Farnsworth first appeared regularly on public television in 1975 as a panelist covering Latin America on the national television program "World Press", produced by
KQED in San Francisco. In the 1970s and 80's she contributed articles to the
San Francisco Chronicle,
Foreign Policy, and
Mother Jones (magazine), among other publications. With Eric Leenson and Richard Feinberg, she wrote about the economic blockade against Chile during the years
Salvador Allende was president. That research became a book, El Bloqueo Invisible, in Buenos Aires in 1973. In 1984 she became a contributing correspondent to
The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour, later known as
The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer and then
PBS News Hour. In 1995 she became chief correspondent and principal substitute anchor, and in 1999 became senior correspondent and head of the
San Francisco office. From 1984 until 2005, she reported in print and on television from numerous countries, among them: Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, Japan, Chile, Peru, Guatemala, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel (the West Bank and Gaza), Botswana, Malawi and Turkey. Farnsworth was a Fellow at the Center for Art Environment of the
Nevada Museum of Art from 2010 to 2013. In June 2013 an exhibit, Fracked: North Dakota's Oil boom, featuring photographs by
Terry Evans (photographer) and written by Farnsworth, opened at the
Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. After a year, the exhibit traveled to the
North Dakota Museum of Art, and since then it has traveled to other cities in North Dakota. Farnsworth is a former member of the Board of Directors of the
World Affairs Council (Northern California) and currently a member of that organization's Advisory Committee. She also serves on the Advisory Committee of the UC
Berkeley School of Law Human Rights Center. ==Awards and honors==