With the 2015 State of the Union address showing a rejuvenated and confident Barack Obama, a panel of experts met at the Frontline Club on Wednesday 21 January to debate his legacy, the partisan nature of US politics and whether racial divides have been healed by the nation’s first black president.
l-r: Robert Carolina, Xenia Wickett, Matt Frei, Kim Ghattas, Michael Goldfarb
Chair Matt Frei, former Washington correspondent and current Europe editor for Channel 4 News, began by asking the panel what they thought Obama’s legacy would be.
Xenia Wickett, formerly of the US State Department and now at Chatham House, replied: “His legacy is going to be economic. President Obama came in in 2009 after the great recession, and if you listened to his state of the union, [now] America is strong, the economy is strong.”
Kim Ghattas, BBC correspondent based in Washington, offered her view of Obama as “the president who always struggled to convince people in the US and abroad that he was a good president, that he did a good job, because the narrative of him being a reluctant president stuck, no matter what he achieved.”
To kick off @mattfrei challenges tonight’s panel to give Obama’s legacy in a minute and a half – live now pic.twitter.com/htmL7vKMKM
— Frontline Club (@frontlineclub) January 21, 2015
The panel also discussed the difficult situations Obama has found himself in throughout his presidency. Veteran journalist and broadcaster Michael Goldfarb said: “He was a president at a time when no-one was really in charge, the world was in a terrible state of drift.”
Frei questioned whether “Obama’s legacy is a legacy of absences – the absence of a war that he started, the absence of an economic calamity. Preventing economic calamity is more difficult to get brownie points for than actually causing a great economic success.”
However, as chair of Democrats Abroad UK Robert Carolina pointed out: “Coming back from economic collapse was by no means assured.”
One of the biggest difficulties that Obama has faced as president has been a deeply partisan Republican congress. The panel wondered whether America’s finely-tuned system of checks and balances is unable to cope with such partisan politics. “If it’s trench warfare, it’s not checks and balances,” said Frei.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Democrat Robert Carolina laid the blame with the Republican party for this state of affairs. He said: “They have become a party whose governing philosophy is almost nihilistic. A failure to achieve anything is almost a victory.”
A member of the audience highlighted Obama’s historic status as the first African-American President of the United States. Xenia Wickett commented:
“The greatest achievement in that respect is that you have five people here and that isn’t what we’d put as his legacy. In terms of a statement about where America is today, I think that’s a huge statement.”
With recent events in Ferguson exposing the ongoing deep racial divides that exist in the United States, Ghattas said: “the only people who talk about America as a post-racial society are white.”
Goldfarb added: “He decided, as many successful African-Americans do, ‘I’m not going to make a thing of my race, I’m not going to play that card’. He chose to downplay it.”
The panel also debated whether Obama had gained or lost international respect for his handling of US foreign policy. “What you get from world leaders today is that there is a failure of leadership and Obama is missing in action,” said Ghattas.
Wickett closed the discussion with a comment on the factors that have most hindered Obama’s presidency:
“He’s in a fundamental dilemma. Everybody wants American leadership, everybody wants America to use its leadership to keep sea lanes open, Middle Eastern energy flowing, the Chinese in their box, Europe safe through NATO. But the trouble is they only want it when it’s their way and they all want something slightly different. He cannot win!”
Watch and listen back below:
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A packed house at The Frontline Club heard Matt Frei regale them with tales from his long and illustrious career. The former BBC Washington correspondent, recently poached by Channel 4 News, was on fine form as he spoke to former BBC executive Vin Ray about more than 20 years with the BBC:
“The BBC is mother, and it’s been a very good mother to me, but now and again it’s a good idea to leave mother and elope with a mistress. I’ve always admired Channel 4 because it’s a cross between current affairs and news. Newsnight with a bit more of a newsy edge at a decent hour. I’ve had my eye on it for some time, and I guess they may have had their eye on me for some time.”
The event was delivered in conjunction with the BBC College of Journalism, as part of the ongoing Reflections series in which journalists including Alex Crawford, Jon Snow, Bill Neely and Martin Bell have discussed their experiences as journalists.
Frei spoke of the time he met Bell in Serbia, during the Bosnian war, and the valuable lessons that he took from him:
“He taught me the craft of television. It’s a very strange craft because it’s more about what you deny yourself than anything else, he said: ‘If you can’t say it in one minute and 42 seconds you can’t say it. Don’t bother.’”
Delivering his reflections alongside a series of memorable video clips, he discussed some of the high and low points of his career, including his coverage of the fall of the Berlin wall:
“I was told by a famous American journalist that this was the best story I would cover, and that it was all downhill from here. He was sort of right – it was such a happy event.”
He also spoke of some less orthodox approaches to stories, including one particular experience during his time in Rome:
“Giorgio Armani was accused of bribing the financial police. I got an interview by saying I was a fashion journalist for the BBC – I said I wanted to talk about hemlines and colours. Halfway through the interview he turned to me and said, ‘You know **** all about fashion, don’t you?’ I said, ‘Did you pay the money?’ He said, ‘Yes, in brown paper bags.’”
With regard to the challenges facing the next generation of young journalists Frei expressed some optimism:
“I think the challenges are going to be the same: find a story, tell it well and make sure somebody is going to pay you for it. If you’re starting out now you have an incredible range of tools at your disposal – much better than the tools we had, and cheaper.”
The issue of social media was subsequently raised, and the question of what it meant for the future of sending journalists like him around the world – particularly in light of the numerous journalists who have recently been killed and injured whilst reporting from warzones:
“I don’t think most serious organisations are thinking social media will replace what they have. It’s just another source of information – if you can’t get into Syria but you have evidence on your mobile phone you’re going to use it.”
As the evening drew to a close he discussed his only regret, the fact that he had to cover the Iraq war from Washington:
“I never went to Iraq, and in some ways I wish I’d covered it. In some ways talking about it from Washington makes you a bit of a fraud: unless you’ve seen the impact of policy on the ground you can’t really talk about it.”
Watch the full event:
]]>In conversation with Vin Ray, Matt Frei let us into the deepest, darkest and funniest recesses of his journalistic mind. Here is his advice for putting together a good story for television.
1. Pictures
Writing well for TV is quite simple, Frei says. The lesson is just to “get out of the way” of the images or the sound:
“It’s kind of a nerdy thing to say but if you’re doing television writing you’ve got to look at the pictures – they won’t tell you what points to make but they’ll confine what you can say.”
Frei says that former BBC correspondent Martin Bell is the ‘go to’ man on writing:
“Martin would look at [the shots] and pace up and down… then out would come twelve seconds of words followed by the sound of a dog barking or a shell going off.”
2. Immediacy
For Frei, the carefully managed journalism event comes as a distant second to the immediate.
A piece to camera by ITVs John Irvine standing on a road in Baghdad as US army trucks scrape by him at high speed is a good example.
“It’s not a kind of standard piece to camera where I’m standing here for thirty seconds telling you what I think this is all about… [John Irvine] writes simply – it’s the light touch.”
And in carefully orchestrated Washington, where Frei works at the moment as correspondent with Channel 4 News:
“These unscripted moments, they’re gold dust.”
3. Humour
In the same way that Frei’s chuckling asides gave this discussion momentum, he says that laughter can be great for telling stories:
“There’s a lot of funny stuff out there and if you don’t use it you’re missing a trick.”
4. Detail
Noticing small, hidden things can bring a difficult story to life.
In South Korea, where the economic crisis had a huge impact on the personal lives of people made redundant, was a bridge that people jumped off to commit suicide. But how do you tell the story with no obvious pictures?
The authorities had put grease up the bridge to stop people climbing up, but slip marks showed that not everyone had been put off trying to reach the top:
“You’re not going to get someone jumping off a bridge and going to funerals isn’t going to do it either, so you have to find something that works… in that little scratch signature in the grease you can see the agony, you can imagine what was going through his mind… it’s a little glimpse in that detail into the desperation that makes people do something like this.”
5. Interviews
In America, Frei says that getting people to talk isn’t hard, but he concedes that interviewing well is a tricky business, albeit one with a simple solution:
“My policy is to start off with a big fat smile and just try and disarm the situation by being unthreatening – then go for it afterwards”
Watch the full event here:
]]>Newly-appointed to Channel 4 News as Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, will be in conversation with former BBC executive Vin Ray to look back over nearly two decades at the BBC before his move was announced in May last year.
]]>In association with BBC College of Journalism
From the fall of the Berlin Wall to the handover of Hong Kong to China, Matt Frei has spent over two decades reporting across the globe.
Newly-appointed to Channel 4 News as Washington correspondent, Matt Frei, will be in conversation with former BBC executive Vin Ray to look back over nearly two decades at the BBC before his move was announced in May last year.
The author of Only in America,Frei has covered numerous high profile stories and reported from Asia, Europe, America and Africa. He has been awarded, amongst others, the Prix Bayeux award for War Reporting for his coverage of the conflict in East Timor. He presented the BBC World News America broadcast and a weekly Radio 4 show, Americana.
Image Credit: Channel 4 News
]]>The following week we will be launching a series of discussions, screenings and workshops examining the risks faced by journalists around the world.
The award-winning, genre-bending documentary filmmaker Mads Brügger launches our new masterclass series, and Tweets from Tahrir is the first of our Screenings from the Frontline with Al Jazeera.
February’s #FCBBCA will bring together a distinguished panel to discuss Iran’s internal power struggle and its turbulent relationship with the West.
We will also be examining the rebuilding of Libya and Fawzia Koofi will be discussing why she wants to become President of Afghanistan, while Matt Frei will be joining us to look back on his career.
Follow us on Twitter and catch up on any events you missed on the Forum blog or download our podcasts on iTunes.
ALL EVENTS ARE OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
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