American journalist Sydney Schanberg when commenting about his work in Cambodia stated, “His mission with me in Cambodia was to tell the world what suffering his people were going through in a war that was never necessary. It became my mission too” (Martin 2008). Schanberg, along with many other journalists during this era, wanted to illustrate to the American people the horrors of genocide and its effect on the natives of a particular country (Joffe 1985). Journalists also hoped to incite action from the United States government as well as help from humanitarian organizations. Journalists’ role in the Rwandan and Cambodian genocide was prevalent; however, despite their accurate depiction of the brutality towards human life, there was still
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Throughout the film, The Killing Fields, the viewer sees Schanberg and Pran face violence, danger, and barely escape death for the greater good of revealing the truth to the American people. These journalists hoped their efforts would prompt the United States to help the people of Cambodia, but instead the United States completely abandoned the Cambodians and allowed the Khmer Rouge to take over, unstopped (Joffe 1985). The worse it became for the natives, the more drive the journalists possessed to tell the world about the living conditions. Sydney in an acceptance speech remarked about his drive as a journalist: “What they specifically were not concerned with were the Cambodians themselves…except in the abstract as instruments of policy. Dith Pran and I tried to record and bring home here the concrete consequences of these decisions to real people” (Kuhn 1999). The United States invaded, bombed, and then abandoned the Cambodian people—journalists such as Pran and Sydney provided a real-life perspective, showed faces to the statistics, and gave people insight into the atrocities and inhumanities occurring in Cambodia (Joffe 1985). Although this was not enough to push the United States into assisting, it did allow journalists to cope with the horrors, tell the world about it, and hope that its documentation will prevent genocide from happening
Throughout the film, The Killing Fields, the viewer sees Schanberg and Pran face violence, danger, and barely escape death for the greater good of revealing the truth to the American people. These journalists hoped their efforts would prompt the United States to help the people of Cambodia, but instead the United States completely abandoned the Cambodians and allowed the Khmer Rouge to take over, unstopped (Joffe 1985). The worse it became for the natives, the more drive the journalists possessed to tell the world about the living conditions. Sydney in an acceptance speech remarked about his drive as a journalist: “What they specifically were not concerned with were the Cambodians themselves…except in the abstract as instruments of policy. Dith Pran and I tried to record and bring home here the concrete consequences of these decisions to real people” (Kuhn 1999). The United States invaded, bombed, and then abandoned the Cambodian people—journalists such as Pran and Sydney provided a real-life perspective, showed faces to the statistics, and gave people insight into the atrocities and inhumanities occurring in Cambodia (Joffe 1985). Although this was not enough to push the United States into assisting, it did allow journalists to cope with the horrors, tell the world about it, and hope that its documentation will prevent genocide from happening