The television program Foreign Exchange with Fareed Zakaria has begun posting all of their weekly shows on YouTube — a great step in what we hope will be an evolution of the video-sharing site (now owned by Google) toward a place that features more than just lip-synching teenagers and virtuoso guitar performances (not that we have anything against those). Each of the Foreign Exchange shows is 30 minutes long — perhaps a little long for posting on a blog. Fortunately, however, individual reports that have aired on Foreign Exchange, many of them produced by the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, [...]
In this past Sunday’s Washington Post, Pamela Constable, a veteran foreign reporter, became the latest in a string of op-ed writers to lament the the “Demise of the Foreign Correspondent.” Constable made a compelling case for the necessity of foreign coverage: Today, Americans’ need to understand the struggles of distant peoples is greater than ever. Our troops are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, countries that we did not know enough about when we invaded them and that we are still trying to fathom. We have been victimized by foreign terrorists, yet we still cannot imagine why anyone would hate us. [...]
The Commentary Week in Review is posted on the blog every Friday. Drawing from more than two dozen English-language news outlets worldwide, the column highlights a handful of the week’s notable op-eds. Normally, in our Commentary Week in Review, we highlight five notable op-eds from the week, on the theory that a review of the world’s opinion pages can’t hope to be comprehensive, but can merely highlight a few interesting or excellent examples among the very diverse smorgasbord of subjects and points of view that are covered each week in newspapers and magazines from New York and Washington to Mumbai, [...]
