometown in India, that was modeled in Columbia. It was a one-year program. I was like, "Why not? I'll apply." I applied and I got in and I got into journalism that way. Mark Wood: And never looked back. Anjali Kamat: Yeah. Mark Wood: Well, on that note, we're going to wrap this up. Our thanks to Anjali Kamat. Patty Vest: To our hosts that [inaudible 00:43:10] with us this far, thanks for listening to Sagecast, the podcast of Pomona College. Until next time.