Voting Station

Anne Garrels

Please vote to see the next celebrity.

Commentator

The Resume

    (July 2, 1951-September 7, 2022)
    Born in Springfield, Massachusetts
    Foreign correspondent for ABC (1975-85), NBC (1985-88), and NPR (1988-2010)
    Covered wars in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and Iraq
    Wrote 'Naked in Baghdad' (2003) and 'Putin Country' (2016)

Why she might be annoying:

    She said she subsisted on Kit Kat bars and Marlboro Lights while covering the Iraqi War from Baghdad.
    After journalist Tariq Ayyoub was killed during the bombing of Al-Jazeera's Baghdad headquarters (April 8, 2003), she allegedly said that Ayyoub should have known better than to be in his office during the invasion, leading to accusations of blaming the victim.
    She was criticized for basing a story on the confessions, extracted by torture, of 'renegade members' of Muqtada Al-Sadr's Shiite militia (2007).
    She said after leaving Iraq, 'I perhaps stayed too long.... After six years I was pretty burned out.'

Why she might not be annoying:

    She said that although being female made it more difficult to break into journalism, it was an advantage once she was a reporter: 'Men generally deal with me as a sexless professional, while women open up in ways that they would not with a man.'
    She was fluent in Russian, which helped her provide more in-depth coverage than other journalists when she served as Moscow bureau chief for ABC and NPR.
    She received the Courage in Journalism Award from the International Women's Media Foundation (2003).
    When Russia invaded Ukraine, she approached NPR about coming out of retirement to cover the conflict. (NPR declined due to her age and lung cancer diagnosis.)
    She founded the nonprofit Assist Ukraine and raised over $1 million for medical supplies and other support.

Credit: C. Fishel


Featured in the following Annoying Collections:

Year In Review:

    In 2023, Out of 17 Votes: 52.94% Annoying
    In 2022, Out of 5 Votes: 40.0% Annoying