'Deeply Concerning'
Editor:
Thank you Jennifer Fumiko Cahill and Thadeus Greenson for your piece "Know Your Enemies" (July 5) concerning the shooting in Annapolis, Maryland, of staff at the Capital Gazette. The shooting deaths that have occurred in our country this year are very disturbing. And the shooting of journalists in a newsroom during the atmosphere of hate promoted by this country's president is deeply concerning. Having worked with United Press International for 28 years, I was honored to have worked with journalists dedicated to their work. The UPI motto was "get it first, but first get it right." And "deadline every minute." I met Kate Webb who was captured while working for UPI by the Vietcong in Cambodia in 1971. She had been UPI bureau chief there since October of 1970 after the former chief had been killed in Cambodia. She endured her captivity for 23 days.
I worked with Marie Colvin at UPI in Washington, D.C., before she became bureau chief in Paris in 1984. She was very sharp and I could tell she really did not want to be behind a desk. She left UPI in 1985 and covered the Middle East and lost sight in her left eye due to a blast by an army rocket. She was killed in 2012 by an improvised rocket device in Syria.
Kate and Marie were dedicated to their jobs and they were dedicated to reporting the facts. When the space shuttle Challenger exploded I had been covering a court-martial. But that was put aside as I joined every other UPI journalist who dropped the stories they were covering to work together on covering the Challenger disaster.
It was our job, but few of us thought about it as a job. We saw it as getting the news out to the public and getting it out correctly.
Dave Rosso, Eureka
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