This essay by journalist Mellissa Fung appears in the June issue of Q&Q.

As a television journalist, I’ve made it one of my golden rules never to insert myself into a story unless absolutely necessary. It was one of the first things I learned in journalism school: your job is to help tell someone else’s story in the best and most honest way possible. In fact, some of my producers and cameramen might say I’ve taken it to the extreme, not even appearing on camera if I can help it, and only using sparse voice-overs to guide the story along.

This goes a bit against the current tide of TV reporting. These days, you see reporters emoting so much on camera, even picking up babies and children in disaster zones, inserting themselves into every scene of someone else’s tragedy, someone else’s story.

In the late fall of 2008, I did much worse: I became the story. I was trying to do a television report for the CBC on the plight of displaced Afghans at a refugee camp on the outskirts of Kabul who had escaped the fighting in the south. I had just finished interviewing several families when I was kidnapped at gunpoint by a gang of thugs.

Read the rest of the essay.