Writing Quote by John Pomfret

Pomfret’s line is doing a delicate two-step that good foreign reporting has always needed, but digital outrage cycles have made harder: hold difference and sameness in the same frame without collapsing either. The first half stakes a claim for contrast. “Illustrate the differences between societies” treats reporting less like stenography and more like translation - the work of showing how power, customs, and assumptions are arranged differently elsewhere. It’s a defense of specificity against the flattening effect of parachute journalism, where every place becomes a template for an American morality play.

Then comes the hedge that isn’t really a hedge: “at the same time trying to connect” to shared values. The verb choice matters. “Connect” implies a wire that has to be built; common ground isn’t automatic, it’s a reporting decision. There’s subtext here about audience management. Editors and readers often demand relatability - a familiar emotional hook - but Pomfret is suggesting that relatability is earned through craft, not manufactured through cliché. “Trying” also admits humility: cross-cultural understanding is aspirational, partial, never finished.

Contextually, this sits in a post-9/11, post-globalization media environment where “difference” can be weaponized into fear, and “we’re all the same” can become its own kind of erasure. Pomfret sketches an ethics of comparison: show the real distances between societies, then resist the easy story that distance equals inhumanity. That tension is the point, and the job.