S1E37 - Janine Zacharia - Realpolitik, Media Control and Democracy’s Decline

We met with renowned Middle East correspondent and journalism lecturer, Janine Zacharia to do a round up on Middle East current events. The scorecard is sobering. We are at an inflection point. While popular attention turns to Russia and China, press freedoms across the region continue to decline. The circulation of deliberately false information is a central cause. This fuels rampant political polarization, which in turn helps autocrats win. Violence and oppression against journalists is on the rise. Our own internal political dysfunction makes coherent foreign policy nearly impossible. As America’s standing and influence in the region wanes, China (who cares little for human rights or press freedoms) is more than happy to fill in our vacuum. So Zacharia asks an existential question - how might we restore respect for fact-based news? This is the lifeblood of functioning democracy. There are no easy answers, but she helps us see that this one leverage point has implications for the entire globe. Join us.

Biography

Janine Zacharia reported on Israel, the Middle East and U.S. foreign policy for close to two decades including stints as Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the Washington Post, chief diplomatic correspondent for Bloomberg News, Washington bureau chief for the Jerusalem Post, and Jerusalem correspondent for Reuters. She appears regularly on cable news shows and radio programs as a Middle East analyst and is currently a lecturer in the Department of Communication at Stanford University where she teaches news reporting and writing fundamentals and foreign correspondence.

profiles.stanford.edu/janine-zacharia

Conversation recorded on May 26, 2023.