Fareed Zakaria of Foreign Exchange shares his thoughts on international news and his career

Fareed Zakaria is an acclaimed political commentator, author and columnist as well as the host of the APT Exchange program FOREIGN EXCHANGE WITH FAREED ZAKARIA. Recently, Zakaria spoke to APT about public television, current events, and the news media.

You are a columnist for Newsweek, editor for Newsweek International, as well as commentator for ABC News and a frequent guest on the Daily Show With Jon Stewart. How does hosting Foreign Exchange on public television differ from these other media outlets?

Well, the first thing is that having your own show on television is very different from being a guest on a television show. I didn’t quite appreciate this until I began doing Foreign Exchange. Being a guest on somebody else’s program is about communicating a few ideas on a particular subject. But, creating your own show is more about constructing an intelligent program that uses the medium effectively to help people understand what’s going on in the world and to visually enlighten and entertain them. That’s a very different kind of thing than I had done before.

The column, Newsweek … these are all different media. Trying to construct a program like that in television turned out to be a much more challenging, interesting and engaging endeavor than I had initially thought. I thought, “I’ve been on lots of TV shows, and so, I’ll do my own show. It’ll be very similar.” In fact, it was very different – more challenging and more rewarding, but also tougher. I got an appreciation for how to do television well. You really have to be thinking at several levels simultaneously – the intellectual level, the aesthetic level, the level of communicating and touching people. [The program] is all that wrapped together, which is not quite true in writing a column.

How did the process get started? What led up to the idea and how did you pull together this show for television?

Well the Oregon Public Broadcasting producers came to me and suggested that I do a show. Initially, I was actually not that interested – mainly because I just had too much on my plate.

But then the more I thought about it and the more I talked to Bruce Blair, who is the head of Azimuth [Media and the show’s producer], the more I came to think that there really was this huge gap in American television. There was really no program that consistently devoted itself to the world, to the other 95 percent of humanity. And so when I became clear that I would be able to do a program that was distinctive in that way, I became more and more interested. I made it very clear that I did not want to do a program where I was the 29th person interviewing a guest. I just didn’t think there was any particular need for one more of those kinds of programs. But, we were able to agree upon something that was really distinctive and that filled a gap. I became quite enthusiastic about it because it seemed to me that it was providing the public with something that really did not exist anywhere on American television.

You have two seasons under your belt. What are some of the highlights for the series and what are some of the lessons you’ve learned?

Well, some of the highlights have probably been a show out of Beijing [China] where I got a hold of five of the most interesting voices of the new China – from the founder of their largest internet service to the “Martha Stewart” of China and one of their senior-most diplomats. That, I think, gave people a really interesting and deep sense of what the rise of China was all about. It was a great show, I thought, because we were able to do what television can really do so well – which is to make you see these people, hear them, watch their body language. But at the same time, it was very smart television because these people were very articulate, engaging and interesting and they were talking about very big, important subjects. Also, there have been conversations that I’ve had that I feel have gone very well – with the president of Brazil, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and the prime minister of Iraq, Mr. Ibrahim al-Jaafari.

Then finally I’m also very proud of our little shorts – our in-focus pieces where we take the viewer outside the studio for a few minutes, and preview or commission an interesting documentary from everywhere from Sudan to India to Latin America. And those have been very interesting little vignettes into the world around us. We’ve been able to get them to be sharp, smart and brief. What I’m most proud of is that often these documentary reports have been done by one guy with a hand-held camera. And it’s the future of television – you know, people have this democratized television reporting because the technology is so accessible and I’d like to do more with that.

[Regarding] the lessons learned – the most important one – to do television well is not as easy as I thought; it’s tough, it’s challenging and it’s also rewarding. But, I think it’s like anything in life – you get better as you do more of it. You just have to keep trying to improve it and you have to keep asking yourself what are the best parts, what are the worst parts, how can you improve it?

How much control do you have on the selection of topics and how the show flows? We have a very good team; they’re great people and they work very hard. We talk a lot, e-mail a lot and we tend to come to a consensus. That said, I’m the managing editor of the show, so if I feel that something is wrong I will generally try my best to make that case and convince people. Ultimately, if I feel uncomfortable with something, I won’t air it.

What do you find to be public television’s role in delivering the news to viewers? What do you think about this audience versus a commercial outlet’s audience?

Oh, I think the fact that it’s on public television is crucial to its viability and success. But let me back up and take a look at serious journalism in the print world. You will notice that there are really only three great newspapers in America that really do serious news and particularly do international news. That is The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post and The New York Times.

These [newspapers] are all owned by families that believe theirs is something that is important, almost as a matter of public service. They provide the American democracy with this institution. Every family newspaper that has been sold to a large corporation has had the substance of its coverage gutted, particularly the coverage that tends to be expensive, like foreign coverage.

It’s understandable, stuff is expensive. By and large, if you are completely commercially motivated, you will naturally drive down to coverage of lifestyle, celebrity and things like that. So, when you transfer that to the TV room, you see the same phenomenon at work. When you are entirely commercially driven, you are going to find yourself pushed in a certain direction. The beauty of public television is that you really don’t have to worry about that.

Of course we worry about ratings, of course we want as wide a viewership as possible, but we have something of a cushion. We can think about building a long term audience, we can think about asking our audience to stay with us for more than a minute or two. We have the ability to try to think “What would make for great television?” and to start with that premise (rather than asking “What is the most commercially sensational thing we can do?)” If we didn’t have the dynamic I described, we really wouldn’t be able to do a show like this. Frankly, I think that on commercial television today it would be very difficult to do the kinds of serious shows that they used to do 20 to 30 years ago. Nightline would not be viable today.

And you can see what’s happened to it as time has passed. It’s got a new format – it has to be shorter, snappier. I think that this is important not just for the future of television, because I think television remains not only the most powerful medium in the world, but it’s important to be able to do things that are substantive and serious. It’s also important for American democracy because these issues don’t go away just because we found ways to entertain people and avoid them. The issues that we’re talking about, whether they are America’s role in the world, the rise of China and India, global warming and its effects on the planet, these things are there. The question is can we get Americans more informed, educated and engaged on them? If we don’t, ultimately, it will be American democracy and Americans that will suffer.

How did you get involved in political commentary? Tell us a little bit about your background in journalism.

I came to journalism through the back door in the sense that I’m an academic. I got my PhD in political science, was all set to go into the academic world and then, instead, decided to go into journalism – but journalism of a sort. I became managing editor of Foreign Affairs which is a cross between an academic journal and magazine.

From there I took a few baby steps and started writing occasionally for Newsweek. Then I joined full time, and in the process of that, started doing some television, mostly as a guest. I actually once guest-hosted Charlie Rose for a week and enjoyed that and was flexing a different kind of muscle.

I came to television much later. I leaned towards political commentary really from the start because I’m not a reporter. My skill has always been to use that academic and analytic training to make some sense of what’s going on. My feeling is fundamentally people have information, but they don’t have knowledge. They have information, but that information is not ordered and is not placed in a framework so that they don’t know what to make of it. What I try to do is clarify the issues, to place things in context, historical, or other kinds of context. In doing that, my academic training has turned out to be very valuable. Though I will say that as valuable (as academic training has been), perhaps more valuable has been traveling. I’ve realized that for all the background, history and theory, there’s no substitute for being on the ground in a country and really getting a feel for what its problems are. Then combining that with the analytic and academic training to give people a sense of what the issue is.

As a columnist and an author, what is the writing process like for you? [When writing a column], you have to have an idea more than anything else. You have to be looking at all the information, all the news that’s coming to you. You have to have an idea, you have to have some access to new information, [and] you have to have access to people.

Writing a book is quite different. Writing a book I actually think, for me, is hard work, very hard work and painful work, sometimes lonely work. I sometimes feel I hate writing a book. I enjoy greatly having written a book, because at the end of the day, the experience of having written a book is very rewarding. The only vehicle for serious ideas in the world remains books. For all the stuff about blogs, the Web and the internet and uploading and downloading and broadcasting – if you want to convey serious ideas, it is still true and I believe it will (always) be true that you will have to write a book. You would read it, you can access that book in any way you want, but I still think that the act of writing a book will remain unchanged because it’s the only way to convey the kind of complicated ideas, develop them, layer them, give them context. Humans beings desire to understand the world is not going to change because technology changes.

Many columnists take time off from their respective organizations to focus when they are writing a book. Did you take leave from Newsweek while writing The Future of Freedom?

Yes, I was writing it partly when I was at Foreign Affairs and partly when I was at Newsweek, in both places I took leaves.

We are a little over halfway through the first decade of the 21st century. As an academic, what do you think will stand out in our political and cultural climate for this first decade?

Without question it will be the dominance of the United States, and the reaction to that dominance.

In retrospect, we will look back and see that the United States was not just the most powerful country in the world, but it was the most powerful country in the history of the world. No other country has ever come close. To give you a sense, Britain was the superpower of its age, and it had a navy that was larger than the next two navies put together, and that was considered quite extraordinary. The United States Army is larger, in dollars spent, than the next 25 countries put together.

So, we’re in a league of our own. But that is also producing a great deal of reaction, in some cases resentment, and in some cases competition. So that dynamic, the drama of American hegemony, is, I think, what historians will look back on.