Joan R. Magee
December 1, 2008
Question and Answer with Joe Treaster
Joseph B. Treaster is the Knight Chair for Cross Cultural Communication at the Knight Center for International Media and the School of Communication at the University of Miami. He reported from New York, Washington and around the world for The New York Times for more than 30 years and continues to write for the newspaper. He has written three books and dozens of magazine articles for
such publications as the Atlantic Monthly, Harpers and Rolling Stone.
As a reporter for The Times, Mr. Treaster has covered wars, politics, diplomacy, disasters, business and every day life throughout the world. His assignments for The Times and national magazines have taken him to more than 80 countries in Asia, Africa, Australia, the Middle East, Europe, Latin America, the Caribbean and throughout the United States.
He worked at The Times to cover all aspects of the insurance industry in the United States and abroad. To prepare for the financial news reporting, Mr. Treaster studied at the Columbia University Business School on a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in 1995 and 1996. While based in New York as a financial writer, Mr. Treaster also wrote from Mexico and several countries in the Middle East.
For the five years before business school, Treaster’s primary assignment at The Times was writing about drug trafficking and illicit drug use in the United States, Europe and Latin America.
The drug trafficking assignment came after years of reporting from the cocaine fields of Colombia, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and the trafficking center of Panama as the newspaper’s Caribbean correspondent, responsible for parts of Latin America as well as the island region.
While based in New York and writing about illegal drugs, as in previous stints in New York, Mr. Treaster was often sent to cover breaking foreign news. He reported from Jordan, Iraq and Kuwait in the build
up to the Persian Gulf War, for example, and returned to Kuwait in the fall of 1994 when Saddam Hussein threatened another invasion. That summer he had reported from Guantanamo Bay on a surge in Cubans trying to make their way to a new life across the Florida Straits. Earlier he had traveled to the Baltic states for several business articles. More recently, Mr. Treaster has reported from Mexico, Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates.
In addition to Hurricane Force, Mr. Treaster is the author of Paul Volcker: The Making of A Financial Legend and a co-author of a book on the experiences of the Americans taken hostage in Iran, Inside Report on the Hostage Crisis: No Hiding Place.
**
Q: With AIG in the news after the financial bailout, how do you reflect on your vast coverage of the company?
Yes, I covered A.I.G. for many years. I admired Maurice Greenburg, who built the company into the largest insurer in the world before he was forced to step down over accusations that he manipulated the company's books to eliminate fluctuations in earnings and show steady, uninterrupted growth.
Q: So what happened at that point to move you to look at AIG as more than a mere story about
insurance?
At about that point, the editors felt A.I.G. had become more a Wall Street story than an insurance story and several Wall Street reporters stepped in. I wrote several stories about A.I.G.'s troubles with a form of financial insurance called swaps. Those investments finally brought down the company earlier this year.
Q: How do you distinguish your level of intensity with a particular story?
I've been enthusiastic about all the stories I've covered. The Vietnam War, early in my career, was
probably the most important story I covered. But I was also very involved in writing about the United States' unwitting testing of civilians, soldiers and members of the CIA with hallucinatory and other drugs.
Q: Where have you reported from abroad?
I spent years reporting on Haiti and places in South and Central America. Drugs were a big story for me in Colombia, Peru and other countries.
Q: Did you cover Noriega at all?
I wrote a lot about President Noriega in Panama before he was deposed by the United States. I covered
the American invasion of Panama.
Q: What are you doing now?
I joined the University of Miami in April of 2008 to take an endowed chair at the Knight Center for International Media. It is formally called the John S. and James L. Knight Chair in Cross Cultural Communication. I taught a class this semester that analyzed the 2008 presidential election. Next semester I'll be teaching a class called "Reporting World Cities."
