Courageous truth-tellers

Fox News correspondent Benjamin Hall was on assignment near Kyiv on March 14, 2022, when shrapnel from a Russian bomb ripped through his vehicle, killing his driver and gravely wounding him. Seeming to hear his daughter’s voice say, “Daddy, you’ve got to get out of the car,” he dragged himself out of the mangled car and closer to the road. A Ukrainian military officer found him and rushed him to a nearby hospital.

In his new memoir Saved (Harper 2023), Hall first tells of his early years, from his time in a Roman Catholic boarding school facing down bullies to traveling the world with his mother, which primed him for adventure. He then spent more than a decade as a freelance reporter in places like Syria and Afghanistan. In 2022, as Russia invaded Ukraine, he went to Kyiv to cover that conflict for Fox News. Hall chronicles his harrowing journey home after his bombing injury and his painful recovery over the next months.

Christians should note the book isn’t about being “saved” spiritually, though Hall is influenced by Roman Catholicism. He or his friends occasionally drink alcohol to excess, use offensive language, and make poor choices—even visiting a voodoo shaman. That said, he courageously risks his life to report the truth, and we see his love grow for his wife and especially his three daughters: “Now all I want to do is sit at the table with them and give them baths and put them to bed and read them stories and kiss them good night.”

Frances Haugen’s autobiography, The Power of One (Little, Brown and Co. 2023), offers a bombshell look at how Big Tech—and particularly Facebook—makes choices that harm society. After Haugen’s “civic integrity” unit was disbanded by Facebook, she worked with a Wall Street Journal reporter to leak more than 22,000 pages of Facebook’s internal communications in 2021: “I wanted to be able to sleep at night, free from the burden of carrying secrets I earnestly thought endangered the lives of tens of millions of people.”

Early chapters cover her challenges as a child math prodigy and an awkward teen. Readers also see her develop debate skills and a thick skin at places like Harvard Business School, Yelp, and Google. But readers will most appreciate the summary of what her leaked Facebook communications really mean. For instance, she reveals why Facebook did not act on internal evidence of how its products harmed users, especially teen girls. She also explains how a 2018 decision to ­promote “engaged” content (that is, content with more likes, shares, and comments) incentivized “angry” speech and led to a “surge of extreme content.” Such content can lead to violence in the United States and has fueled genocide in smaller countries like Myanmar.

Haugen’s story contains a few instances of coarse language and one scene in which a man exposes himself. But she offers critical insights into technology’s impact on our lives and how we can work together to make it better.