Flashback: My interview with Chris Jones
A movie soon available for streaming features one of our former guests - who covered the January 6 insurrection for a non-profit news outlet.
On September 27, the movie War Game will be available for digital streaming via Apple TV, Fandango, and Amazon.
War Game is a documentary showing a simulation of what the Situation Room would look like over a six-hour period if there was another insurrection attempt, though one even more extreme than what took place on January 6, 2021.
One of the notable people in this documentary is Chris Jones, a former Marine machine gunner who has reported from Afghanistan and eventually became a reporter on the domestic extremism beat for 100 Days in Appalachia. He covered January 6 up close as a photojournalist via Report for America.
I interviewed Chris two years ago (he’s since left 100 Days) and thought that I’d use this week’s newsletter to highlight some of what we talked about for those who might have missed it when it was initially posted.
You were a military kid. How did your upbringing influence your perception of journalism?
Journalism was always there. It was definitely something you really took for granted. One of my earliest memories is after my parents left the military, we moved to Joplin, Missouri. There was a local paper, The Joplin Globe.
My mom was really bent out of shape about some zoning thing and I remember my mom would drag us to city council meetings. There was always this guy in the corner with a notebook who was furiously writing everything that was happening.
I was like, this guy needs to get a batter hobby. And then I realized that he was a journalist … I saw my mom in the paper and I kind of realized that now it’s real. This thing that started out as one person in the community wanting to have an influence on what their life was like was this journalist whose job was to show up and document everything. He was in a position where he could make it real.
How are you able to get the pictures you took on January 6 (you can see them here), both from a psychological perspective and from a technical perspective when there’s a guy holding a large piece of wood directly above where you are [and he looks like he might attack you]?
80% of being a machine gunner in the Marine Corps does not prepare you for journalism but the 20% that does is really useful. And that 20% is situational awareness. Being able to be in an extremely kinetic, chaotic situation and very quickly sort of read the mood … but also reading it in terms of, these guys have a lot of sticks and they're going to start throwing them.
So I know that a picture is going to happen there, but also the law enforcement folks with guns are going to be focused on them, so how close do I really want to be to that? And these are all calculations that are happening, like split-second. Definitely having two deployments helps …
Sometimes it's something as simple as like breathing right. And making sure I'm breathing out my nose and making sure nothing comes in my mouth, That's going to bring my pulse rate down and it's going to help me make more critical decisions, not emotional decisions.”
The other picture I took note of was of what I'm guessing was a father-son. The father had just gotten teargassed, the son looked dazed. Is there a story behind that photo?
I really quickly on the sixth realized that there's this like intense sSort of religious and specifically religious iconography component to everything that was happening, when the experience was religious for, I think, a lot of these people, So many of them felt like they were coming to something that was ordained by God or QAnon which can be the same thing for some folks.
I remember when I saw the son, I was like, this kid looks like he's in a cult. Ye can see the dissonance in the kid's eyes. He very clearly had a break from reality and was having to drag his father out, his father who brought him here … I didn't even know exactly what it was. And so, I mean, that's a picture that to me is still kind of mysterious.
What did you learn from Afghan journalists?
I can’t stress enough that I learned everything I know about journalism. I learned what a nutgraf was from an Afghan reporter, or what a reverse pyramid paragraph was. I learned how to caption photos from this Afghan photographer (here’s one story Chris wrote there).
When I was getting into journalism, my heroes were not a bunch of white dudes with Pulitzers. My heroes were the people I was watching do incredible journalism in their own country. I was really grateful that there were some Afghan reporters and photographers who were willing to kind of tolerate my presence.
Of the nearly 200 interviews I’ve done for this podcast, the one with Chris Jones from January 2022 sticks with me as much as any of them.
I hope you get the chance to listen.
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