Foreign Correspondence, Vol 136
Ken Burns on revisiting America’s founding after 250 years
Hello, and … well, it’s Friday.
This correspondence comes to you from my sick bed, where I’ve been confined since getting struck down with what I can only describe as the plague earlier this week. On the bright side: I’ve had plenty of time to watch the news, which has more dystopian twists and turns than anything Netflix can offer.
If I’ve learned anything from this latest escalation (if “escalation” is the right word to describe the U.S. and Israel bombing Iran and setting off a domino effect that has engulfed much of the region and beyond), it’s just how vital trusted journalism is at this time. I cannot recommend the work of my Reuters’ colleagues enough, which includes exclusive comments from President Trump on how the U.S. must have a role in choosing Iran’s next leader, this visual story mapping out the ongoing crisis, this exclusive story on who bears responsibility for the strike on the Iranian school that killed scores of children, and much more.
What I’ve worked on
Last week, I caught up with the award-winning documentarian Ken Burns, who was in town promoting his new film on the American Revolution, which is slated for release this summer just a few weeks shy of its 250th anniversary.
For our latest Reuters Culture Current, we discuss his foray into filmmaking, the myths and nostalgia that define many Americans’ understanding of the revolutionary period and his guarded optimism for the next 250 years.
This summer marks 250 years since American Independence. How are you feeling about the next 250?
You have this current political crisis that we’re in, which is the lopsided power that the executive has taken vis-a-vis the legislative and the judicial (branches). It’s unprecedented in that it’s not happened at this highest level, but things happen. So I think that this is our supreme test. I think this — along with the Civil War and the Depression and the Second World War — is one of the greatest crises in American history. And in all those cases, we figured out a way. We were much more divided during the Revolution than we are now. We were much more divided during the Civil War, the Vietnam period, (and) the Depression than we are now. There’s a bit of arrogance that the present always has, because we’re alive, our stuff is the worst or the best or whatever. But a study of history tells you maybe it’s not the worst.
Read the full conversation here
Plus:
Our latest editions of Emotional Currency, from prenups to house hopping
Our latest City Memos from Cortina, Melbourne, Jakarta, and Valencia
What I’ve read
This essay from my friend and former Atlantic colleague Elaine Godfrey, whose artful writing should act as a deterrent to any other politicos thinking about booting her from a campaign event (best believe she keeps receipts):
I will, of course, own up to being a white woman wearing a Menards baseball cap. But “top-notch hater” is a distinction that I had never considered for myself. Last year, I wrote a profile of Crockett that displeased the congresswoman. I interviewed her several times for the story, but after she learned that I’d called some of her colleagues in Congress without asking her permission, she told me that she was “shutting down the profile and revoking all permissions.” (In retrospect, I suppose this was a helpful signal that Crockett does not have a firm grasp on the First Amendment, or at least does not particularly care for it.)
As security guards began to materialize around me, I wondered to myself what distinguished a top-notch hater from a middling one. I agreed to leave, and four guards, including at least one who was armed, escorted me out of the building, through the parking lot, and right to the edge of the nearby highway, where they waited as I ordered a car. A spokesperson for the Crockett campaign did not respond to my request for comment on these events or for elaboration on the tiers of haterdom. A spokesperson for her team told Semafor that I had not been removed from the event. Crockett told CBS News there is “no evidence” that a reporter had been removed from an event. She added that there is a “specific journalist” who has a “history of being less than truthful,” and that this person had been sued for defamation and lost. Perhaps she was thinking of someone else, because that’s not something that has ever happened to me.
This piece on California Governor (and anticipated 2028 presidential candidate) Gavin Newsom’s recent comments likening Israel to an apartheid state:
Newsom is one of those rare political animals whose funding base is so vast and secure that he could weather whatever torrent of AIPAC dollars could be hurled against him. One consequence of his new position might even be that it could make AIPAC’s funding of down-ticket candidates running in Democratic primaries this year politically toxic to Democratic voters if it’s sufficiently called out. The first test of that could come on March 17, when Illinois holds its primaries. AIPAC donors are funding candidates in four Democratic congressional primaries there. Now that the Democratic establishment’s presidential front-runner considers it all but obligatory to repudiate AIPAC’s fundamental orientation, the candidates whom AIPAC is opposing in the forthcoming primaries might just consider it safe to call out their AIPAC-backed opponents for their support of the savage ethnic cleansers whose rule AIPAC devotedly promotes.
This Q&A with former LA Times Managing Editor Sara Yasin on the reality of being a Palestinian journalist in legacy media and launching her new platform, “The Key”:
Journalists—particularly in legacy places—have this ingrained thing of: put your head down, do the work, and the work will speak for itself. The problem is there’s all this scrutiny of what standards are going into how we’re doing things, and quite literally, people on social media were seeing what was happening in Gaza directly from journalists and people who were actually showing what was going on. That was showing there was a gap. To me, that gap was a crisis. By virtue of being someone who was around people asking a lot of questions—not just about the media, but about these big institutions and their relationship to whitewashing the genocide—I was engaging with these questions in an open and earnest way, differently from my peers. I thought it was urgent to interrogate our approach to building credibility with audiences. It made me feel like I existed in another universe.
What I’m thinking about
This recent appeal by the Foreign Press Association in Israel urging the Israeli government to lift their ban on the press entering Gaza.
It’s an admirable effort — but one that I fear will probably go nowhere without more pressure from the international media outlets behind these journalists (including CNN, ABC, Sky News, and the Associated Press) and the foriegn governments purporting to support freedom of the press.
Until next time,
Yasmeen