Publishing in a Polarized World
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Hello, everybody. So you, my dear listeners, may know that CFR publishes Foreign Affairs magazine. And for years, it's been required reading for policymakers both here at home and abroad. Foreign Affairs also publishes a daily stream of web content on global developments of the moment and now has a successful podcast series, which you may have heard on this feed last week, the Foreign Affairs Interview.

So in honor of World Press Freedom Day being this month, we thought we would do something a little bit different, a Why It Matters Foreign Affairs collaboration. I'm Gabrielle Sierra, and for this special episode of Why It Matters, I'm sitting down with the editor-in-chief of Foreign Affairs magazine, Dan Kurtz-Falin, to discuss the state of global press freedom and the challenges of publishing in a polarized world.

Dan, welcome to Why It Matters. Thank you so much. Really glad to be here. This has been a long time coming. Yeah, seriously. The world has been asking, you know, and here we are delivering.

So I just kind of want to kick off and say in honor of World Press Freedom Day, which happened this month, and in honor of, you know, the pretty wild news cycle we're in, the media environment we're in, if you had to assign it a grade, what grade would you give the state of press freedom globally at this point?

I think it's a really complicated picture because on the one hand, we know the incredible challenges and threats to journalists working around the world today. Obviously, most extreme examples are journalists in prison, whether that's Evan Grishkovich in Russia or lots of journalists whose names we probably don't know or most people don't know who are imprisoned in places all over the world. There are record numbers of journalists being killed in war zones, whether that's in Gaza and in places that

are suffering, you know, extreme violence, but are not at war in Mexico and Central America. So it's a it's a grim picture. In that sense, it's a grim picture in the in the commercial or economic sense in this country and lots of others, just because the the models that have traditionally supported journalism have, as everyone knows, fallen apart over the last 20 years. And it's been, I think, a struggle for

a lot of publications to figure out what to do with that. On the other hand, there are way more people who have access to really high quality journalism and analysis than has ever been true in, you know, certainly the history of America as a global power, but I would say probably in the history of humanity. So there is, I think, much more access to that

even as you see those really awful threats, in some cases, mortal threats to journalists working all over the place. And they're just incredible financial challenges for institutions of

of sustaining all this. So I'm in many ways gloomy because it's easy to be gloomy about this, but I think we need to remember that that access and everything that technology has enabled, even as it's disrupted those financial models, really does change the ability of people to access information. So I don't know if that takes me to a B or what, maybe a C because it's a

a complicated picture, but pretty wide range. Yeah. You know, I try to hold both of those things in my mind at one time. And whether that makes me kind of optimistic or pessimistic depends, you know, sometimes on my mood of any given day. Makes sense. All right. So let's just kind of go into what made you want to do this? What made you want to get into this business to begin with and take the path you've taken so far?

So I have been probably since high school or middle school quite focused on this set of questions. It goes back, I'm a child of the end of the Cold War in the 90s, so very much shaped by the experience of watching the fall of the Berlin Wall, which probably feels like ancient history to many listeners, but it was kind of fascinating to me as a child and trying to understand

the context and the reverberations and then watching everything that played out from there. And then again, seeing 9/11 and the Iraq war when I was in college and trying to make sense both again of the context, but also especially in the Iraq context to understand the debates and what in that instance went wrong in some ways. What was the debate that we should have been having before Iraq that

perhaps was not had in the way it should have by people in the foreign policy world, you know, sometimes called not especially affectionately the blob. But what did you know, what did the blob get wrong in trying to scrutinize those decisions and look at options in that moment. So that's a lot of what you know, as I think about our task now, I'm informed by is that context. And, you know, I've been kind of always torn between either go back to that idea of those

those few different worlds, I've been torn between them. And I teach, I've spent time in government, I've written books that are intended for a larger audience. And so in some ways, it's a kind of indecision or a lack of decisiveness that map perfectly onto the way that foreign affairs tries to exist among those worlds.

Yeah, I was going to say you sort of emerged from the blob because you served in the State Department. Do you feel like that experience really shaped the way that you approach telling stories or communicating bigger issues to readers? It did in a huge number of senses. In some ways, that makes me more kind of sympathetic to the people, you know, sitting in the State Department or, you know, the NSC or elsewhere trying to kind of think through options. But

also gave me an awareness of the kinds of blind spots and limitations that you almost inevitably have when you're sitting in those jobs, which has been, I think, hugely useful and influential in terms of how we think about what we do at Foreign Affairs. It's easy on the outside to kind of admire problems and critique approaches without really having anything to say about what you think a better option would be. It's obviously a cliché in

in foreign policy or policy of any kind that you're dealing in many cases with the best of only bad options, you know, that there's not a really ideal solution. And you know that there are lots of risks and trade offs and costs of what you're doing. But in order to really critique that with, I think, kind of intellectual,

honesty and real ethical gravity, you need to be able to say, look, there is a better way of doing this that will not bring inordinate risks of its own or have other costs or trade-offs that would outweigh whatever benefit might come. So if you're talking about the failure to address nuclear weapons in North Korea, I mean, it's very easy to kind of

lay out a record of failures across administrations for many decades, it's much harder to say what else you would do. So we would press an author to, again, put forth a real constructive solution there. In other cases, it might be, you know, I've brought this kind of new, maybe kind of scholarly framing to a problem or used

data or empirical academic work to shed light on in some new way. And then we'd say, okay, so what if I'm a policymaker, I'm someone trying to act on that in government, or it might be in business or a nonprofit or other kinds of institutions, what should I do with that? If that framework is useful, it should tell me that I should approach these problems that I'm dealing with every day in a new way.

Well, so you recently, I guess it's been how long has the foreign affairs interview been on at this point? Over a year? It's been about, it's almost two years. It might be a two year anniversary. Oh my gosh. So it's been a couple of years. It does not feel like that. It does not standing there in that studio with you when you first started. And I will say you put me through my paces trying to get my basic podcasting skills there and hopefully gotten somewhere else.

Well, this is an extremely successful show and you have made this jump from sort of behind the scenes to in front of the scenes or at least in front of a mic. How has that transition been for you? It's been more fun and more seamless than I imagined. I kind of anticipated it with some degree of

dread, mostly because it was something that I had not spent a ton of time doing in the past. But the advice I got from you and others is that what you're really doing, and I think this is a great thing about the podcast forum, is you're trying to have a conversation with someone that I think we're lucky in that most of the people we have conversations with on air are people that I would love to sit down with over a

a coffee and talk to them about an issue. So on the show, we're dealing mostly with either people who have written for foreign affairs or in a few cases, sitting government officials or military officials. We did an episode with General Mark Milley, the former chair of the Joint Chiefs when he was still in the military about a year ago. And with each of those, it's really just about curiosity and being engaged with the person. So that's been

in some ways, more natural process than some other formats. And it's also quite close in some ways to what we do in the editing process. So when you're talking to an author about a draft or talking through an idea, it's in some ways you're kind of trying to ask them the right kinds of questions to elicit answers that would, again, shed light on

some of the issues that we're trying to cover. So that's, in some ways, very similar if you're doing that on air with a podcast guest and doing it over the phone with an author, trying to get the elements of an essay down. Any favorites so far? I know you mentioned Mark Milley. Any others jump to mind? I mean, Milley was totally fascinating because this is someone who had become a complicated political figure in the Trump context, especially, and had not really done

long form interviews like that. At that point, he was several months away from retirement and had been as a good military officer, fairly restrained in what he was willing to talk about. But at that moment, had a huge amount of experience, was willing to talk kind of expansively, not so much kind of talking out of school about policy issues or military challenges at the moment, but really kind of reflecting on history that he'd

He'd lived history in a much deeper way. And, you know, being able to get someone who isn't often heard or seen in that kind of context talking, you know, over the course of an hour was quite fun. That's awesome. When we come back, we'll talk to Dan about whether publishing has gotten more challenging amid mounting global challenges. Stay tuned.

Do you ever feel like there's nothing new in the news? You know there are urgent things happening in the world around you, but all you hear is noise. That's why we made What Next? Our goal is to tell you the stories you haven't heard before, or maybe a different side to the story you thought you already knew all about. I'm Mary Harris, the host of What Next? And I love my job because it helps me cut through the noise of the news.

And then I get to bring it to you. Together, we can figure out what next. I want to pivot a little bit. What about the climate in international affairs right now? There's obviously a lot of debate on college campuses elsewhere. Do you feel like that this world of foreign policy is polarized today?

I mean, it certainly is in the way that so many issues are. At the same time, I'm struck there's obviously a level on which these kinds of conversations, whether it's about Israel and Gaza, whether it's about Ukraine, whether it's about China, whether it's about our own politics and the state of democracy in the United States, there's an incredibly fraught and often bad faith version of this conversation that plays out. At the same time, I'm struck

when I look at really all of those issues that there's also a really, I think, constructive good faith version of those debates and conversations that play out. And when I look at, not to be too self-referential here, but when I look at the work that authors have done in foreign affairs,

There's a very wide range of views. There are people who write advocating for one state, the two-state solution is dead and there should be one binational Israeli-Palestinian state. There are people advocating for traditional focus on the two-state solution. There are people who believe the two-state solution is dead, but that instead Israel needs to be aggressive in the ways the current Israeli government is in guaranteeing its own security. So you can get those people in one publication

I think offering serious good faith arguments, grounded analysis, and speaking to one another in ways that I think probably were more challenging in the past, or I'm not sure it's any worse now than it was. So if I were sitting on a college campus as a student or a professor at this point, you do see a wide ranging conversation. I think that represents a really serious engagement with this. Have you been feeling like a really stark generational divide?

That's the kind of question that makes me feel old because I have to kind of reflect on where I fall in those generational divides. I don't know. When I look at the kind of samples of our readers that I see in people kind of involved in the foreign policy debate, there are, of course, generational differences. If I was shaped by my memories of the Berlin Wall and the humanitarian debates of the 1990s, anti-WTO protests and everything that kind of consumed attention, you know, before 9-11, I

Then I look at students who are very, very shaped by the experience of 9-11 and the Iraq War and kind of bring up skepticism to the use of American power that I think is different than is the case for people who were shaped by earlier experiences. And I think it's this kind of fascinating question of what college students or high school students now will take away from these last few years was on the one hand, I think you saw around Ukraine one shift and then another shift.

since October 7th and the war on causes started. And what they'll take away from that, I'm not totally sure, but it seems clear to me both in working with authors and teaching and interactions with our readers that that formative experience as people are first starting to pay attention to international affairs and foreign policy becomes...

framework that they are going to bring to problems through the rest of their careers. I think you see this with policymakers as well. There are generational differences even in the Biden administration, and I think that explains some of the differences in policy preferences and focus. Do you find that it gets harder to remain nonpartisan in this climate, or at least has it become more challenging to engage in published debate over issues in this divisive time? I think what's become...

especially complicated here is the way that partisan divisions map to foreign policy debates has changed a lot. So if we were having this conversation 15 years ago or even 10 years ago, I would kind of have a sense of what a Republican viewpoint on most issues was and a Democratic viewpoint on most issues was. I wouldn't be able to predict that with perfect accuracy. There was obviously variation in debate within the parties, but you kind of had some understanding of how

debates about specific foreign policy issues mapped onto that partisan spectrum or onto the political landscape. And that's become really complicated in interesting ways, right? The kind of way that Trump has disrupted debates about

American foreign policy in the Republican Party has been, you know, obviously a total transformation in both what Republican foreign policy looks like, but also what those debates look like. You have probably a somewhat more subdued version of that on the Democratic side, but with a left in this debate that has a much bigger voice than it would have, you know, again, 10 or 15 years ago. So

We work very hard to represent a fairly broad range of views, both what would be considered kind of traditional blob perspectives on a problem, but also more pro-restrainer views, which could come from the left or the right.

We've had a slew of very senior former Trump officials and perhaps future Trump officials who have written in our pages and engaged in debate with officials from different administrations. We published a piece that's in our current issue by Matt Pottinger, who was Deputy Secretary of the Trump administration, writing with

Mike Gallagher, who just resigned as a Republican member of Congress from Wisconsin and led the China subcommittee and was a strong voice on a kind of new Republican foreign policy. We're going to have in our next issue a set of responses to that, including from people who served in the Biden administration, the Obama administration, members of the intelligence community. So again, the partisan lines are not totally clear there.

Yeah, I want to push you a little bit on that because I know, like obviously most publications, some pieces Foreign Affairs has published have drawn criticism, you know, not necessarily to the magazine, but perhaps to the writer. Where is the line between fostering debate and sharing a viewpoint that is potentially problematic? You know, at what point do you decide not to publish an essay by perhaps an otherwise esteemed commentator?

We bring a couple of questions to this when scrutiny is an idea. And one is the author bringing, you know, real credibility to the issue and the problem. And that could be someone who's done great dissertation research. It could be someone young who's done great PhD research on migrant caravans coming out of Guatemala. But as someone who just knows more about the reality of that problem and drivers of migration than anyone else, it might be someone who served in government in a serious role. It might be someone who's, you know,

done really fascinating reporting or historical work and that brings real credibility to it and is engaging in that debate and with a degree of good faith right if something is kind of trollish or just a provocation that is not of interest to us you know it should also have at least the ambition if you should have the ambition to kind of drive debate forward it shouldn't be just kind of

rehashing a consensus or admiring a problem, but really kind of driving debate forward about how to constructively address something. So that's always a judgment call. And there are, you know, people who scream at us every day on Twitter and sometimes in real life about specific pieces. And that's true across a whole range of issues, right? If you talk about Israel, Gaza, it's kind of obvious what the challenge of managing those responses would be. But

It's true on Ukraine policy now, right? If we publish a piece that explores the possibility of negotiations, then there'll be a set of responses from one camp. We publish a piece that is advocating for a more assertive or aggressive, riskier response from the US and its partners, there'll be a set of reactions.

making an argument in good faith is trying to drive debate forward. If someone wants to respond to that in a constructive way where they are similarly engaged in that same enterprise, then that's the kind of debate we love. Right. Have you had a hard time finding journalists from countries and regions where the press is not so free? How do you balance that with the desire to include essays from undercovered areas? In places where there's authoritarian systems,

It's challenging in two ways. So we look at Russia at this moment, there are people writing for foreign affairs who still live in Russia, who are, I think every time they write, taking certain risks, but are willing to do that and doing that with eyes open. And so we work very hard to continue to publish those people if they're so willing, knowing that there's some risk there. Another challenging but important case right now is China, where I think it's quite important to get

serious Chinese voices into the magazine. And there are a slew of really impressive Chinese scholars who I've talked to a lot over the years at this point, who write occasionally for foreign affairs. The challenge there is they're always navigating very complicated dynamics on their own side. So

In an ideal world, that's the kind of thing we'd be doing all the time. But that takes, you know, a lot of work and judgment calls and kind of framing things carefully to make sure that it's something that meets the test that I laid out a bit ago, but still allows us to bring in perspectives from places that don't always feed into American foreign policy debate in the way they should.

I know like every day we talk about audience. I'm sure you also talk about audience. So, you know, in the world of short videos and YouTube and TikTok, do you think there is and will continue to be room for long form pieces? Do you think that, you know, people will grow into foreign affairs?

So look, I don't know. And I have the same concerns about where a magazine will be 25 years from now as anyone else. But I don't have acute short term concerns. I have to say when I look at again, just the number of people who will read a three or 4000 word foreign affairs piece online, a lot of them not in the United States, a lot of them under the age of 35.

That looks like a much bigger audience willing to spend the time reading that than was the case 50 years ago. So I think it's easy to kind of think back to that golden age, but I see people reading. I mean, podcasts are kind of amazing demonstration of the willingness. It's obviously a different format than you or I would have been working in 20 years ago, but we do hour-long interviews with scholars and

the number of people who are willing to listen to most that hour if the scholar is interesting continually surprises me. So, you know, one of the things that we are very focused on, even as we think about the kind of credibility of author and how this engages into a fairly elite policy debate, you know, lead in the sense that it's among people who are really working on an issue professionally in intense ways, is how you kind of provide the context and framing for things, whether that's in a podcast or in a written piece so that

That 19-year-old college student sitting in a university in Colorado, where I'm from, can read it and also kind of understand not just the basic terms, but really how this fits into debate. And so without compromising the kind of seriousness and ambition of what we do in the policy sense, making sure that we are providing ways in for that newer readership and broader readership.

You know, the magazine was first published in 1922. So obviously, things have changed in that time. But people really respect this magazine. What was it like inheriting such a legacy? Does that like weigh heavily on your shoulders all the time when you're making decisions?

It does in some sense. So I spent the first few years of my career at Foreign Affairs before going into government. So I feel very much shaped by the magazine. And I've kind of been in some ways imbibing that legacy for a very, very long time. It both weighs on us, but I think it's also fascinating and sometimes, sorry to sound a little bit corny, but kind of inspiring to go back and read issues in the 1920s that is impossibly dry or really embarrassing or offensive. But

But there's also a lot that you go back that is like totally fascinating if you go back and read like W.E.B. Du Bois writing in foreign affairs in the 1920s or 1930s, kind of pieces that seem incredibly contemporary in many ways and really kind of searching and fascinating on issues that we're still grappling with as a policy community of society now.

So there's a lot in there that I think is, you know, can be a reminder of what we could do with the magazine. And, you know, you go back to the kind of founding mission statement, and it was about democratizing the foreign policy conversation, bringing in a wider range of voices. And that doesn't mean, you know, in our case, millions and millions of people, but by 1922 standards, it was kind of radical to say that we should have a kind of public conversation about these issues that goes beyond the walls of, you know, the State Department and the White House and military circles.

And that in some ways is, you know, we're still trying to do that means, you know, doing it in a podcast or doing it online now, but the mission is in some ways very consistent.

So FAA is obviously foreign policy focused. It's in the name. But in recent years, it feels like the line between foreign and domestic has grown more blurred even here at CFR. So where do you see the distinction between domestic and foreign issues? And at what point does a story become too domestic for you and your audience?

It's a really great question, one we grapple with all the time, especially at a moment that is so politically fraught and where the range of outcomes for the United States and for American democracy and American policy in various areas, just the set of possible outcomes in the coming years just feels much wider than it has been for much of my professional life. The questions that we try to bring to that, I mean, the biggest one is, can we

add value to this conversation in some way, right? We're not experts on healthcare reform. So, you know, we probably wouldn't run a piece just on how to approach healthcare reform better, but we might run a piece as we have on foreign healthcare systems that can help us understand the best models out there. You know, if I look at the political context now, we're not covering Trump's trials, but we have run pieces and we'll continue to run pieces looking at

comparative studies that might, again, shed light on what this means for US politics and American democracy. We might look at the global repercussions of something happening here. So you're totally right that it's a much blurrier line and a harder question than I think it would have been 20 years ago. But I think this was also probably a shortcoming of the foreign policy conversation to not understand both the consequences at home and the consequences abroad of events at home. So in some ways, that's complicated, but it's healthy.

Sort of piggybacking off of this, we're also abuzz about how we're all going to cover the U.S. election. Do you have plans? How are you sort of approaching this time?

One role of foreign affairs with any election is to look at policy options for 2025, regardless of who's president, but then also at how the two parties or the two candidates are approaching key policy questions. So in more traditional elections, that was somewhat simpler to do because there was, I think, a much more substantive public debate that was playing out between surrogates for campaigns and, you know, aspiring officials. And I think a lot of that has

changed in this context in ways that make it a little bit harder, but we will try to do both of those things. And some of that will mean bringing in perspectives from people who have served in administrations from either party, may serve in a second Biden term or a second Trump term and trying to

get a sense of what they might do based on what they're trying to lay out in our pages. So we will try to do that and then also try to make sense of what disinformation and threats to democracy and risks of violence might mean for America's role in the world. Again, we're not you know, we don't have a staff of reporters who are going to go out and and cover it in the way that lots of, you know, publications will be doing, which is obviously

the essential work, but I think our role here can be to try to both bring international context to some of that, but also try to understand the global consequences of it, both for America's role in the world, but also for global democracy or global economy or global issues more broadly. We're in the era of AI. What do you think the future of journalism looks like? What sort of debates are you guys having?

So I don't want to sound too Pollyannish here either, but my sense is that AI will be a huge challenge to lots of media organizations, but will in some ways raise the value or clarify the value of places that do really kind of, you know, bespoke work, right? That

put a lot of editorial care into selecting articles and publishing them. And those will stand out, understanding what happened in the markets that day or what an annual report said or what the weather is or when the Grammys are on or whatever that will be done by AI. But I have a hard time

imagining that a complicated 5,000-word argument about what to do about the Chinese economy is going to be done in the way that an author would do it. So my sense is that it'll in some ways be...

clarifying and be beneficial and to places like us, it creates, you know, as you know, all kinds of challenges for audience and finding people and there are lots of business challenges. But if we can work those out, I think on the kind of core substance, it's not a terrible thing and could be could be a good thing in some ways.

Last one. So most of the writers and editors I know, and of course, people in other industries as well, worked in a different industry to support their writing dreams. I was a bartender. I was an executive assistant, you know, worked for free for a lot of small magazines. I once had to book my boss a facial. I think it all makes you stronger. That's the way that I look at it, or at least I hope it does. Do you have any gigs that sort of stand out to you from your path along the way?

Yeah, I mean, the one that I that I would offer is an unhappy memory. I was a caddy briefly, and I was so bad at it that I stopped like I would go sit on the bench waiting for, you know, for work, and they would basically never give it to me. So I wasn't quite fired, but I just stopped actually getting I would put on like a white jumpsuit at this country club and wait for caddy jobs and not get them. So it was not it was thankfully, I did not have to do it that long. So you

So you weren't even a caddy. You were waiting around to maybe be selected as a caddy. I did caddy sometimes. I was just extremely, extremely bad at it. Well, again, builds character. And thank you for running through all of this. You can breathe out. You made it. Thank you. That was fun. All right.

For resources used in this episode and more information, visit cfr.org slash whyitmatters and take a look at the show notes. If you ever have any questions or suggestions or just want to chat with us, email at whyitmatters at cfr.org. Or you can hit us up on X, better known as Twitter at cfr underscore org. Why

Why It Matters is a production of the Council on Foreign Relations. The opinions expressed on the show are solely that of the guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

This episode was produced by Molly McEnany, Noah Berman, and me, Gabrielle Sierra. The episode was also edited by Molly McEnany. She does a lot around here. Our interns this semester are Olivia Green and Meher Bhatia. Robert McMahon is our managing editor. Special thanks to Mariel Ferragamo. Our

Our theme music is composed by Carrie Torhusen. You can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your audio. For Why It Matters, this is Gabrielle Sierra signing off. See you soon.