Is America Broken?: A Talk with The Economist’s New Editor-in-Chief

Even if you don’t agree with its Euro con­ser­v­a­tive pos­ture, The
Econ­o­mist always comes off as

emi­nent­ly ratio­nal and sen­si­ble when
grap­pling with polit­i­cal issues, and cer­tain­ly unwill­ing to put spin
ahead of good report­ing, which sep­a­rates it from many of its Amer­i­can
coun­ter­parts. This judi­cious­ness comes across in a talk giv­en last week
by John Mick­leth­wait, the mag­a­zine’s new­ly appoint­ed Edi­tor-in-Chief. (Access audio ver­sions here.) Inter­viewed by Orville Schell, Dean of the Grad­u­ate School of Jour­nal­ism at
UC-Berke­ley,
Mick­leth­wait cov­ers a lot of ground, but spends a good deal of time
con­tem­plat­ing Amer­i­ca’s role in the world, and par­tic­u­lar­ly whether
Amer­i­ca’s inter­na­tion­al lead­er­ship is now irre­triev­ably bro­ken. His com­mon sense answers pro­vide no red
meat for any­one on the left or right. But they’re thought­ful, and worth your time. (Just as an fyi, his talk does­n’t get start­ed until about 10 min­utes in, and he does­n’t get to inter­na­tion­al affairs until about the 29th minute.) Final­ly, on a relat­ed note, you may want to explore The Econ­o­mist’s rel­a­tive­ly new series of pod­casts: iTunes  Feed

For more pod­casts like it, see Open Cul­ture’s col­lec­tion of News & Infor­ma­tion Pod­casts and our Uni­ver­si­ty Pod­cast Col­lec­tion.