The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
CNN’s Lisa Ling tackles MS13, ‘furries,’ screen addiction
Lisa Ling has a dream job for any curious, empathetic journalist: She gets to travel the United States, immersing herself in different — often maligned or misunderstood — subcultures to try to understand participants’ motivations and psyches.
Called “This Is Life With Lisa Ling,” the CNN hourlong weekly series returns for a fifth season of eight episodes Sunday. Ling’s style of reporting is earnest and straightforward, with nary a trace of partisanship.
“We provide people with an experience and arm them with information so they can decide how they feel about a particular topic or subculture,” Ling said in a recent interview.
This season’s first episode tackles MS-13, a viciously brutal street gang. She spends time in the D.C. area, studying how and why kids — typically Latin American immigrants — get drawn into the gang.
“MS-13 is frequently mentioned by the Trump administration,” Ling said in an interview. “It’s incited the wrath of the president. But in reality, not a lot of Americans know what MS-13 is about. They will be surprised to learn the U.S. government played a pretty big role in its evolution.”
Ling homes in on a gruesome 2017 murder of a teen girl, Damaris Reyes Rivas, by MS-13 in Virginia. One of the participants was fellow teen Venus Romero Iraheta, who blamed Damaris for the murder of her boyfriend and MS-13 gang member Christian Sosa Rivas.
Damaris was stabbed 23 times. Her murder was captured on video and shown during the trial.
“It was horrifying,” she said. “It was one of those things you
wish you could unsee. You can’t believe human beings could be capable of this. Even after watching the video, I wanted to understand better why someone would do this. After receiving the responses of my questions from Venus, I in no way sympathize or condone what she did. But I do have a better understanding of how she ended up in the clutches of MS-13, how powerful gangs like this can pressure associates to conduct these kinds of savage murders.”
But not every episode she does is that dark. She also delves into the world of “furries,” a group of people who like to dress up in full-body animal costumes.
Ling said she “discounted them at first. It sounded silly. Some on my team thought they were a bunch of sexual deviants. But when we started asking around, it’s actually a massive community of people for whom sex is not the reason they do it. The majority of people who profess to be ‘furries’ suffer from extreme social anxiety.”
Ling interviewed one “furry” out of costume and “she could not stop shaking.” But once in her outfit, “she became an entirely different person who wasn’t afraid of anyone.”
Ling said the episode about screen addiction is less a subculture and more about our entire culture. She sheds light on the negative impact screens have on kids’ brains. The more time spent staring at a screen, the more prone a child will become to being depressed and anxious.
She focuses on a psychiatric nurse who had been trained on the warning signs of suicide. Yet her 16-year-old daughter took her own life, and her mom only discovered why after the cops studied her phone and laptop.
“Kids these days lack basic face-to-face communication skills,” Ling said. “It’s really scary.”
Ling’s return is bittersweet for CNN only because her show is paired with the final season of “Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown,” which precedes her return Sunday at 10:15 p.m.
“His passing was a devastating loss to humanity,” Ling said of Bourdain, who took his own life in the spring. “He brought the world into our homes in such a unique way, exposing us to cultures we’d otherwise never have known about or been interested in. He brought a kind of humanity into our homes. I have such an appreciation for what he did.”