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PAULA SLIER

PAULA SLIER

As a journalist, she has spent her career reporting from places where history is unfolding in real time. She realised that conflict isn't only about understanding politics, military strategy or diplomacy. It's about understanding people.

As a journalist, she has spent her career reporting from places where history is unfolding in real time. She realised that conflict isn’t only about understanding politics, military strategy or diplomacy. It’s about understanding people.
 
Facts matter. But they rarely shape outcomes on their own. Perception, belief and the stories we tell ourselves often have just as much influence over the decisions we make and the world we create.
Today, Paula explores not only what is happening, but why people interpret events differently, how trust is built or broken, and how information influences leadership, decision-making and public opinion.
 
Whether reporting from a conflict zone, speaking to business leaders or working with organisations, Paula is still asking the same questions that first drew her to journalism: What are we missing? What assumptions are we making? And what happens when we choose to look beyond the obvious?
 

ABOUT PAULA

a life devoted to truth.

For more than three decades, one question has shaped Paula Slier’s work: Why do people experience the same event so differently?

Modern conflict is fought not only with weapons, but with narratives, images and information

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORIES

It Started with a Question

Journalism Found me

The People Who Believed in Me

When the World Called

Leaving Home

The First War

The Stories that Stayed With Me

From War Zones to Information Warfare

The Bullet I Never Heard

Beyond the Battlefield

Another person I'll never forget was
Gavin Mpasa.

He was a homeless teenager living on the streets and sleeping in a shelter while studying for his final school exams. I found him quite by chance. We sat together on dustbins on a pavement for a live television interview. I handed him the morning’s newspaper containing the matric results – South Africa’s final school-leaving exam results. It listed only people who had passed. I wouldn’t let him look at it beforehand and, while live on air, he searched desperately for his name. He couldn’t find it. I started to panic, took the newspaper, looked again, and there it was.

He’d passed.

He jumped up shouting, “I’ve passed! I’ve passed!”

Someone from the Thabo Mbeki Foundation saw the interview and offered him a three-year university bursary. Last I heard, Paseka was running his own marketing company in Cape Town. 
 
It was a reminder that journalism doesn’t just tell stories. Sometimes, it changes lives. 

Journalism
Found me

Sometimes the places we dream about become the

places that shape us

One of those people was
Paseka Moahlodi.

He was a homeless teenager living on the streets and sleeping in a shelter while studying for his final school exams. I found him quite by chance. We sat together on dustbins on a pavement for a live television interview. I handed him the morning’s newspaper containing the matric results – South Africa’s final school-leaving exam results. It listed only people who had passed. I wouldn’t let him look at it beforehand and, while live on air, he searched desperately for his name. He couldn’t find it. I started to panic, took the newspaper, looked again, and there it was.

He’d passed.

He jumped up shouting, “I’ve passed! I’ve passed!”

Someone from the Thabo Mbeki Foundation saw the interview and offered him a three-year university bursary. Last I heard, Paseka was running his own marketing company in Cape Town. 
 
It was a reminder that journalism doesn’t just tell stories. Sometimes, it changes lives. 
Every opportunity that followed can be traced back to the day one remarkable woman said yes to a nervous university student.
 

The People Who Believed in Me

Read the full tribute I wrote after Helen’s passing. 

FULL TRIBUTE
I couldn’t drive home fast enough. I banged on the front door until my mother came running, convinced something terrible had happened. “I’m going to be on television!” I shouted.
 
Helen became far more than my first boss. She became my mentor, my teacher and, over time, one of the most important people in my life. She believed in giving people opportunities, and she had an extraordinary ability to see potential in everyone, long before they themselves did. She believed journalism should be serious, but journalists didn’t always have to be. If we weren’t enjoying what we did, she’d ask, “What’s the point?” 
 
Whenever an aspiring journalist reaches out to me for advice, I always make time. It’s the best way I know to thank Helen for everything she did for me.
 

The biggest turning points in our lives are often not the places we go, but the people who see something in us before we see it ourselves

when the world called

Some invitations don’t just change your plans.

They change your life. 

On another deployment with Rescue South Africa, this time to Algeria after a devastating earthquake in 2003, I met a family who I still think about today. 
 
At exactly 19:44, when they were seated for dinner, their apartment block began to shake. Everyone rushed for the door, but 17-year-old twin, Yasmin, turned back to fetch a scarf to cover her hair. The building collapsed around her. 
 
When we arrived, her family was sitting on a blanket across the road. Seeing an international rescue team gave them hope. Her father, Krimo, in broken English, begged the team to find something – a strand of her hair, a piece of clothing, even a fingernail – so they would have something to bury. 
But there was no miracle. Yasmin was gone. 
 
In the miracle of unbearable grief, the family shared their food with us. Although we were complete strangers from South Africa, they welcomed us like family. I spent time with them and returned to visit them twice over the following years. The only English Yasmin’s mother knew was “Eat,” and she would ask me, “Why aren’t you married?” The last time I saw her she gave me a wedding gown as a gift. They had lost a daughter, they told me, but had found another one in me.
 
The stories that matter most are rarely about disasters themselves. They are about the humanity we share in our darkest moments.
 
 
 
I had to start from the bottom again. Slowly, one assignment became another. I picked up freelance gigs, reported for South African radio and television, Reuters, Israeli broadcasters and international news organisations. Over time, I spent nearly two decades reporting from the Middle East and eventually became RT’s Middle East Bureau Chief and international correspondent for South Africa’s eyewitness news.
 
Looking back, I realise careers are rarely straight lines. Sometimes, starting over is the only way to move forward. It’s the beginning of everything that comes next. 

Leaving
Home

The world became my classroom long before it became my workplace.

At 31, I made one of the biggest decisions of my life. I left a secure job, ended a six-year relationship, packed two suitcases and moved to Israel. I had no close family there, knew almost no one and arrived with very little money. My first home was a tiny apartment I rented in Jerusalem’s Mahane Yehuda market. Every morning I woke to traders shouting, chickens clucking and the market coming to life. I slept on a mattress on the floor, watched television from a single chair and wondered often if I’d made the biggest mistake of my life. When I saw a former colleague of mine reading the news on CNN from Atlanta, I questioned everything. Had I thrown away the career I’d worked so hard to build? Was I starting again for nothing?

In many ways, I was.I knocked on doors looking for work. One editor told me I wasn’t offering anything new. I was a South African journalist who spoke only English in a region filled with correspondents who spoke Hebrew, Arabic and other languages. 

the first war

Nothing prepares you for the moment history stops being something you read about and becomes something you stand inside 

A month later I crossed into Lebanon to cover the Second Lebanon War.

Before I left, my sister Hayley, who lives in England, phoned me with what she thought was a perfectly sensible idea. “Can’t you phone the Israeli army and tell them which car you’ll be travelling in?” she asked. To her, it made complete sense.

If they knew where I was, surely they wouldn’t bomb me. I smiled, knowing it wasn’t possible. That was also the moment I realised that every war has two front lines. One is where the journalist stands. The other is where the people who love you wait, hoping the phone will ring.

“I didn’t set out to cover wars. I set out to understand people.”

- PAULA SLIER

From War Zones to Information Warfare

The world became my classroom long before it became my workplace.

That realisation transformed the way I think about conflict – and the work I do today.
 
I now spend as much time helping people understand information warfare, disinformation, media literacy and narrative power as I do talking about the conflicts themselves. If we want to understand why wars happen – or how to prevent them – we have to understand the stories that shape the way people think long before violence begins.
 
Because facts do not speak for themselves.
 
They are spoken for.
 
Today’s battlefields are fought not only on the ground. Increasingly they are fought in our minds. 
 

The Stories that Stayed With Me

Nothing prepares you for the moment history stops being something you read about and becomes something you stand inside 

The Boy Who Still Surfed
the World

Leaving Home

Over the years, photographs arrived from beaches, oceans and coastlines across the globe - the journey Assaf never got to make.

Assaf Tzur was just 16-years-old when he was killed in a terrorist attack while travelling home in the school bus. His greatest dream was to surf the world’s oceans. 
 
At his funeral, his father buried him beneath a headstone shaped like a surfboard and asked travellers from across the globe to photograph themselves with Assaf’s picture wherever their journeys took them. Over the years, photographs arrived from beaches, oceans and coastlines across the globe – the journey Assaf never got to make. 
 
As is customary with Jewish tradition, people also sent stones to be placed aside his grave.
 
Assaf never got to see the world. But in a way, the world came to see him. 

What Kind of Sister Prays for Her Sister to Die?

Watch the interview 

In a refugee camp in northern Iraq, I sat holding the hands of Amira, a Yazidi woman whose 27-year-old sister had been taken hostage by Islamic State terrorists. The Yazidis, a Kurdish-speaking religious minority, were specifically targeted by ISIS because of their faith. Thousands of women and girls were abducted, sold in slave markets, raped and subjected to systematic sexual violence, with the youngest girls often fetching the highest prices. 

Amira told me her sister had managed to call briefly to say the girls were being sold, enslaved and raped. Through tears, Amira confessed that she had begged her sister to kill herself. “What kind of sister tells her sister to kill herself?” she asked me. She wasn’t speaking out of cruelty, but out of unimaginable love and desperation, terrified that death might be kinder than what awaited her sister at the hands of Islamic State.

Some questions never leave you. 

The Girl Who Wanted to Become a Journalist

Leaving Home

One of the most unexpected moments of my career came when I met two teenager girls receiving treatment in the same Israeli hospital – one Palestinian and one Israeli. The Israeli teenager had survived a suicide bombing in Jerusalem. The Palestinian teenager had been caught in a crossfire while travelling with her family in Bethlehem. Their lives, backgrounds and experiences could not have been more different, yet they shared teh same hospital ward and the same determination to rebuild their lives. 
 
Years later, the Palestinian teenager told me that meeting a woman journalist had inspired her to become one herself. Sometimes you never know which conversation will change someone’s life – including your own.

The Pen, the Kalashnikov and the Cross

Leaving Home

In Homs, Syria, I met a former schoolteacher whose life had been turned upside down by war. He told me that the day a mortar exploded in the school yard and he had to hand over the body of a six-year-old to her father, was the day he swapped his pen for a Kalashnikov. He took my hand as we ran across “Sniper Valley” where snipers were shooting anything that moved from the rooftops. As we said goodbye, he pressed a small cross into my hand. It wasn’t a political gesture or even a religious one. It was a symbol of hope. “Pray for me and my men,” he asked me, “because most of us won’t make it out here alive!”  
 
I’ve forgotten many dates, military operations and countless headlines. I have never forgotten the people. Whenever I look at that cross, I am reminded of the terrible choices war forces ordinary people to make. These are only four stories among thousands. They are why I believe every conflict must first be understood through the lives of the people living it. 
 
That realisation transformed the way I think about conflict – and the work I do today.
 
I now spend as much time helping people understand information warfare, disinformation, media literacy and narrative power as I do talking about the conflicts themselves. If we want to understand why wars happen – or how to prevent them – we have to understand the stories that shape the way people think long before violence begins.
 
Because facts do not speak for themselves.
 
They are spoken for.
 
Today’s battlefields are fought not only on the ground. Increasingly they are fought in our minds. 
 
put quote ere

From War Zones to Information Warfare

The most important battles are
often fought long before the first shot is fired 

The Bullet I Never Heard

The Story I Never Expected
to Tell 

Beyond the Battlefield

Where conflict, leadership
and humanity meet 

Read the full tribute
The greatest deception I have ever experienced didn’t happen in a warzone. It happened in my home. With the man I chose to marry. He turned out not to be who he claimed he was. The future I believed I was building never existed.
 
How could someone who had spent decades reporting on deception and manipulation fail to recognise it in her own life?
That experience changed me. It taught me that not all trauma comes from bombs or bullets. Some of the deepest wounds are inflicted by lies, betrayal and the collapse of everything you believed to be true. It deepened my understanding of resilience, of manipulation, and of how powerful stories can be – not only the stories we are told, but the stories we tell ourselves. It was the hardest story I have ever had to tell, because this time, I was the subject.
 
Some journeys don’t just take you to new places. They introduce you to yourself. 
Read the full tribute
Everything I’ve lived has prepared me for what came next. Today, I no longer see my work simply as reporting on conflict. My experiences in war zones, my encounters with extraordinary people, and the unexpected challenges in my own life have all shaped the work I do today.
 
Whether I’m delivering a keynote, teaching journalists, advising leaders, or building the 676 Foundation, my purpose remains the same: to help people better understand conflict, question the stories they are told, and recognise the humanity that exists on every side.
 
The places I’ve been have changed me. The people I’ve met have shaped me. And the journey is still unfolding.
 
I don’t believe my most important work is behind me.
 
I believe it’s still ahead.