PostGlobal Launches

Washington Post columnist and associate editor David Ignatius was online Thursday, June 15, at 1 p.m. ET to discuss the launch of PostGlobal , a new online special that features independent journalists from all over the world in an ongoing dialogue about global issues. PostGlobal will be moderated by Ignatius and Newsweek's Fareed Zakaria , with a network of experts contributing regular analysis of pertinent happenings in our world.

The transcript follows.

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David Ignatius: Thanks for joining me today online. I'm hoping we can talk about a new experiment Fareed Zakaria of Newsweek and I launched yesterday called "PostGlobal," where we hope to build an online global forum for discussing issues that matter. I'm also happy to talk about topics I write about in my own column twice a week in the Post.

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Arlington, Va.: How many journalists are contributing? Is there a regular, stable rotation or will it depend on the country/issue being discussed? Thank you.

David Ignatius: We are starting with about 30 journalists and commentators--in countries ranging from China to Iran, Syria to India, Mexico to Israel. We hope to expand that number a bit, to 50 or so. We hope that people who come to the site from around the world will feel part of the network, too, and will share their views. The rotation of featured commentators will depend on the topic.

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Bethesda, Md.: I welcome this, but only if you are genuinely letting these foreign journalists have an "open mike". After The Post's squelching of the many WMD skeptics, its paralyzed lips on Mr. Bush's 2-year Saddam-9/11 associative-learning public miseducation campaign, to its ongoing complicity with his mischaracterization of the Iraqi insurgency (actually only 4-10% foreign terrorists, mostly a civil war), it's been a Dark Age of American journalism.

So I guess my question is: will these writers labor under the same censorship regime The Post has gone through the motions under? If so, please skip the insult to the intelligence of your readership. We'll keep going straight to international Web sites to find out what's going on. Thanks.

David Ignatius: I like your "open mike" image. That's just what we would like to provide here. No censorship regime for our commentators or for folks posting, but we will follow washingtonpost.com's basic rules for online comments, which I think are important for any constructive, civilized discussion. But in terms of political control, absolutely not.

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Washington, D.C.: Dear Mr. Ignatius: Thanks for doing chats and for your always thought-provoking writing in The Post. The topic of today's chat, and The Post's current buyout offer, and Richard Cohen's recent column about similar happenings at the New York Times all lead me to ask what you see as the future of newspapers, or at least of yours (and mine). I get actual "news"--i.e., new information--much less often from the paper than I used to, because of the Internet, TV, radio, and so on, but I do get news details and opinions and sports and comics and other things from the newspaper, and I would hate to lose it. Do you think you can hang on until I'm too old to read anymore?

David Ignatius: What we're doing at PostGlobal is an example of something that's happening all over the Washington Post Co., which is that we are looking for effective new ways to share our journalism with a wide readership, using new technology as effectively as we can. There are many pressures on our traditional print base, to be sure, but I actually think that opportunities for good journalism will expand, if we are smart and not too hidebound. We can be a global newspaper today, online, which was impossible when I joined the Post 20 years ago.

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Arlington, Va.: Mr. Ignatius, I think your novel "Agents of Innocence" was a great book, do you think you are going to expand on it after such a long time? I still think that the Israeli/Palestinian issue is the root of the problems in the Middle East and not Iraq, any thoughts? Thanks and good luck on the new Web site.

David Ignatius: I am glad you enjoyed "Agents of Innocence," my first novel. I have just completed a new book that returns to the Arab world and to many of the themes of "Agents of Innocence." It's about the war on terrorism and the ways in which it has peeled back against itself, much as was the case with earlier CIA operations in the Middle East. It will be published by W.W. Norton next spring.

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Fairfax, Va.: Will each week feature a specific world-type correspondent and will it be a function of the news at the time?

David Ignatius: In PostGlobal, we will be asking our panel two questions a week, for starters. They will be keyed to current events, but not slavishly so. I am interested in knowing about, say, what's new in the cultural or intellectual life of Asia, even though that isn't on anyone's list of hot news topics. The main rule Fareed and I have in moderating this discussion is that it should be interesting--that it should tell us things we don't know. I want as sharp a discussion as possible--and within the broadest limits.

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South Prairie, Wash.: How does the U.S. convey to Iraqis that we don't wish to be occupiers and that there's nothing we'd like more than to bring our soldiers home? Or does their press usually present things in a negative way?

David Ignatius: I suspect that over time, we will see more discussions between the United States and the new Iraqi government about the American troop presence, how it should be used, when US troops should withdraw. I thought it was a positive sign, for example, the Prime Minister al-Maliki asked for an Iraqi investigation of what happened with the US Marines in Haditha. Such an inquiry is appropriate--it's their country, after all. The Iraqi press is a work in progress, but I have to tell you, I have been inspired by the courage and professionalism of many of our Iraqi colleagues. The Iraqi staffers for the Washington Post, for example, are some of my real heroes in this business.

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Washington, D.C.: Interesting insights from this week's PostGlobal contributors. I wonder if you might address the implications of this discussion to a recent column on the desire of Iranian government officials for a Nixon-to-China overture to Iran. As several of the contributors point out, Iran lacks both the actual and potential weight to be a regional power, let alone a China, a country of 1.2 billion and an emerging global economic and military power. Does it seem to you that the Iranians have an exaggerated opinion of their own importance and that the regime's vanity may be a stumbling block to more constructive engagement with Iran? Would efforts to integrate Iran into the international community have to be coupled with a more reasonable self-assessment on the part of the current regime?

David Ignatius: I liked the answers to our initial PostGlobal question about Iran because they took the discussion to a level that would be impossible if people were sitting around a table in Washington. The perspectives from Lebanon and Iran--and those to be posted soon from Pakistan, India, Venezuela and a dozen other places--look at these issues in a different way. I was struck by the fact that nearly everyone was dubious that Iran would be a stabilizing force anytime soon.

As for the Nixon to China analogy, I prepared the "Editor's Inbox" summary of Kissinger's diplomacy because I thought it would be a useful reminder of just how far outside the box Kissinger went in his opening to China and other diplomatic maneuvers. Iran isn't China--it doesn't have the strategic depth or, sadly, the level of maturity among its leaders. But the Iranians, like the Chinese, do want to be taken seriously by the United States. And the core question with Iran is the same one Kissinger faced with China: Is there a way for the two ideological adversaries to address each other's fundamental security concerns.

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Washington, D.C.: Is PostGlobal aimed at an international audience (i.e. readers in these countries themselves), or is it more for U.S. readership to develop a better understanding?

David Ignatius: We hope PostGlobal will have a big audience at home and abroad. I travel a lot, so I always feel that I am in a global conservation. The discussion with friends in Beirut last weekend was an extension (somewhat more animated, at times) of what I would have been talking about with friends here in DC. As with many of the interesting things on the Web, the benefit of this experiment will be the opportunity for unplanned, unexpected connections. It really is possible now to have a shared conversation around the world. Or at least I hope so.

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Baltimore, Md.: How did you find the journalists involved in this project? Are they mostly bloggers, or are they traditional journalists in their countries? Also in places in Iran, is there any risk of censorship?

David Ignatius: Many of the journalists and commentators are people Fareed Zakaria and I have gotten to know in our travels around the world--people we respect for their intelligence and independence. This is an idea that first came to me several years ago, when I was executive editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris. We liked to call ourselves "The World's Daily Newspaper," and I hoped we could use the Internet to create an IHT-sponsored network of global journalists and commentators. Sadly, The Washington Post is no longer a partner in the IHT (despite our wishes to the contrary), but the Post's interest in global journalism remains strong, as I hope this experiment demonstrates.

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Seattle, Wash.: Is this new blog being created because The Post outsourced all the writers? Or am I just being cynical and overly observant?

David Ignatius: You are being cynical. There is no hidden agenda here.

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Munich, Germany: I'm looking forward to your PostGlobal blog, and I'm hoping that the format will be compatible with my creaky, ancient computer, that doesn't have the power to deal with video streaming.

By the way, when you wrote "Bank of Fear", did you really think that Saddam Hussein was eventually going to be assassinated?

David Ignatius: We hope your computer will cope. PostGlobal shouldn't eat up too much of your bandwidth. Thanks for remembering "Bank of Fear." That 1993 novel was about how Saddam Hussein ruled Iraq by torture and intimidation, and the research I did made a lasting impression on me. (For one thing, it made me see how desperately most Iraqis wanted to be rid of Saddam.) In imagining the ending, I did see a popular uprising in which the brutal leader is toppled by an angry nation. It's easier to make it all work out smoothly in a novel than in life.

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Berkeley, Calif.: I hope that you can ask scientists and non-scientists, experts in geography and agriculture and such, and people from the World Bank, what are the implications of climate change and other environmental changes geopolitically over the next 50 years.

Thanks for this interesting venue!

David Ignatius: Global climate change is definitely one of the topics we hope to discuss in PostGlobal. I can imagine asking our network of commentators--and even more, folks coming to the site--to post comments about how climate change is affecting the regions where they live. I can also imagine sharing ideas about ways to reduce carbon emissions in developing countries. The opportunities for this kind of productive exchange are limitless.

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Washington, D.C.: How does this blog fit in with World Opinion roundup's coverage?

David Ignatius: We will continue to digest what foreign publications are saying in World Opinion roundup. And we are also looking for ways to connect with the global blogosphere. My colleague Amar Bakshi, who is the editor/producer of the project, has some experience with this international blogging world. You can post us suggestions.

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Seattle, Wash.: So, can we expect to see reporters actually talking about issues that matter to other nations then, not just the beltway MSM view of the world? And, will we be seeing at least half of them being female reporters, or will they all come from state-sponsored news programs as we see on MSM TV reporting?

Secondly, can you please NOT include any Israeli or Palestinian reporters - we get way too much coverage of that already and don't need more.

David Ignatius: Certainly you can expect people in our global conversation to describe the world as they see it--outside what is sometimes a constricted circle of discussion here in the States. (That's not an MSM problem, in my view, but a bigger cultural one.) We are working to expand our group of contributors, as I mentioned earlier, and many of the additions will be women. On the Israeli-Palestinian issue, this is one of the most vexing and intractable problems on earth. Frankly, I can't imagine a global dialogue that don't include Israelis and Palestinians, and we have enlisted several outstanding journalists from both sides.

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Bethesda, Md.: PostGlobal seems like a great collaborative effort. How did the idea to do this come about? Are there other news sites who do a similar kind of thing? Was it difficult finding "experts" to participate?

David Ignatius: Happily, nearly everyone Fareed and I have contacted agreed to take part. There are a few other experiments like this, but I'm not aware of another one by a major US newspaper. One thing we will try to do, where possible, is link PostGlobal with other interesting conversations taking place in other online forums. That's one of the nice things about the web--exclusivity bad; connectivity good.

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David Ignatius: Thanks to everyone who joined in this chat. We will look forward to your visiting PostGlobal and sharing your thoughts with us there.

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