“The state of journalism today is abysmal,” said journalist Roxana Tiron, native Romanian, graduate of AUBG who lives in Washington, DC and works for Bloomberg, a global news network. “How can we know anything if journalists can’t do journalism?”
Tiron has been helping people know things since she graduated AUBG in 1999, among the early group of students to reach that milestone. She wanted to be a reporter since she was a kid, preferably reporting in English, a language she always loved. “English spoke to me,” she said.
It did not speak to the Romanian government at the time which banned the teaching of English. Undeterred, Tiron took lessons in secret thanks to her parents who wanted a different life for their daughter. “My mom, an architect, refused to join the Communist Party. My family lived in Transylvania and was viewed as bourgeois, the kind of people who could be classified as ‘enemies of the people’.” Tiron had good role models for questioning authority and this trait would serve her well at AUBG.
No “enemy of the people”
She remembers some very dark times in Romania when there wasn’t enough food on the table. In response to depravation, family and friends became the center of life, plans were secretly made, different futures imagined. The present was endured.
More challenges awaited when Communist rule collapsed.
“You don’t immediately go from totalitarianism to democracy,” she observed. “The late 1980’s and early 90’s was very scrambled as we struggled with the transition.”
Amidst the scrambling, new opportunities emerged for young Romanians, and it became legal to learn English. Tiron was well positioned and sat for the SAT, which was sponsored by the Soros Foundation. She got a good score, and her mom learned about AUBG from a friend. It was expensive to go there. How would her family afford it?
AUBG called with a scholarship offer and in 1991, Tiron entered the class of 1995. Over the ensuing four years, her life changed in unexpected ways.
“AUBG was the little place that can do. A special gem of a place.”
“An amazing American university in Bulgaria. It was so fresh feeling, opening opportunities for smart, talented young people who want to make a positive difference. The message was: develop your curiosity; use your brain to contribute to making the world better for us, for our countries.”
What impressed her most was the quality of the teaching. She marveled at the Fulbright program that brought working journalists to campus for a year or two.
“I had teachers who were generous with their knowledge and their time. I will remember them forever.”
People like Ted Schwalbe, Kael Alford, Bobby Phillips and Thorne Anderson also had great influences on my journalism. For them work was more than a job. It was a passion. They inspired us and I think we inspired them. Year by year, there was this steady accumulation of experience that made us ready for the world we graduated into.”
That world now featured a husband from Philadelphia, a son, now nine, and an internship in the U.S. at CNN where she assisted and was mentored by the formidable CNN journalist and anchor Judy Woodruff. She eventually moved to the National Defense Magazine where she covered the NATO mission and the war in Kosovo in 2000. A lesson she drew from her reporting is that former enemies can learn to coexist, which might provide some hope amidst all the conflicts hate and intolerance of our present day.
Among the national security stories she is most proud are one on the cost to the U.S. taxpayer for the war in Afghanistan. “A gallon of gas cost $400,” she marveled. That high cost reflected the difficulty of getting fuel into Afghanistan for the voracious U.S. military consumption. Another story is how munitions production in the U.S. has fallen to pre-World War II levels, making it difficult to support allies like Ukraine, let alone having enough for its own forces.
She also wrote a story about US Congress efforts to prompt the military to buy bison meat from Native American suppliers only to receive strong pushback from the tribes because of the Army’s slaughter of buffalo herds and ignorance of the spiritual connection earlier in history by non-Native people. Congress abandoned the effort. “While reporting from Congress, I try to keep people informed about how their tax money is spent.”
Democracy and the need to know
That spirit of public service is on display at Bloomberg where she also reports on national security from a perch in Washington, DC. “I’m grateful to be at Bloomberg because of the resources available, the global reach, and the solid journalistic values including objectivity, truth telling, and insisting that sources speak on the record.” She laments the disappearance of regional and local news, the closing of thousands of small newspapers across the country. “What has replaced them is sensational TV news, news deserts, disinformation, and partisan silos.”
“The depressing news is that there is no formula to survive,” she laments. She’s been gone from Romania for too long to opine on the health of journalism there but can’t help thinking the trends in the west will be replicated, creating challenges for democratic governance just when there are signs that the Balkans have turned the corner from their Communist past.
“Without strong countermeasures, slipping back may be inevitable.”
“We need independent investigative journalism. We need strong training centers like AUBG and its Christo Grozev Fellowship for Courageous Journalism. We need to hold power to account. Without a robust professional free press, how can we know anything?”
