Sara Sidner Is Only Human

Thanks to the events of the last year, the world got to see the person behind the CNN correspondent.

Sara Sidner Is Only Human

For nearly a year, journalist Sara Sidner was on the ground in Minneapolis. She covered the murder of George Floyd, the subsequent uprisings, and the trial of Derek Chauvin, the now-convicted officer responsible for Floyd’s death. For a time, she was a welcome local.

“There isn't a day that has gone by since George Floyd was murdered, and the video went viral where I didn't talk to someone from the Minneapolis community—the Floyd family, their attorneys—[or have] written about what happened here,” she says, the day after the Chauvin verdict was announced.

Sider, a national and international correspondent for CNN, knows a thing or two about being on the frontlines. She’s witnessed families mangled by war and terrorism firsthand and led CNN’s coverage in Ferguson after the shooting death of Michael Brown by a police officer in 2014.

There was also that time she was hit by a bullet shell while reporting outside of Muammar el-Qaddafi’s seized compound in 2011. “Rebel: Libya is free,” she tweeted from her BlackBerry.

Earlier than that, she was there—boots-on-ground—amid the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. For the one-year anniversary she recalled the experience for CNN:

“Outside there were a flurry of stunned reporters struggling with cables and notepads, cameras and phones trying to get the information back ASAP. We all stood in a row like sitting ducks. There were no barriers, no police tape, and nothing to stop anyone from getting too close.”

But it was the 2021 story of Juliana Jimenez Sesma, a Los Angeles woman who lost her mother and stepfather to COVID-19, that memorably brought Sidner to tears on live television in January. There were no stray bullet shells or bombs; no concrete buildings tumbling to the ground. Just a somber, socially distanced funeral in a parking lot, under a pop-up canopy. For Sidner, and for numerous people around the world, this was another kind of frontline.

Despite enduring those core-shaking experiences, there was something different about Minneapolis. In June, days after Floyd’s death, the city’s police chief, Medaria Arradondo, called the killing “a violation of humanity” outright. To see a chief almost immediately react against the blue wall of silence culture that permeates the police force was a rare moment. For months, Sidner was embedded in the community, which up until this April she referred to as her second home. Minneapolitans greeted her like she was one of their own. A kindness that helped take the edge off of a difficult day of reporting. 

“I just always felt so helpless, honestly," she says. "Because nothing I could say or do could fix the heartbreak in the community, the heartbreak of the family, the heartbreak of the people who stood there and watched a man be murdered, you know?”

Sidner pauses and takes a breath. “I think about what that does to a human being; there was a nine-year-old girl watching this with a shirt that said Love on it. What is this going to do to her?”

Nothing exposes the true nature of a society more than its acceptance of or repugnance toward vulnerability. And journalists are rarely granted the grace of breaking the fourth wall. So in January, when Sidner cried on camera, it was a necessary moment that revealed there was in fact a human reporting our nightly news, and this human was, like so many of us, affected by what she saw. In years past, women crying or even hinting at the possibility of tears while on the job has been met with harsh criticism (see: Hillary Clinton and Serena Williams).

Luckily Sidner’s tears were met with a great deal of support; a bellwether of a positive cultural shift? Who knows. But one thing is certain: after working more than three decades in the business, Sidner has not only learned about the nuanced nature of foreign affairs, she's also learned about how she wants to show up in the world.

“It's taken me a really long time to say ‘You don't have to be a robot reporter. You were hired because of your unique thing; whatever is your unique way of interviewing or seeing the world, just like every other person that's in this business,” she says. “So stop trying to be something that has been written out in a school book. Young people taught me that. They're like, ‘Why are you doing this thing where there's no emotional base? Be your authentic self!’ I learned that from them.”

By simply being herself Sidner has quietly helped shed the pervasive illusion of the stoic—often male—reporter, unmoved by the death and destruction unraveling before them. And you better believe she has some advice for anyone hesitant to be themselves at work right now.

“Do not be afraid to be who you are while doing the work that you do. It's taken me 30 years to get to this point."

This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Marquita K. Harris