BROOKE GLADSTONE: This is On the Media. I'm Brooke Gladstone.

BOB GARFIELD: And I'm Bob Garfield. Paul Salopek is a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner who has been praised for his exhaustive reporting and evocative prose and who has reported from some of the most dangerous and miserable places on earth. In August, he was in the Darfur region of Sudan when he was arrested, accused of espionage. Salopek was on a brief leave from The Chicago Tribune in order to write a multipart series on life in the vast Central African savannah for National Geographic. He had written stark reports from Sudan before, and, based on experience, he decided to cross the border without a visa, planning to be there only for about two days. Two hours later, he was arrested, and ultimately imprisoned for 34 days. Salopek says on this assignment he was following one of the few leads he'd gotten about good news in the region.

PAUL SALOPEK: We were traveling on a road to a village that people were going to rebuild – basically a positive story on a fairly dismal humanitarian catastrophe. We were stopped by a militia patrol of Darfurian rebels who had switched sides and joined the Khartoum government in a peace deal. And these individuals captured us, took some of our electronic equipment, and, a few days later, turned us over to the government forces.

BOB GARFIELD: And before they turned you over, were you beaten, abused? How did they treat you?

PAUL SALOPEK: Well, the treatment from them was a bit harsh, but it got continually better once we were passed into the hands of the Sudanese.

BOB GARFIELD: And from that point, it was 34 days of incarceration of various kinds, in various places, under charges that you were a spy. Where did this come from?

PAUL SALOPEK: This surprised me as much as anybody, additionally so because all three of us – my Chadian colleagues were charged with the same charges, and one was just a driver. I think where it came from was apparently under Sudanese law there are two levels of espionage charges. One is intentional and one is unintentional. I've never had it clearly explained to me what unintentional espionage is, but that's apparently even if you're under the suspicion of gathering any information without permission in Sudan, though I guess reporters doing their jobs in war zones would fall under that rubric. They also found notes that I had, interviews with refugees, with humanitarian aid workers and some Internet maps that I'd downloaded of the border region.

BOB GARFIELD: You know, let's not gloss over the fact that you were in Sudan illegally. You hadn't obtained a journalist's visa for entering the country. Why?

PAUL SALOPEK: Sudan has opened up its doors a bit in the last five or six years and become an easier place to work in. There are now, to my knowledge, at least one and maybe two or three Western journalists based in Khartoum, doing their job there, which you wouldn't have heard of, you know, five, six, seven years ago. It has very brave Sudanese reporters working there all the time, and there is some debate in the Sudanese press itself. However, Darfur, and before Darfur, the civil war in the south has always been problematic. It's a difficult, remote area to get to, and if you attempt to get a visa to cover it, they frequently take weeks if not months, if you get them at all. And then once you do go through official channels with a visa, your job is often thwarted by your travel being restricted or actually meddled with by the secret police scaring away sources or just making your life generally difficult to collect information freely.

BOB GARFIELD: You have at least one story to finish. Did the Sudanese tell you get out and stay out, or will you try to go back into the country again?

PAUL SALOPEK: Well, Sudan is one of the most important stories in Africa for many reasons. I mean, it's a microcosm of Africa. It's geographically set out like Africa, a mostly ethnic Arab north and a mostly ethnic African south. And it's hugely important because of its position as sort of a crossroads to the Middle East, and it's got resources, like oil, that the whole world wants. So I would love to go back to Sudan, obviously, through official channels this time. When I did leave Khartoum, Sudanese, at least at that occasion, said that I was welcome to come back. So I'll be delighted to take them up on that offer.

BOB GARFIELD: There has been enormous amounts of coverage of Darfur without it seeming to have had any effect either on the political situation on the ground there nor in the public's mind here. I mean, I remember so vividly President Clinton talking about the Rwanda genocide, saying, never again. Do you see any evidence that more coverage is going to change the way the world reacts to this ongoing catastrophe?

PAUL SALOPEK: It's a hideously complicated conflict that goes back ultimately to struggles over resources. That, then, is overlaid with ethnic and tribal rivalries and then overlaid yet again with political agendas at the national level, and, indeed, the international level. So I think it's not just writing a story a day or a story a week about Darfur but explaining it correctly, just how difficult and how complicated life is there. And I think that allows policymakers then to explain their positions to their constituents, to the public and go about the very, very difficult job of trying to sort things out. So I've got to believe that, yeah, more coverage will help.

BOB GARFIELD: In the midst of the efforts to free you, Congressman Chris Shays of Connecticut, apparently trying to assuage the Sudanese government, said that you, quote, "Did a very foolish thing coming into the country without a visa," and he knows that, "he knew he made a mistake." Did you make a mistake or did you just do what you had to do to get the story?

PAUL SALOPEK: You know, Congressman Shays, whom I'm immensely grateful to, I won't take issue with his statement in the sense that clearly I made a mistake by putting myself and my two Chadian colleagues in danger. I take full responsibility for that. I know that having covered many, many conflicts, when I have colleagues who either, A, get captured, or, worse, get killed in combat, around the hotels afterwards or in the cars that journalists travel in after these incidents happen, we express our great shock and condolences, but we also parse “what went wrong”, in quotes. But it's a defense mechanism, because there's an element of luck in all of this – that bad luck can be the deciding factor between freedom or captivity or between life and death.

BOB GARFIELD: All right, Paul. Well, many thanks for joining us.

PAUL SALOPEK: Thank you very much.

BOB GARFIELD: Paul Salopek is a twice-Pulitzer Prize-winning correspondent for The Chicago Tribune. [MUSIC UP AND UNDER]