At CTi’s biennial corporate roast, managing editor Lyn Cryderman was nominated for the 1990 “I Wish I Were Dan Rather Award.”
Like CBS’s intrepid evening-news anchor, Lyn likes to visit the embattled scenes where the news is made. Last year the blond Lyn traveled, incognito and illegally, into a banned Palestinian village in Israel. Before that, he felt the effects of pepper gas at a student demonstration in South Korea. This year, he braved bullets to visit Christians in bombed-out Beirut.
Lyn’s report begins on page 41. Several of his discoveries did not find their way into his account. For example, most middle-class Lebanese families have two cars—a shiny, late model that sits unused most of the time in an underground garage, and a rusty, scarred “shrapnel special” to drive whenever the bullets are flying.
He also found Lebanese Christians discussing the eternal destiny of faithful Muslims. This concern does not proceed from mushy theology or liberalism. It sprouts naturally in the soil of experience in a country where Christian betrays Christian and where many Christians have learned they can count on certain reliable Muslim friends.
Although Lyn came bumper-to-barrel with a tank of unknown loyalties, he didn’t win the “I Wish I Were Dan Rather Award.” That prize was awarded instead to assistant editor Timothy Jones for braving hordes of pacifists to attend the Mennonite World Conference in Winnipeg.
