World Press Freedom Day 2024: Mounting Threats, Renewed Purpose

MCMAHON:
Welcome to the World Next Week's special press freedom episode. I'm Bob McMahon.

ROBBINS:
And I'm Carla Anna Robbins.

GEDMIN:
And I'm Jeff Gedmin.

ROBBINS:
Joining us for this special episode is a fantastic writer, editor, champion of free press, and in full disclosure, a really good friend, Jeff Gedmin. Jeff is the cofounder and editor-in-chief of American Purpose. He's twice-led Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, of which Bob is a proud alum. Jeff finished up his most recent stint at RFE/RL just a few months ago, so a lot to talk about that work in these dangerous times. Jeff is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Jeff, welcome to our show.

GEDMIN:
Carla and Bob, thank you very much for having me.

MCMAHON:
Well, Carla and Jeff, tomorrow is World Press Freedom Day, or maybe we should call it World Media Freedom Day. The day is dedicated to the importance of journalism and freedom of expression. This year so far has been especially hard for journalists and it's basically part of a decade-long plus period of difficulties.

Just for one set of example is, Reporters Without Borders, a watchdog group, has found that the environment for journalism is bad in seven out of ten countries. Another watchdog group, Freedom House, has been citing the decline in press freedom as part of an overall erosion, or should we say, a recession in democracy over the past fifteen or sixteen years. Obstacles to journalism and the free flow of information range from censorship to violent attacks and actually targets and assassinations of journalists. So, there's no better time than today as we celebrate the power of the pen or perhaps the podcast, to reflect on where global press freedom stands.

ROBBINS:
So Bob, as you said, this has been an incredibly tough year. Myanmar, Iran, Russia, governments have been shutting news outlets, harassing, jailing, killing reporters, editors, photographers, and a large number of people have been forced to flee their home countries. Let's talk a little bit about when journalists decide they have no choice but to leave. Are they still managing to do their work of speaking truth to power? Are they even safe once they cross the border, or do the threats and the harassment continue?

MCMAHON:
Well, this is a growing phenomenon, Carla, which is the journalists in exile phenomenon. The group I cited earlier, Reporters Without Borders, said just last year alone, it provided about four hundred sixty journalists from sixty-two countries with financial assistance in relocation or resettlement, and that's twice the number that they helped the previous year. So there's a trend right there. You could probably guess some of the countries these journalists were exiled from. Russia, certainly, Myanmar, Iran, Afghanistan, just to name a few.

Through these help organizations, and there's many others, and it's sometimes governments too, by the way, journalists are being given some means to relocate, sometimes family members or close family members. They can set up shop, but it's usually a temporary period of time. Some are in transit and in many cases, unfortunately have targets on their backs. We've seen Russia in particular go after journalists seeking to report the truth about its invasion of Ukraine. There was not many independent or open media in Russia at the time of that invasion, 2022, and it certainly just really put down the hammer after that date. Anybody referring to it, even as a war, is subject to harsh penalties.

Jeff knows this very well, obviously from his work recently, stewarding Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The Russian tactics include intimidation, include outright attempts at violence, poisoning is a favored tactic and so forth. But again, we're seeing it with journalists leaving Myanmar, which is one of the undercovered stories of the year, a terrible situation there. Multiple battles going on in the civil war there. Some of those journalists have been able to relocate to Thailand, for example. We're seeing it in Hong Kong. Jimmy Lai is in a prison and facing very harsh penalties there. The national security law that China is pressing forward with is quashing the last free voices in Hong Kong. Some of those journalists and others are going to Singapore, among other places, and we can go on and on. So it's a problem of not only relocating journalists whose media organizations have basically been snuffed out or sometimes they're able to port over the assemblance of their media organization, but then it's supporting them and protecting them. It just speaks to a very chilling period right now.

I will say that again, evoking some of Jeff's recent work, that you have organizations like the so-called surrogates of Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty are able to support and hire some of these journalists to do their work in providing this surrogate service, but it's a work that requires more massive resources to try to replicate it any anyway, what kind of work they were doing. We talk a lot about journalistic deserts in this country, United States, but we're talking about whole countries that are becoming deserts. I mean, let's just look at the vastness of Russia and how little covered that is right now and the dangers that those who still try to cover Russia even from abroad are facing.

ROBBINS:
Jeff, your people obviously face incredible dangers when they go work inside countries when they're abroad. What sort of tales do they tell you about the harassment that they get even outside their original home countries?

GEDMIN:
So Carla, I'm very happy to be with you. I admire your work and Bob's greatly, you're both friends and the subject can only make one pensive, because as Bob noted, we're all concerned about individual cases and protecting people and when they're in prison obtaining their release, but this is a trend. As press freedom declines, it's in sync with democracy faltering and authoritarianism rising.

Carla, from a RFE/RL, Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty perspective, the governments of our broadcast region are becoming increasingly repressive at home, increasingly brazen, and they're different. But Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Belarus, Russia, Bob mentioned several times, what kind of tales, what kind of illustrations? Just a quick few points. Number one, many, to another point that Bob made, many of these journalists, especially the younger ones who live outside of Russia, principally in Europe and Prague and Riga elsewhere working for RFE/RL, but for others, this is my speculation. They came to work abroad as journalists because it was more efficient, effective, and safer. I think now they start to contemplate, imagine you're twenty-five, thirty, thirty-three, thirty-seven, "I'm beginning a life in exile. I may not go home, not anytime soon, and now my family and friends are in jeopardy because of what I do outside of Russia in Europe." I think that's one thing to note.

The second thing, directly to respond to your question, Carla, all these regimes have different techniques and methods. They harass at home, they reach out abroad, poisoning, intimidating, surveilling, harassing, but it can be soft to harder, and I'll give you two. A popular technique, if I may put it that way, of the Iranian government, is to issue a summons for journalists working abroad to return home to face, well, to present themselves before an Iranian court. Well, when that journalist says, "Well, no, I'm not doing that, that's certain arrest and imprisonment," then the next round can be, "Well, we will then knock on your mother's door and her deed to her home in northern Tehran is in jeopardy. Then would you like to come home?" People get faced with dilemma after dilemma after dilemma. Of course in the case of Russia, but not only, I think the communication has been, if we can't shut you down at home, if we can't get you at home, we will reach you abroad. There too, threats, intimidation, surveillance and poisoning.

I'll just tell you, we had a case at RFE/RL during my recent tenure in the fall, not ancient history, in the fall where a thirty-five-year-old senior video producer collapsed at home on a weekend, was put in a medically induced coma and died shortly thereafter. There was a homicide investigation, there was no evidence of wrongdoing, but there is no evidence of anything. There is an autopsy and that remains closed. So, that doesn't mean you know anything, it means you speculate and you wonder. Journalists, active journalists, are concerned. So I think it's tightening, virtually everywhere it's tightening and the regimes are very inventive at home and abroad on how they silence people.

MCMAHON:
I think it's interesting that just the exiling or that the act of exile of a journalist does not mean that that journalist's voice is silent and that the power of media is silent. It just shows how important it is because these regimes do feel so threatened.

Another case we should really mention, unfortunately there are very many examples, is of course the Saudis going after Jamal Khashoggi, when he entered into a consulate in Istanbul thinking he was safe. I think there's this sense of that in some cases, journalists who are abroad might feel a little bit more sense of protection or safety, and they're seeing increasingly that's not the case. It's also, I would just add one more thing, Jeff, if you had any thoughts or Carla, it's almost becoming a tech race as well with the advent of the Pegasus spyware. Journalists have been happy to have these tools to use to do their investigative work, but we're finding regimes are just as capable.

ROBBINS:
But the technology goes two ways because we also are getting pretty extraordinary reporting from lots of reporters who have left Russia and left a lot of these other countries, and not just people who go work for RFE/RL, but people who work for some of these organizations that were shut down inside of Russia. But the people who continue to report because they have technology, because they can tell us what's going on inside. So the technology is bridging the gap to a certain extent. Yes, they can be spied upon, but they've shown an incredible courage and incredible ability to use the technology to continue to...because we are platform agnostic these days because people can communicate in many different ways. I don't mean to be Pollyannaish here, but there's something of a good story on tech as well, Bob.

MCMAHON:
No, absolutely. It's something that we're going to have to keep on watching. There's a little bit of a cat and mouse game going on in places like China with people using VPNs and so forth and Telegram accounts. But yes, there is a little bit of hope as well, because the press and the urgency and the desire for freedom is a compelling one that should not be underrated.

Jeff, I wanted to follow up on this vein though, and talk to you about a case that has very much gripped the RFE/RL community and maybe not has generated as much a notoriety and a profile abroad, although I think it's getting there, which is the case of an RFE/RL journalist, colleague of yours, on a case we followed on this podcast. Her name is Alsu Kurmasheva, she's a Russian-American journalist who was first stopped by Russian authorities when she was making a visit to Kazan last June for a family emergency. Then that followed up months later in October with her being detained and formally charged. She's being accused of not registering herself as a quote on quote "foreign agent." She's facing at least five years in prison or as many as five years in prison. Could you tell us, Jeff, what you know about the latest on this case and what kind of signaling this has sent to the practice of American or other journalists in Russia?

GEDMIN:
So, thank you Bob, and I am a fan of this podcast, that's why I'm honored to be with you. I listened to that particular episode, and you two were exceptionally well-informed, and thank you for that.

So indeed, Alsu Kurmasheva is a RFE/RL culture reporter, and her work was focused on culture, ethnicity issues, minority rights in the Republic of Tatarstan, the capital Kazan, 500 miles east of Moscow. You started us off well, Bob, by noting that she was first stopped from leaving the country in June. She went on a private trip, by the way, to visit her elderly frail mother. No reporting, purely private and understandable. She was stopped. She came into a de facto kind of house arrest until October when she was arrested, if I may say, in most brazen fashion. That was men in ski masks coming to her mother's home, cuffing this woman, hauling her off for interrogation.

So there's Alsu taken off to interrogation. Bob, in short, the allegations keep evolving. It started with, she's a U.S.-Russian dual national. The first was, she failed to disclose her U.S. citizenship. Then the second was, it just kept morphing. Failure to self-register as a foreign an agent, as you said. Now she's still there in a unpleasant, overcrowded cell. They are preparing, we think it is said, a case against her for spreading false information about the Russian military, that could be fifteen years. She's just had her pretrial detention extended to June 5th.

It used to be, and mostly is, governments, authoritarian governments do this to silence people, to elude accountability, to repress people, to constrain individual freedom and liberty. But in this particular case, the case of Vladimir Putin and Russia and Alsu, it seems Bob and Carla, it's a bit of a hostage-taking spree too. If you look back, Brittany Griner, she got out. Paul Whelan, he is not out. Evan Gershkovich of the Wall Street Journal, he's not out. There's a teacher, a history teacher named Marc Fogel, he is not out. There's a dual national from California named Ksenia who ill-advisedly in January, went home to visit her grandparents whom she had not seen before the pandemic. She's in, she's not out. So it certainly chilling, it's repression, but it seems also in the case of Vladimir Putin's Russia, he's taking hostages as trade bait.

ROBBINS:
Jeff, is the U.S. government giving her case the attention and the support that it needs?

GEDMIN:
Carla, thank you for asking. There is attention and there is support and we're grateful for that. And, there is a designation called unlawfully detained. Paul Whelan has that, he should. Evan Gershkovich has that, and he should. We believe that Alsu deserves that too. Why? It frees up additional resources and makes her officially a case for hostages affairs. While I can't prove this to you, I think it makes it more likely that she will get into the front of a queue for a hostage or a prisoner swap.

There are criteria, according to something called the Levinson Act, eleven that one must meet to qualify for this designation. It's not a magic wand, it just helps unlock additional resources. We believe she meets all eleven criteria. We have a law firm named Covington whose worked for us pro bono, they've submitted the State Department a legal brief, arguing she meets all eleven criteria. So Carla, we can't quite figure out having said all that, why we can't get this designation for her. It's a little bit mysterious. I think there's good will on the State Department, there is support, but we want this too, we need this too, we think it's important. We haven't gotten that yet and we don't have a good explanation why.

ROBBINS:
Well, the Wall Street Journal has done an extraordinary job of keeping Evan's case out there, as well it should. As an alum of the Wall Street Journal, I'm really proud of what they have done. Unfortunately, so far it hasn't moved Putin, but everyone has to be aware of his case and continue to push it but we also have to be aware of Alsu's case and continue to push that and if this designation could make a difference, State Department, wake up, pay attention.

MCMAHON:
Yeah, and I would just add that I think that it is that attention and sort of unwillingness to give up and forget that is going to be important. As I was preparing for this podcast, I was thinking back to my own experience when I was with the Associated Press. I joined them in the late '80s, and Terry Anderson had already been a hostage in Lebanon for a couple of years. It turned out he ended up being a hostage for seven years, traded around by different groups, but he was released when I was on the world desk at AP. Him coming through that newsroom in New York, it was one of those memorable moments that you have in life. Here's this legendary figure, the name you had heard constantly, almost many had given up, but there was a persistence there that the AP had, that his family had, that U.S. officials had. I think this is the type of thing that's going to be necessary. That was a case where you were dealing with this shadowy group of terror groups and not a government, per se.

GEDMIN:
Well, Bob, that's a very vivid and very important and compelling example and to what we're talking about. First of all, Carla, you're a former reporter, the Wall Street Journal has been, in my judgment, splendid. They don't have Evan out yet, but they really are a model and they've poured resources in and they see it as strategic. They're trying to help him and his family and that's center, center, center. But I think, I can't speak for the Wall Street Journal, but the fight for one is a fight for all. In the case of Alsu, I can tell you RFE/RL has seven hundred people in Prague in its headquarters, another thousand and change on part-time in more than two dozen countries, actually. They all follow this case and they want to see her released, but they want to see us fighting for her. That's very important.

Carla, let me, if I may ask you a question. What do you say to someone who says, but it's always this way in the past, this isn't new, I'm not sure there's a trend, but independent journalism has always suffered in closed authoritarian societies. What's actually new about this story? How would you respond to that?

ROBBINS:
Interesting question. There are more authoritarian societies these days after a flourishing of democracy. We're going in a very disturbing trend, that's one of the things that I worry about. Second thing I worry about is that the United States leadership is at risk in terms of authoritarianism. As I think Bob was saying, is that we have this tech war going on that makes repression cross borders. All of these things worry me. I think we in the press play an absolutely essential role in pushing back against this rise of authoritarianism.

I think the other thing that really worries me is that people's loss of faith in institutions has extended to a loss of faith in the press. As much as we know that we play an essential role in this fight against rising authoritarianism, there are questions that have been raised about our role as well. So it's a struggle across the board for a lot of us.

GEDMIN:
So does that mean that we, I'll say in the West or in the United States, do we suddenly or incrementally have less credibility to speak to these issues? Or, how do you judge how we're received? When we do a podcast like this, I have a good sense of how we're received in LA or New York or Washington or Paris or London or Berlin. How do you imagine we're perceived today in Russia, in Belarus, in Iran, in Afghanistan, and so forth?

ROBBINS:
You would know the answer to that far better than I would, Jeff. Don't you all do polling on those things?

GEDMIN:
Well, we do. I have a view, and it may not be complete, it may not be fully accurate, but I'll tell you through anecdote. I recall once in my first tenure at RFE/RL, being in Central Asia. I was actually in Kazakhstan being in a hotel lobby for a late night drink with a half a dozen journalists who railed and railed and railed against the United States of America for five and ten and fifteen different reasons. Carla and Bob, I said to them at one point I had to go to bed. I said, "It's not so easy to sell what we're doing in Washington, DC with all the competing priorities in the United States of America. You all with your criticisms of us, you're really not making the case." Then they all paused and said the same thing, "If not you who? You can't leave us, we depend on you." So I happen to believe that even when things are broken in the United States, I think they are and our politics are troubled, I think they are. I think people still look to us. I hope they will still look to us and I hope we will not let them down.

ROBBINS:
Of course, though the mission of RFE/RL is different from the mission of a Wall Street Journal or a New York Times or an Associated Press, you do have more of a role to talk about the United States. You represent the United States in many ways, don't you?

GEDMIN:
Yeah. Well traditionally, what I'm going to tell you is not a sharp and clear delineation, but traditionally, RFE/RL and what Bob referred to as the so-called surrogate networks, that includes Radio Free Asia for example, are trying to give countries that are closed or war-torn or transitional, the news and information, responsible reporting that they need that they're not getting from their indigenous media and certainly not from their governments.

Whereas Voice of America, not so black and white, but still, Voice of America has always been in the business of talking to the world about the United States. Not propaganda, not disinformation, but it's a large complicated country filled with contradiction. To report on science and technology and politics and law and environment and crime and religion and ethnicity, it's a tall task and it's really vitally important. Havel, Václav Havel, remember the guy who became the president of a free Czechoslovakia after the collapse of communism? He said, "From Voice of America, I learned about the world. From Radio Free Europe, I learned about my own country."

ROBBINS:
How do your reporters though, feel? They must occasionally report about the relationship between their own country and the United States?

GEDMIN:
Of course they do. It's my view, Carla, I've always said to journalists, the editors, the producers of RFE/RL during my two stints and now as a board member, I've always said, we are in the business of journalistic integrity, rigor, truth telling, and you follow the story wherever it leads. So if someone said to me, "The United States was responsible in country X for collateral damage, do we report on that?" I said, "Of course you do. If that's part of the story and it goes to honesty, truthfulness, and the credibility, the trust that you have and relationship have with the audience, you absolutely must." Then as a footnote, Bob is an alum and knows this side of this work, then an editor, a journalist or producer will say to me, "So we are independent, we can report anything we want anytime." Then I always say, "Well, yes, responsibly. I don't expect a program from Iran on the stoning of women, pro versus con." So I have an open mind, but not so open your brains fall out. But do we report about the United States and relationships? I think honorably and honestly, I think one must.

ROBBINS:
Let me tell you, as a former deputy editorial page editor of the New York Times, we wouldn't have done the stoning of women in Iran pro versus con either, so.

GEDMIN:
Good, we're of the same mind, not for the first time.

ROBBINS:
But I think the question I'm asking because it's the question that you posed to me, which is, the perception of the United States in the world, which is a somewhat critical one. Certainly, and we struggled with this now and why so many countries have sat on the fence in terms of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So many countries that abstain right now. Do you even in dealing with RFE/RL or dealing with Afghanistan, in which you had a grave disappointment with the United States' withdrawal of Afghanistan. What is the perception of the United States?

GEDMIN:
So I think it's a very important question and I'm glad we're talking about it, Carla. Of course it depends, and this is not a monolith and it varies. First, I put to both of you, I think we Americans should be self-aware that if you sit in any number of these countries, including developed democracies across Europe and the EU, and I'll make this up, but you're in your early 40s. The America you know principally is not the America that emerged victorious with allies during the last chapter of the Cold War and the America of the 1990s. The America that you know, and I exaggerate a little bit for effect, is the America of Iraq, of Afghanistan, we'll come right back to that, of the 2008 financial crisis, of foreign policy where pendulum swing in a short amount of time from President Obama to President Trump. That's a pretty big swing. No matter what you think of President Trump, I think it's fair to say that he projects a certain amount of instability, uncertainty, and his behavior is erratic. I mean, that's putting it mildly. I'm trying to be diplomatic but direct about it.

So then if you have this case, Carla, as you said of Afghanistan, let's call it...whether you're for or against the exit, I was against the exit. Whether you're for or against the exit, the exit was botched horribly, I think. I think from an RFE/RL perspective, if I may say, we had a bureau in Kabul, we had reporters across all thirty-four provinces working hard with great integrity, and then suddenly all this gets torn up. It affects individuals, families, communities, livelihood, who stays, who leaves, who's threatened, who's arrested. My experience with our Afghan colleagues is that they have extraordinary grace and poise and patience and discipline and thoughtfulness, but I think it's got to be terribly jarring and upsetting. Remember, they serve us, they're dependent on us, but we need to serve them too and stand by them.

ROBBINS:
So the state of journalism is certainly dire, but I can't imagine a better way to spend one's life or a better career. For me it's been a license to be infinitely curious, one might say nosy. I certainly never apologize for asking questions. Looking back, Jeff, is there a story you wish you could go back and report on again?

GEDMIN:
First Carla, I want to say I fully agree with you. I do think we undervalue journalism, is a noble profession with enormous responsibility to truth-seeking to audience, and I think in a broad sort of way, the democratic idea, because democracy doesn't flourish without free people with access to information and without rulers or governments held accountable. So I just want to say thank you for saying that. I think it's so, so important for so many different reasons.

Stories, let me answer it in this way. It's a little bit different than what you asked, but it's related. I think now, I'm trying to connect some dots, that in this exile journalism where the authoritarians push us outside the country and we have to report from outside the country, there are all sorts of logistical problems to that. But I think when families are still inside the country and friends and relatives, one problem is invariably you're going to run up against the challenge of self-censorship because if I'm working in Washington, London, Paris or Prague and my mother is back at home or my cousin, I can be very bold and brave in what I report but they're the ones who are going to have a knock on the door in the middle of the night or have their freedom curtailed.

Particular stories, here's one for you. In my first stint with RFE/RL, we had an Iranian colleague named Parnaz Azima, who went home to visit her ill mother who is placed under house arrest. We did get her out within a year, she came back to Prague. The authorities told her, revealingly, Carla and Bob, "When you return, you may report on light international news, but nothing domestic or political or social," which says what nerve they're touching. I might have used that at that time as a post-mortem on the kind of journalism we're doing and the kind of journalism we can do. I think she was a cultural reporter, Parnaz Azima. I think before she went and after we returned, we weren't entirely clear on how we were connecting the actual reporting she was doing with the audience needs and the regime's restrictions. That's a little bit of a vague answer.

MCMAHON:
But Jeff, if I may just add a quick follow up. Did you see her cultural reporting as striking a nerve with the Iranian authorities? Is cultural reporting something that in itself was controversial, per se?

GEDMIN:
Well, it was. She was a translator of American nineteenth century literature. Why do these things touch a nerve? Well, it must be independent thought. It must be opening windows and doors for people that are looking for different ways to think about politics or their lives or about their communities.

Bob, that reminds me then of the Cold War figure who you may have known or know about, a Romanian named Monica Lovinescu, who reported on culture and history and literature and philosophy and music from Paris. She was so feared and loathed by the Romanian dictatorship led by Nicolae Ceaușescu, that he sent agents to beat her up and put her into a coma. Well, culture, philosophy, literature, novels, fiction, why that? I can only speculate for you and think, independent thought in and of itself is a challenge, and for the regimes, control is paramount.

MCMAHON:
That's a great example. I think Georgie Markov might be another one from the old RFE/RL days. This was the famous victim of the infamous umbrella tip poisoning. He was a contributor to RFE/RL from London who used to send in his commentaries to the Bulgarian service, which had started to strike a chord, shall we say. One day he was walking through a crowded London street, felt a pinch, went home, started feeling really bad and never really recovered and died, and turned out what was believed to be an umbrella tipped with ricin, an extremely toxic substance was used to stab him, and he was snuffed out by that regime at that time. So there are others, examples too, but those are the stuff of lore.

GEDMIN:
That's a powerful and dramatic one. As we say, I think we say, knowledge is power. In closed or partially closed societies, access to information is empowerment and no one in control wants that.

So Bob, you are an active and influential editor and you've been an active and influential editor and journalist. Is there anything you would like to revisit for us that you think had importance and relevance in a previous time, but is very relevant today? The platforms change, but content to some extent I like to say is still king. Anything you want to draw on from the past that we need to hear about today in today's context and environment?

MCMAHON:
Well, first of all with the digital tools today, I sure would've loved to have an AI assistant in those early days of covering planning board meetings for my local newspaper, which, just many late nights pouring over zoning laws and other things. It was certainly a learning experience, but boy, having having some digital assistance could've been nice. But that was just the early days.

I think one thing I think of from my reporting days that wasn't too long ago but could have benefited from some of the tools today. And it could be interesting to go back actually, apropos your question, Jeff, is I did a lot of coverage for RFE/RL when I was there UN correspondent in the run-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq. Certainly as a UN correspondent, you're not really lacking for information, that you have this incredible UN bureaucracy that's just pumping out information, and from all these agencies. You have the UN correspondents are right down the hall from the UN secretary-general's press office, they have tons of information that they want to share as well. This was still the days of the early 2000s, where you could rummage around the internet to find things.

But I think about today and what you can do with data viz and how useful it would've been to be able to try to connect the dots a little bit more on some of the things that were being raised. As you saw this relentless effort by the Bush administration to make its case for invading Iraq. Where did they purchase the yellow cake and what were they doing in Niger and what was going on here and what was going on there. I think there would be just tremendous data viz opportunities both before and then after the invasion to try to put the pieces together, because it ended up becoming an invasion. It's a series of incidents, it's a war that continues to reverberate in various ways today. Among other things, I think, spawned the so-called Islamic State's rising.

It also was an incredibly traumatic period for the United Nations, including the first summer after that invasion, bombing, one of the worst bombings I think ever inflicted on a UN institution, which was in Baghdad, and one of the most well-regarded and admired UN officials who was put in charge of the UN mission, Sérgio Vieira de Mello, was killed. He was talking to, I believe the story goes, he was talking to a former CFR fellow, Arthur Helton, in his office when the bomb went off. The UN was traumatized, to say the least from that.

They were also an institution that felt a bit kicked around by the U.S., is one way to put it, in terms of the way that whole effort was pursued in the Security Council. Then were asked to take over the mission in Baghdad and also to set up conditions for elections. So it was a very interesting period to cover that story, not that the results would've been any different because the U.S. was in a certain frame of mind back then and the way weapons of mass destruction were covered, it was very much word of mouth. The various inspectors got a lot of currency and some of the other data might've been surfaced in a better way with some of the tools today. So that's one thing that sticks in my mind, Jeff.

GEDMIN:
So then if I may, I ask a following question to you, Bob, and to Carla. As a journalist, so we've talked a lot about closed and partially closed and the responsibility and the need of markets for accurate, honest, truthful, reliable, independently verifiable reporting. But I'm going to come back to something that Carla raised about the importance of this profession and curiosity and service and accountability, I called it noble, about the responsibility, Bob and Carla. How important is self-awareness for the individual journalist in the following ways? When you're reporting a story, you never work with a complete data set, if I may put it that way. There're always missing pieces or different lenses through which you're not able to look at a given moment. Second of all, my view, we all have assumptions. We can claim that we're purely objective beings, but we come to subject matters and projects and work with assumptions. Third, I ask you both, is there a little bit of a crowd effect because we're social beings and we go to dinners and conferences and sit in airport lounges and so forth? Then even relationships, Carla, we're friends, Bob, we're friends. How does the individual journalist assure that they are doing the best job possible of playing the straightest game possible in real time when circumstances are suboptimal?

ROBBINS:
Well, real time is of course one of the biggest challenges because there is so much time pressure of deadline. I think, Bob, it's great that you brought up the run-up to the war in Iraq because it's two things. I mean, I think I did a pretty bad job in the run-up to the war in Iraq, and I think I got sucked into a lot of the groupthink. So I think that a healthy look at why we fell into this groupthink, but also the groupthink post is really important. This seems an incredibly fraught time emotionally and I think self-awareness about how we blew that story is pretty important, Jeff.

GEDMIN:
Does time and the culture allow it more space for postmortems, examining what we did right and why and what we did wrong, and why?

MCMAHON:
On that latter one, Jeff, I would love for maybe some deep pocket angel investor or somebody to help support a media entity that has, or maybe it's a podcast for a while, like revisiting history or something where you go back in and you take the time to dig into it. The whole run up to the Iraq war would be a great one, there's many others though. It doesn't have to be something as epic as that, but it would be really helpful. It would be helpful for the craft of journalism. It could be something a journalism school might invest some time and money in. Some do on smaller cases, there are definitely case studies.

I think the self-awareness thing is crucial. You can't bring it up enough, especially as we've had in the past decade or so, in the advocacy journalism really rising. I mean, you see it everywhere where you're not considered a journalist unless you're weighing in with a point of view on something. I think it's really, it needs to be reminders, journalists taking a step back and stepping out of the story and covering the story itself and trying to do their best job, and it's happening.

Back to our original conversation with this podcast, those journalists in exile who are facing the toughest backlash are the ones who are really hitting a chord because they're getting to the core of stories. One of the thing that's heartbreaking, I know you've experienced this Jeff, as well, is when you see places where journalism has been ceded like Afghanistan or Russia not too long ago, and you have some tremendous intrepid journalists and then they are quashed and then they are snuffed. Those places are losing that and they're really losing something that's a real part of core of the strength of their society. I think journalism is, we've called it the fourth estate in the past in this country. We haven't heard that in quite a while, we've heard enemy of the state. I would like to see it back referred to in some realm as part of one of the pillars of society. It does get to that sort of knowledge of craft, though.

GEDMIN:
Well, Bob, I think that you, Carla and I need to identify funding for a podcast or a small institute called Post Mortem, and the tagline will be, it starts with self-awareness. To what you said, Carla, it's really hard because to get it right is hard. It's demanding work and it takes training and discipline and self-awareness. But I think examining what we got right also and what we got wrong and why. In this town, in Washington DC, it's really a town of narratives more than it's a town of trying to get the fully accurate, honest account. That sounds a little bit cynical, but I believe it.

MCMAHON:
Well, Carla, you have shared on this podcast countless stories of reporting in the field, and I've always wanted to go into more detail in a lot of those. From Argentina, I think to Kuwait even, you've trotted the globe and then some. Is there a story that you have never gotten over you'd like to share?

ROBBINS:
So much we report on is so grim that it's especially wondrous when we managed to find a happy ending. I feel that way about Chile's 1988 presidential plebiscite. We as Americans of course, were complicit in the 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, and I don't think many people know that we also played a supporting role in helping the democratic opposition the so-called "No" campaign stop Pinochet from stealing the vote when the country was asked whether to keep him in power for another eight years. There were so many extraordinary moments unfolding behind the scenes after the junta's stop-the-vote, count the "Si" campaign, quietly accepted the "No" campaign's unofficial numbers, tried to stage alleged terrorist attacks the junta overruling Pinochet's last-minute bid to stay in power.

I was relatively new to the business and I had incredible behind-the-scenes access. I don't think the stories that I wrote were particularly good because there was so much going on and it was so compressed. While I could write something of a narrative, it's only looking back and so many times later and I think that's a really good way that you assess how good a story you do when you tell people later, "...and then this happened," and then you go back and you look at your stories and say, did I really highlight that well enough? It was an extraordinary moment, and I wish I could go back and tell that story again because it was a triumph of human dignity and one that we as Americans actually managed to support.

But perhaps the best moment of all, and one that I didn't write about was the next morning. After we knew that Pinochet had tried to steal this vote and even the junta stopped him from doing it. A small group of people stood in front of the presidential palace, and as the guards were changing, they began to slowly clap. I was watching this from a distance and I didn't have a chance to ask them why they were clapping. I always assumed that they were clapping because the military after torturing people for such a long period of time, had done the right thing, they had decided to step aside. But when I was thinking about this the other day, I wondered whether perhaps those were military supporters and that maybe they were clapping for another reason, which is a reminder that we really do have to ask people why they do what they do.

MCMAHON:
Carla, that's a great story and a reminder also of Chile's role in history and also of the sometimes nuanced role the U.S. can play in some of those bigger narratives as well. It does get back to that point of reporting though at the end of the day, it's being on the ground or at least on the other end of a phone line and asking questions of real people in real time and then filing on deadline. We mentioned deadline filing. I think that's the other thing you can't overlook is sometimes you have a news desk or somebody leaning on you to get something in and you're going to cut corners and file what you can and maybe miss some of the flavor of something. But I do think your reminiscence about Chile will stand out for some.

That wraps up our special World Press Freedom episode of The World Next Week to all of our regular listeners. We hope you've enjoyed this special episode. Tune in next week for our regular look at The World Next Week. Jeff, thanks so much again for joining us.

GEDMIN:
Bob, Carla. Thanks for having me, a pleasure.

ROBBINS:
Thanks Jeff, for coming on the show. Please subscribe to the World Next Week on Apple Podcasts. Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts, and leave us a review while you're at it, we appreciate the feedback. If you'd like to reach out, please email us at [email protected]. The publications mentioned on this episode as well as a transcript of our conversation are listed on the podcast page for the World Next Week on CFR.org. Please note that opinions expressed on the world next week are solely those of the hosts and our guests, not of CFR, which takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.

Today's program was produced by Ester Fang and Sinet Adous, with Director of Podcasting Gabrielle Sierra. And pecial thanks to Olivia Green for her research assistance. Our theme music is provided by Markus Zakaria, and this is Carla Robbins saying so long.

GEDMIN:
This is Jeff Gedmin signing off, an honor to be with you.

MCMAHON:
And this is Bob McMahon saying goodbye and please support your local and global media.