Matina Stevis-Gridneff
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Shaunagh talks to Matina Stevis-Gridneff
This episode features Matina Stevis-Gridneff, the Brussels correspondent for The New York Times. before joining the Times, Matina covered East Africa for the Wall Street Journal and was also their Europe correspondent.
We chat about Matina covering the Greek and Turkish border crisis and how refugees are paying the price, we discuss Matina reporting from Eritrea, one of the most secretive countries in the world and we chat about Matina's escapades travelling rural Uganda.
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Episode credits
Hosted and produced by Shaunagh Connaire and edited by Ryan Ferguson.
Episode transcript
Shaunagh Connaire
Welcome to Media Tribe, the podcast that's on a mission to restore faith in journalism. I'm Shaunagh Connaire, an award-winning journalist with over 10 years of experience working for some of the biggest news outlets in the industry. Every week I'm going to introduce you to some of the world's most respected journalists, filmmakers, and media executives, and you're going to hear the story behind the storyteller. You'll get a sense of the integrity and hard graft that's involved in journalism, and hopefully you'll go away feeling that this craft is worth funding.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
He left because he was an artist and he painted and he increasingly found that there was not going to be a way for him to continue being an artist and stay in his country. I was incredibly moved that when I eventually visited Eritrea, I met his family, but he was the last person to be rescued off the 2013 shipwreck, and he watched his best friend drown.
Shaunagh Connaire
My guest today is Brussels correspondent for the New York Times, Matina Stevis-Gridneff. Before joining the Times Matina covered East Africa, and she was the Europe correspondent for the Wall Street Journal. Matina, you are so welcome to the Media Tribe podcast.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Thank you so much for having me.
Shaunagh Connaire
It's lovely to kind of meet in person. You're in Brussels. I'm in New York. What is the crack there?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
I know. I wish one day, not too far from today, we'll meet.
Shaunagh Connaire
Yes. Yeah. So Matina, we might as well kickstart, like we do every podcast, and can you tell our audience about your journey into journalism and how you ended up as a correspondent at the New York Times?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
I guess my journey is a little unusual in that I'm not an American or I'm not from an Anglo country. So I was born in Greece and I was raised in Athens. I studied in the UK and I went back to Greece for three or four years where I worked as a journalist, and I went back to the UK to do my masters. And at that point it was the very beginning of the Eurozone crisis, which has really badly affected Greece. And I found myself in demand. I ended up writing for British media and doing television, trying to explain what was going on in Greece. It was also quite a technical topic and I was studying public policy and public economics at the time. So that really helped me start my career.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
And I had my first job at an English language publication with the Economist while I was still a master's student and straight out of my master's I got a staff position with the Wall Street Journal. So I was very lucky, as my country's fate went South, my stock went, as is often the case with foreign born correspondents. Often their ascent coincides with them covering their own country. But that was my big break. I worked at the Journal for eight years, three years in Brussels covering the Eurozone crisis and the migration crisis, and then I was in East Africa for five years, covering 16 countries in that region, before moving to the New York Times and Brussels just in the middle of 2019.
Shaunagh Connaire
Amazing. So how long are you at the Times now?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
It's been a year and a half or so, so pretty new.
Shaunagh Connaire
Early days. And you're in quite a... Well you're quite busy. Obviously migration crisis is still a crisis and your beat, it's fairly varied, isn't it as well, because you're covering the Eurozone, so really you could be covering absolutely anything, right?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Yeah, that's it. I think when you cover the European union, the way you do that really depends on your audience. For example, when I was with the Journal, that was obviously a more economics and finance focused beat, although of course we did general news. Now with the Times we're very interested in transatlantic relations. We're interested in Europe's place in the world, especially vis-a-vis countries of interest for Americans, such as Russia or China, interested in big tech and how American technology giants are behaving on this side of the Atlantic, but also very interested, and close to our mission, are topics like migration, human rights, civil liberties, which are under so much stress in Europe and the European Union right now. So that's where the more public service element of the work comes in as well.
Shaunagh Connaire
It's a huge beat. What's interesting to me, Matina, is that starting at the Economist, graduating I guess to the Wall Street Journal, they're both publications with a finance, business slant. Is it different, then, moving to the Times where it's more generalist, I guess?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
There are definitely definitely differences. Of course the, the Economist is a different animal culturally, and as a publication, it's a weekly. They call themselves a paper, but let's be honest, they're a magazine. And of course the Journal and the Times are top American daily newspapers, so they have similarities in their approach and their standards, which are quite different to British publications. Style is a matter there as well. But certainly I think you learn to adjust your lens when you work for the New York Times. And it suits me a lot. It suits me in terms of my personal interests and my instincts, and it's the career path I wanted to be on to continue being a career foreign correspondent rather than focusing more on economics and finance and business.
Shaunagh Connaire
Got you. So Matina, big question. Is there a story that you're you're proud of and maybe it's something that's had impact?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Sure. The reason it makes me feel a bit strange, I guess, is because it makes me reflect on how little impact we have sometimes, especially on topics that we really deeply care about. So just from my recent time at the Times, I think, for example, I had this scoop about Americans, or travelers from the US being banned from visiting the European Union during the COVID crisis because of how poorly things were going in the US with the pandemic, and that was a really impactful story. It affected so many people who all approached me as if I was their travel agent, which sometimes happens, but it also held up a mirror to the US and reflected that things were genuinely not going very well there. And that was the perception of the country from the outside world.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
But if I look further back in my career, I'm really proud of the work I did in the horn of Africa in my last beat. I was one of the first reporters in nearly a decade to access Eritrea, which is famously or notoriously reclusive. I had the chance to travel to parts of Somaliland to record the rise of Middle Eastern powers in the horn of Africa. So that type of journalism is very different. It is more ground reporting and field reporting. It's very difficult to access, which brings intrinsic value with it.
Shaunagh Connaire
Let's talk more about Eritrea because actually it's a country we've never spoken about on this podcast, and I think that's indicative of how difficult it is. I mean, it's impossible really to get in there as a journalist. As you say, Matina, it's an incredibly secretive country and you covered it from the lens of asylum seekers, isn't that right? Young people escaping to neighboring country Ethiopia because they had been forced or were going to be forced to be conscripted into the army as are all kids under 16 or 18, Matina?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
The last years of high school [crosstalk 00:08:18]-
Shaunagh Connaire
Last years of high school. Get you. So I believe something like... Is it one in 50 asylum seekers in Europe are from Eritrea, which is actually double the number of Syrians, which might shock our audience. So can you just tell us a lot more about Eritrea. Your experience of covering a country so secretive and that's rarely covered in the news. Let's call a spade a spade.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
I didn't know much about Eritrea. In fact, I knew it from reading asylum statistics, but I covered a big shipwreck that some listeners might remember of a migrant boat off the coast of the Italian island of Lampedusa in 2013, where more than 300 Eritreans drowned. And I got to Lampedusa very soon after the shipwreck and I met with many of the survivors and interviewed them and did stories about that, and that's how I came to know Eritreans. And one thing that really struck me back then, and this is the beginning of the early days of the Syria war and the refugee movement from Syria, and that was my main experience talking to refugees in Europe. Eritreans just seemed to really love their country. That really hooked me, and I was just so interested in the background and the history of the country, it's relationship with it's much larger and much more powerful neighbor Ethiopia, and what the reason was for the flight of all these people in huge numbers. Eritrea's actually quite small country.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
So when I got my posting to Nairobi in 2014, I just really focused my efforts in trying to secure a journalist visa to Eritrea. And it took two years. So it took a while. But eventually it worked and I was on my own, so it's very different to operate in a country that's very suspicious of visitors as a writer than it is, for example, if you're a television reporter and you have a camera with you, or even if you're a photographer and you're still carrying equipment. I was able to just walk around and be much freer. I was followed. I subsequently was given good reason to believe by Western intelligence services that I my phone in my room was tapped in my hotel. My mobile mobile phones didn't work. Asmara, the capital of Eritrea is very beautiful. Eritreans are delightful, wonderful people, as most people are in the horn of Africa. From a cultural perspective, it's an ancient culture, very rich. And the architecture Asmara is famously modernist. There's some incredible gems from the inter-war period, especially including a famous petrol station that looks like a spaceship. So it's full of surprises.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
What's clear is that there's hardly any work. What's clear is that there's a lot of poverty, but also a huge amount of national pride and commitment to Eritrea's statehood and independence from Ethiopia. And I think that in the context of a despot or a dictator who takes advantage of that and was a really lionized, very brave revolutionary fighter who then became president forever, that makes a very complex national identity, and it explains to me why all these young people I met in Lampedusa lamented fleeing their country that they so loved, which is so beautiful and had hopes of being part of it's rebuilding, but lost faith because they didn't see an end to being basically kept inside the country. For example, they would need an exit visa to leave, which is impossible to get. So it was a, it was a fantastic experience. I don't think they'll be inviting me back anytime soon, though.
Shaunagh Connaire
It's very interesting to hear that you went in legitimately, as in, you went in on a journalist visa, you didn't go in undercover, which I do think is quite impossible. We have certainly tried to get teams in there in the past. And I've heard it is a beautiful country. I have friends from there and also I believe it has magnificent scuba diving of all things.
Shaunagh Connaire
Now here's the thing about immigration that baffles me. It's been proven time and time again that immigration works. It supports economic growth, which in turn helps citizens prosper. Everyone wants to see the economy grow because that typically means wages grow. Unless, perhaps, you're already rich. Yet a growing cohort resists immigration and the facts just don't seem to be reaching this crowd. So if like me, immigration is a topic you're interested in, then I highly recommend listening to a series on Noa, the sponsor of today's podcast. The series is called How Immigration Affects the Economy. You'll hear audio articles from the New York Times and Bloomberg supporting the case for more immigration, not less. The series provides different perspectives from Germany, the US, Australia, Japan, and Canada. If you haven't downloaded the Noa app, then please take this opportunity to do so. The first 100 people to hit the link in the show notes on thismediatribe.com. Get one week of Noa premium free. Importantly, you'll be massively supporting this podcast, and will also get 50% off if you choose to subscribe after your one week free trial. Right. Back to Matina.
Shaunagh Connaire
So talk to me about the people that you met who were escaping and making these treacherous routes across the Sahara, and of course they had to go via Ethiopia, which is of course the country in which Eritrea is trying to protect itself against after, I think it was a 30 year struggle, isn't that right, for independence from Ethiopia. Tell us a little bit about those people.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Yeah, well, the issue of course, is Ethiopia and Eritrea reached a peace agreement two years ago for which the Ethiopian prime minister won a Nobel Peace Prize. He's now leading his country into a civil war, so things are actually really getting bad, again, both for Ethiopians and for Eritreans. But one of the people I remember from that reporting and who I'm still in contact with is a young man called Yohannes. He left because he was an artist and he painted and he really didn't to go to the military. And he increasingly found that there was not going to be a way for him to continue being an artist and stay in his country. I was incredibly moved that when I eventually visited Eritrea, I met his family. I met his mother and father and his sister, and they hadn't seen him in years, and they were happy to talk to me about having met him more recent and spoken to him more recently in Europe.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
But his little sister told me, the straw that broke the camel's back for him was that he couldn't find the colors he needed to paint. The country's isolation, disrupts all sorts of supply chains, including for obviously better quality art equipment and paint brushes and whatnot. And that was kind of the final push for him. But he was the last person to be rescued off the 2013 shipwreck. And he watched his best friend drown. So this is someone who also went through incredible trauma to start a new life in Europe and will probably never see his sister, whom I saw in 2016, again. So the trade-offs and the decisions are immense.
Shaunagh Connaire
It's huge. And I think, sorry, this is my fault, but we should definitely point out when you are conscripted into the army in Eritrea, it has been compared to slave labor. People do not get... I mean, you barely get paid. It's not like a life of luxury at all. Au contraire. It's a really, really grim and desperate life, isn't it? I think another family that you portrayed in that particular piece, in the Wall Street Journal, they mentioned they see their dad once a year and he wasn't he was confined to a life in the army as well. So it really, really is desperate times. And Matina, I want to talk to you also about another really great report that you had in the New York Times about the Greek coast guard. I say great, I mean awful. Do you want to talk to us about that?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Actually it wasn't the coast guard. It was the situation at the land border. But it's not any better on the sea borders. I mean, it was a very tricky story for me because I'm Greek and it was situated at a time that was extremely fraught for Greece because most refugees, all refugees really, arrive to Greece through Turkey, and Greece and Turkey have very, very fraught, difficult relations. And this has been the case for a very long time, and it's especially the case this year. Relations are at historic low. So president Erdogan of Turkey has always been able to exert pressure on the European Union and on Greece by threatening to quote unquote, open the tap of migrants and asylum seekers. There is millions of people who are seeking international protection, especially from Syria, but from other parts of the world as well, as well as economic migrants.
Shaunagh Connaire
Yeah, Turkey hosts maybe four million Syrians?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
That's correct.
Shaunagh Connaire
Yeah, it's extraordinary. It really, really is.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Yeah. When Erdogan actually, for totally unrelated reasons, his army had suffer a defeat in Syria and he deemed that the European response was not sufficiently enthusiastic, opened the taps and announced to people who were seeking a life in Europe that the borders were open. Thousands of asylum seekers made their way to the Greek border, especially the Northern Greek border with Turkey, the land border. For Greece, that was a hostile move. Greece was already receiving thousands of asylum requests every year and hosting thousands and thousands of asylum seekers, stopping them from moving onwards into Europe. So the government found itself under a huge amount of pressure. And the way that pressure manifested in some cases was by becoming quite brutal with asylum seekers.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
In the eyes of the broad public, frankly, that response was justified. People felt that Erdogan was playing war and using people, and in that context, these people should have known better than to become embroiled in this. My perspective is that these people are often so desperate to finally set up life somewhere where they can stay, which isn't the case in Turkey for the vast majority of them, that they are not going to really stop and think about the international geopolitical ramifications of them trying to cross the border. But what we discovered happened is that Greece pushed people back into Turkey often by rounding them up in groups and keeping them in a place and then sending them back to Turkey, which is also known as [inaudible 00:20:01] or push-back. It's an illegal practice under international European law. Greece has repeatedly rejected our findings. They've accused us of using Turkish agents as our sources and decried our reports as fake news.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
And personally, that was very difficult for me because I am Greek. My family lives in Greece. And a lot of my friends and people I care about deeply felt that Greece's actions in being aggressive with asylum seekers were justified in the context that these happened. That's not my place to say, but what we discovered is ostensibly illegal under Greece's international obligations, and for me, one of the lenses that I applied on this story was that I always saw Greece's edge over Turkey in this perennial enmity as lying in the fact that Greece is a European Union country and a rule of law country, something that Turks have aspired for themselves, but their hopes have been thwarted, in particular under president Erdogan who has become increasingly authoritarian. So for me, it was especially interesting that in a moment of crisis, instead of Greece becoming more attached to this superior liberal democracy values that it's signed up to, actually chose to go against the law, and by this it's espoused.
Shaunagh Connaire
So for context again, I remember when we were covering the refugee crisis with Channel 4, I guess it was 2016, and back then Greece and Greek people were very, very open and welcoming to refugees landing in places like Lesbos and all of the other islands, and it was magical to watch. And it really, really was extraordinary in the sense that human beings care. However, fast forward four or five years, is there a sense of indifference, would you say?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Oh, it's much stronger than indifference. I think people are fed up. Greece became a holding pen for hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers when Northern Europe decided it wasn't going to take anymore. And an agreement was put in place that effectively penned these people in, especially on the Eastern Aegean Greek islands like Lesbos. So it's really understandable that local populations are fatigued, as are asylum seekers who are stuck in this overwhelmed system, often for more than a year or two. So it's a recipe for disaster that pits Greeks against asylum seekers, when the problem really is much broader, it's at a European level.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Greeks don't think these people should all stay in Greece, but these people also don't want to stay in Greece. So it really is a very unfortunate situation, but I do see that parts of the Greek population have been radicalized to become strongly anti-immigrant and to be perfectly prepared for their government to put aside humanitarian concerns, issues of international law, because they think this is incredibly unfair on Greeks and Greece. And we have to look at that claim with sympathy because it is very unfair on Greece and Greeks.
Shaunagh Connaire
Well I think it's fascinating from a policy perspective. The Greek government is newish, it's center right, and they have recently refused any more asylum applications, isn't that right Matina?
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
They suspended applications just in the course of March. They've been reinstated but magically no asylum seekers are arriving anymore, which may have something to do with their extremely aggressive, what they call active border guarding, but is actually extremely aggressive behavior that includes pushing people back into Turkish waters. The Turks of course love this because it allows them to play moral superiority over a European Union country and say, "Look here we are hosting four million Syrians and the Greeks are pushing people back into our waters." So the asylum seekers are stuck in a game of ping pong between Turkey and Greece and the European Union. It's unfair on everyone, and it's a deeply political and cynical game with real human victims.
Shaunagh Connaire
Yeah, refugees being used. They're being weaponized. You're actually making me think back to an extraordinary piece of investigative journalism from the New York Times, as always, from the visual investigations team where you guys have captured. I thought it was the Greek coast guard, shooting at refugees on a dinghy and sweeping by them in their massive ship with the hope of them falling overboard. And I mean, there's women and children on these boats.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Well, they would say they weren't hoping for them to fall over board. They would also say this isn't true, and they would point to the fact that this video that you're mentioning was provided by the Turkish coast guard and anything provided by the Turkish state, according to the Greek state, cannot be considered anything more than propaganda. That being said, part of our forensics team at the New York Times, which is incredible and was part of a Pulitzer Prize win this year, does exactly that. It takes video, audio, or other information provided by sources, including state sources and corroborates it.
Shaunagh Connaire
We've had Malachy on the podcast, so it's fantastic journalism. And I think your name was on that piece as well, so it was obviously... It's actually great to see how you guys collaborate within the New York Times, even if you were clearly in Europe and Mal and his team are obviously in New York. So another extraordinary piece of journalism. Well I think it's great. It's very apparent that what you're doing, Matina, in your role is so, so important. Europe is at an intersection. Nobody knows what's going to happen next, what with the coronavirus, with Britain leaving the Eurozone, and there is still a migration and refugee crisis which needs to be covered, which has obviously fallen out of the news, unfortunately. One of my more lighter questions, Matina, potentially lighter is whether there's a moment in your career that feels like it was rather crazy that maybe none of your colleagues know about that you've put it to the back of your mind or blocked it out completely and that we'd only love to delve into right now.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Yeah, oh God. This is actually not only hilarious and speaks to how unglamorous actually our work is, but it also is a story of frustration about how some stories don't work out. So when I was in East Africa, I was trying to cover renewed fighting in South Sudan, a country which is the world's youngest nation, as we always like to say. Achieved statehood in 2011, but has been in the throes of civil war, brutal, brutal civil war since 2013. And it was 2017, and was trying to somehow cover this flare up of fighting and it was impossible to get into South Sudan. The South Sudanese authorities had thrice rejected my visa applications, and it was becoming increasingly hostile for international journalists. Most of my colleagues were leaving. So I decided to go to Uganda and try and talk to people who were fleeing South Sudan in droves, seeking safety in that neighboring country.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
So I traveled to rural... Two internal flights and hours of driving, got to the border between Uganda and South Sudan. Started doing interviews. There were people arriving every day. I remember there was a footbridge and I was standing on the Ugandan side and at the end of the footbridge was the South Sudanese side, and actually the so-called frontline, because it was moving constantly, was not far from that point, so it was so close. But I really focused my frustration on just getting the best testimony I could from the people, mostly women and children, because most of the men were staying behind to fight, to talk to me about what was going on, and also just to record how Uganda, which is obviously a poor country, was coping with what quickly became a million plus refugees from South Sudan, and comparing that to my context of how European countries had dealt with refugees.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
And that included... I'm in deep rural Uganda, and the only hotels, so to speak, are basically hostels that are in the form of dorms, and I have a very vivid recollection. I managed to get a room where I could sleep by myself, but there was no shower and there was communal loo. This is a month before my wedding as well.
Shaunagh Connaire
I love where this is going, by the way.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
I wasn't a real pampering mode, like I must look great for my wedding. And I remember very vividly standing in a bucket, a small bucket as well, not a big one, with two bottles of water and trying to wash myself and thinking, "God, how did I end up here? What decisions in my life led me to be here in this moment?" I was very pleased with myself that I was able to somehow wash. It was hot. I was in the dust and dirt all day as well. So very unfortunately, for completely non-interesting editorial reasons, that story never ran. And then I was getting married, so it wasn't really going to fight. But that bucket shower.
Shaunagh Connaire
You've just illustrated to our audience how unglamorous journalism, and especially foreign reporting, is. I think people have this idea that it's all very nice showers, hot showers. No, if you even have a bag of wet wipes you're doing well, do you know what I mean? Well good for you, Matina, and I'm sure you've had a shower since and in particular for your wedding. I'm sure you went all out. Listen, you are an absolute star. It's really lovely to kind of meet you, as I said, and continued success with your work at the New York Times. It's incredibly important. Everybody should go and follow you on Twitter and keep an eye out for your articles in the Times. Thank you so much, Matina.
Matina Stevis-Gridneff
Thank you, it's been a real pleasure.
Shaunagh Connaire
If you like what you heard on this episode of Media Tribe, that's very good news, because I'm going to be dropping new shows every week and every month on my new Media Tribe Spotlight series. Also, if you haven't already, make sure to take a listen to previous shows with some legendary folk in the industry. And as ever, please, please, please do leave me a rating and review, as it really does have other people find this podcast. Finally, if you do have any guest suggestions, drop me a note on Twitter. I'm @shaunagh, with a GH, or @shaunaghconnaire on Instagram. And again, that's with the GH. Right, that's it. See you soon.. This episode was edited by Ryan Ferguson.
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