Claudia’s stellar career with The Wall Street Journal began with a two-year stint as books editor in 1984, followed by her promotion to editorial page editor of The Asian Wall Street Journal in 1986. After several years in Asia, she worked in the Journal’s Moscow Bureau from 1993 to 1996, becoming its bureau chief. She returned to New York in 1997 and became a member of the Journal’s editorial board.

She is now a freelancer contributing to several publications, including Opinion Journal, National Review Online and The New York Sun. In 2005, Claudia received the Eric Breindel Award for Excellence in Opinion Journalism for her coverage of the UN. Claudia is now Journalist-in-Residence, Foundation for the Defense of Democracies.

Claudia Rosett – A global reach and a global grasp

My most important affiliation is with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies. There was only one outfit anywhere that early on assigned a reporter to the Oil for Food story — of course the Sun has been terrific on it – but that outfit was the FDD. Mainstream papers had some terrific stories, of course, but I can’t think of one that worked it like the FDD did. The FDD basically said, ‘Go to town.’

I have degrees in poetry and in finance, which has actually worked out quite neatly for the kinds of things I have been doing. Knowing how people respond to incentives — and having a nodding acquaintance with how things in the financial world work — has helped me puzzle out how things at the UN worked. And that is something like puzzling out how things work in free verse!

Growing up, I lived a somewhat peripatetic life. I spent a year in Holland as a kid, then Taiwan for a year as a teenager, then back to Holland in a student exchange program. So by the time I got out of college, my interest was very much focused overseas. I started as books editor at the Journal, but my editor Bob Bartley, who recently died, sent me to Asia. I worked there for seven years, a fascinating beat and just about the world’s best job. I was also running and writing editorials for the editorial page there, with a staff of about three. Probably the most fascinating time was covering Tiananmen Square.

I was in the Journal’s Moscow Bureau from ‘93 to ‘96 and was promoted to Bureau Chief and covered Yeltsin and the war in Chechnya. Then Bob Bartley brought me back to New York in 1997 and I was a member of the Wall Street Journal editorial board and wrote about the financial crashes in Asia, Russia and Latin America. So I was no stranger to mismanagement on a global scale.

Just doing her job, she discovers ‘Oil for Food’

I began writing a column, which by 2002 was focused on dictators and democratic dissidents. And the more I did that, the more I wrote about the UN, because that is where they all converged and where they get a certain amount of their legitimacy — such as it is.

That is where I came across the Oil for Food story, not as a hot tip but just in doing the things you do to understand a country’s economy. After I went freelance, I just went on writing about it, and that story really took off.

For the Journal, I’ve written mostly about things international, not domestic. I am grateful to have America — just to know it is there and come back to it (laughs). I also write for the New York Sun, which is run by an old mentor and friend. And I write for The Weekly Standard, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal U.S. edition from time to time, and regular contributions to National Review Online.

A poet hides inside this top journalist

My first love is poetry. I read it when I can’t stand to look at another UN corruption scandal. There is a line taped over my desk along with personal pictures — a picture from a Persian illustration of Noah’s Ark and a picture of camel racing in Mongolia. The line is from William Faulkner’s Nobel Prize banquet speech, which is just terrific. It’s about literature, not journalism, and he says, ‘I decline to accept the end of man.’ It was 1950 and he got his award just as the Korean War got going.

The point is, the issues aren’t about numbers and statistics, but about real people who are dramatic and amazing. The world never ceases to surprise. It’s just fascinating, and that is probably one of the reasons it is so interesting to write about the worst things people do. Because you also get to see some of the best.

On our direction

I don’t have a great sense of it, but it’s basically bringing together a somewhat disparate group of people to try in a somewhat more organized fashion to play around with information and opinion, and to provide an alterative to the same media that didn’t provide a reporter on Oil for Food.

So I would say it will be good — especially if we can pay attention to important stories that are not getting the attention they deserve. We in the media get stuck in the six top stories of the day. But actually, it is very often at the margins that the real news takes place.