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Lisa Ling sees job as doing good

By Amy Wilson awilson1@herald-leader.com

Go to www.lisaling.com and see for yourself her personal credo, as a kind of reminder to herself: "Lisa Ling, Trying To Do Good."

Ling's job description is journalist. Doing good, for her, means going into the darkness and shining the light.

"Once awareness is achieved, people are compelled to think about these issues differently," she says. "That's where they come in, and some good can be done."

So the good she judges herself by is hard to measure?

Sometimes yes and sometimes no.

For Ling, there is pride first in giving voice to the voiceless.

Ling is the keynote speaker at In the Interest of Women: A Forum for the Women of Kentucky on Oct. 20 and 21 in Louisville and Lexington.

A teller of stories from all over the world in her role as host of National Geographic's Explorer and now as a special correspondent for The Oprah Winfrey Show, Ling has opened the eyes of viewers to the special plight of girls and women.

In recent years, she has taken on bride-burnings in India, gang-rape in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, China's policy of abandoning its baby girls, Chechnya's recruitment of female suicide bombers and the horror of worldwide child prostitution.

"I am so thankful to hear all their stories. How could I not be moved by their cries?" Ling asks. "As adult women, they all know when they are mistreated and abused, even if their culture has told them it is OK to be so."

She reconsiders.

"Maybe the little girls don't know there is better out there, because their parents have told them this is how it is for you, but," she pauses again, "I think they do know."

On her Web site, Ling gives more insight into her stories in her diary entries. In late August, for example, an entry explained how she was reporting on a Midwestern couple hooked on heroin. The woman was five months pregnant. She writes about how, one day, they asked specifically for her help in getting clean. She agreed to try. Not exactly the job of a journalist, she knows.

She is often asked, she says, why she is willing to get personally involved that way.

"Technically, I shouldn't," she says. "But I have to live with those cries in my heart and head. I would be remiss if I didn't."

She made a phone call to the police chief in the town where the couple live. He, through incredible perseverance, she says, did the rest, even inviting them to live at his house for a while.

"It's like these angels appear" to help her, she says. "It may seem like all these stories are so tragic, so dank. I see the worst in humanity, but I also see the best."

When Ling, 35, was a little girl, she hankered to be on TV. It was her friend: "It was my baby-sitter."

But now the Northern California native knows that it is better than that. It is powerful.

If that means she is powerful, so be it.

She will try to live up to its demands. She will try to be that good.