No one knows the danger of war reporting better than Bob Woodruff.

Only a month after being named anchor of ABC World News Tonight in December 2005 — succeeding the late Peter Jennings — Woodruff suffered a traumatic brain injury from a roadside bomb while reporting in Iraq.

Woodruff recovered and continues to report. The lawyer-turned-reporter appears in Fresno for the San Joaquin Valley Town Hall lecture series on Wednesday, Oct. 15.

GV Wire spoke with Woodruff to preview his appearance, titled “Covering Conflict & Championing Our Veterans.”

“I’m going to talk about what we were doing over in Iraq when this war was going on, how I was covering it, what ultimately happened to me, and what’s happened to the veterans. Also, some of the resilience that we can have, and certainly the United States has had that. And then ultimately, we started a foundation to help the veterans that were not treated as well as could be, try to fill that gap between what the government’s able to do for them and what they’re not,” Woodruff said.

Woodruff transitioned his career from attorney to correspondent while teaching law in China. He witnessed the Tiananmen Square uprising in 1989, and joined CBS News despite taking a substantial paycut.

“I was instantly happier when I did it,” Woodruff said. “Studies show it’s not money that brings happiness, but what you do. I just loved it,” Woodruff said.

Being a self-described “international travel addict” didn’t hurt. He made the transition as a legal reporter, and later joined ABC News in 1996.

Covering Wars

Woodruff talked about how being a war correspondent is different than other beats — other than the inherent danger.

“There is an addiction to it, being in a place like that, not only because you’re fascinated by the rest of the world that you don’t know much about, so everything is brand new to a large extent. It’s kind of exciting to be covering something like that,” Woodruff said.

He regarded war reporting as service— delivering the news from far away that Americans wanted to know.

War coverage has changed. Woodruff said he learned the places not to be, even with the difficulty of blending in, especially in the Middle East.

“It’s a little bit harder to fit in because there’s a linguistics differences where not that many reporters actually speak perfect Arabic. Sometimes it’s more dangerous if you don’t fit in. And if they know that you’re an American when you’re at war with them, of course that’s obvious,” Woodruff said.

The Change in Network News

When Woodruff had his brief turn as network news anchor, it was a changing of the times. In the mid-2000s, the nightly anchors for ABC (Jennings), NBC (Tom Brokaw) and CBS (Dan Rather) all finished 20-year-plus runs on the air.

“There was a time where people trusted only one person — their favorite in the evening for the news. They want to keep that the same. I think the younger generation doesn’t have that that kind of faith in the story anchor than they used to have in the old days,” Woodruff said.

Woodruff said the change in technology — cable news, social media — softened the “hard news” approach networks used.

“CNN could have all sorts of elements of entertainment, sports and weather and all that sort of thing. That put(news) in a different direction. Then social media came out where everybody and their mother can talk about what is ‘quote unquote’ facts. Of course that changed everything. The trust of news took a big impact because some people don’t know the difference between news and podcasting,” Woodruff said.

GV Wire is a sponsor of Valley Town Hall.