The Media & International Security
Vol. 9 No. 1 | 2022 Edition
Even the most diligent news consumers, flooded with information, disinformation, and infotainment, miss key elements of the biggest stories. Journalists, pressed by deadlines and ever-shrinking resources — due to staff cuts and the elimination of foreign bureaus and even copy desks, for example — leave crucial gaps in coverage. The result is a dearth of the kinds of in-depth, well-rounded news and accountability journalism that the American public and their leaders depend on for decision-making in a democracy.
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Viola Gienger is Washington Senior Editor for Just Security and Research Scholar at New York University School of Law. She previously served as senior editor/ writer at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, where she also conducted program strategy work on the 2014 Ukraine/Russia crisis. Her journalism career includes news organizations in the United States and the United Kingdom, including covering the State Department and the Pentagon for five years for Bloomberg News. She lived and worked for seven years in the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and the Balkans, providing training and consulting for independent media in transition, and as a freelance journalist. She has reported from more than 30 countries, including in the Middle East and Asia, and has appeared as a guest commentator and moderator in television, radio, and podcasts.
An extensive and rapidly expanding body of research now shows how rising temperatures have destabilized the world’s two poles, the North Pole and the South Pole, causing significant concerns.
However, the world also contains what is often referred to as the “Third Pole,” or the Tibetan Plateau. This region faces a similar crisis but has not received the same attention.
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Dechen Palmo is research fellow at the Environment and Development Desk of the Tibet Policy Institute in Dharamshala, India. She studies Tibet’s Transboundary Rivers, focusing on the Mekong and Brahmaputra Rivers, and has written on the damming crisis and China’s strategic interests on the rivers. She has an M.Phil. in International Relations from the University of Madras with a dissertation titled “China’s Four Modernization Programmes.” Dechen Palmo has written and been published widely on environmental issues in Tibet.
Fletcher Security Review (FSR): What do you perceive as an under discussed or underreported issue in global security right now?
Caroline Rose (CR): It’s a very simple answer, but something that is always underreported in both Western and international outlets: human security. We often talk about human security in the context of state-to- state combat and great power competition, as they are some of the larger geopolitical contexts. But what I think is often misrepresented is the basic security and livelihood of the people who are experiencing conflict. Often, humanitarian consequences get only a mention in articles or TV interviews, or it’s discussed as just one dimension. In the media, we forget that in terms of conflict, state competition, and geopolitical rivalries, it’s all about human security at the end of the day. That is an often-neglected aspect of the coverage...
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Caroline Rose is senior analyst and head of the Power Vacuums Program at the New Lines Institute for Strategy and Policy.
Fletcher Security Review (FSR): What was the impetus for writing your book, The Vanishing: Faith, Loss, and the Twilight of Christianity in the Land of the Prophets? On one hand, it’s a chronology of the storied career of a war correspondent, but on the other hand it’s deeply personal as well.
Janine di Giovanni (JDG): Well, I think that the idea of these Christian minorities was really fascinating to me, having worked in the Middle East for so long. I became aware that there were these ancient, ancient people — Assyrians, Chaldeans, speaking Aramaic, the language of Christ — living in these remote villages, and they had somehow survived two millennia of persecution and armies trying to wipe them out.
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