NBC's Richard Engel: NYT reporter Anthony Shadid was 'absolutely brilliant'

Wasif Chudhary


By Richard Engel, NBC News Chief Foreign Correspondent
Anthony Shadid, the New York Times correspondent who died in Syria on Thursday, was better than the rest of us. He wasn’t the fastest to a story, or the biggest daredevil or the most technical with a satellite phone. Sure, he was good at all those things. But he was absolutely brilliant at something else. Shadid could hear the story.
He could feel it in the tips of his fingers. He could do what may be impossible. He could make war subtle.
This is what I mean. During the often overlooked, ferociously dangerous 2006 war between Israel and Hezbollah, reporters in southern Lebanon generally rushed to the bombing sites. The faster we got there, the fresher and more compelling our stories and pictures would be. And there were incredibility compelling stories. In the first three weeks of the conflict, Israel dropped as much tonnage of explosives on southern Lebanon as it used in the 1973 Mideast war.