Tuesday, Oct. 14, BBC News journalist Asma Khalid delivered a talk at the College of William and Mary on the news media’s role in shaping United States foreign policy. Alma Mater Productions hosted the event, which took place at 7 p.m. in the Sadler Center’s Commonwealth Auditorium, for both student and faculty audiences.
Khalid drew upon anecdotes from both her current role as co-host of the BBC’s daily international news podcast, “The Global Story Podcast,” which launched in September, and her experiences as a former White House correspondent and co-host of “The NPR Politics Podcast.” Khalid also regularly contributes to ABC and PBS’s television news programming as an expert on American politics, among other domestic outlets.
Khalid opened the lecture by sharing her recent decision to transition into an international media career after previously covering American politics exclusively for American networks. She described the fundamental difference between how domestic and international outlets cover American news that inspired her to expand her horizons.
“I think a lot of folks who know me are confused: ‘Why would you have left American politics at this particular moment [when] there’s so much going on?’” Khalid said. “And the truth of the matter is that I felt a lot of times like we were covering domestic politics as if it was something that was distinct and not connected with the rest of the world.”
Khalid cited a story she covered that morning on the Argentinian president’s meeting with President Donald Trump on tariff policy as an example of domestic and international news’ interconnection, arguing that U.S. networks give such stories short shrift.
“That’s a story that I think would have just been a blip as a traditional White House correspondent,” she said. “But it gave us a chance to really connect the dots.”
Khalid then proceeded to the main portion of her lecture, where she outlined what she considers to be the “attention wars” playing out in the contemporary media environment. She described the rising polarization in America that stems from both social media users and government officials consuming fragments of a full story, drawing hasty conclusions on complex geopolitical conflicts such as the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.
“The stories that people see and the stories that people don’t see shape how we understand the world,” Khalid said. “Government people, foreign leaders, our own world leaders, all react to it. They are reacting and responding to the media environment.”
Khalid compared the “frenetic” feedback loop between contemporary media and foreign policy with news coverage norms of the 1960s and 1970s. She highlighted the Vietnam War as the first time Americans could view the reality of an international conflict directly, bringing attention to global issues previously overlooked at the domestic level.
“Over the years since then, I’ve often heard my colleagues in the industry refer to something called the ‘CNN effect,’” she said. “It’s the idea that when images are televised into people’s homes, say particularly as CNN does on a 24-hour news basis, that it could possibly change perspectives.”
Khalid mentioned the Sudanese humanitarian crisis of the early 1990s as an example of when the “CNN effect” led millions of Americans to pressure foreign policy officials to take more direct action. This contributed to the government’s decision to increase humanitarian assistance to the Sudanese people.
“To be abundantly clear, I do not believe for a second that journalists actually led the government’s response,” Khalid said. “But what it did was help curate attention. I think that’s really important because it forces and elicits a response from elected officials.”
Khalid explained how the relationship between news and government has only intensified in the 21st century, emphasizing the role of contemporary media in boosting the plurality of perspectives, while also becoming more fragmented and polarizing.
Khalid cited the nationally-televised interview between Fox News anchor Brett Baier and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, following his tumultuous Oval Office meeting with Trump. She used the example to illustrate the national media’s continued influence on both Americans’ perceptions of foreign policy and the government’s decisions on major global issues.
“When the numbers came in for that interview, it was a Friday night [and] over six million people watched it,” Khalid said. “It was watched more than any other network that night. And [Zelensky] knew what he was doing. He knew that he was not only speaking to President Trump, but he was going to be able to speak to an American audience that he needed to win over.”
Khalid addressed the positive aspects of democratizing news through citizen-driven reporting on less visible topics in the mainstream media such as the war in Gaza. She highlighted an NPR story she produced about an American family from Boston who visited family members in Gaza, but then became stranded there after Oct. 7, 2023.
Khalid emphasized how NPR’s live phone call interview with the family’s mother, in which she pleaded for assistance from the government, shed light on the overlooked crisis of Americans trapped in Gaza and prompted action from the White House.
“I legitimately don’t think people knew that there were Americans inside of Gaza that were in this predicament,” Khalid said. “Her family’s story ended up being pulled on a number of other news outlets, [and] I believe we were the first major American news outlet to air her story. As a result, many times in the White House press briefing room, the Biden administration was asked: ‘What are you doing to get these people out?’”
Khalid commented that citizen-led reporting from inside Gaza, shared on social media platforms, went so far as to influence political strategy in the 2024 presidential election.
“There is no world in which President Trump would have actively engaged in Michigan with the Arab American population if it had not been for this war,” she said. “I also covered his campaign in 2016, and this was a marked shift from how he campaigned to court these voters. And it very much was in response to what we were seeing, and what we were seeing was largely on social media.”
At the same time, Khalid recognized how the role of journalists in the social media era has begun to shift from that of a “mirror and a megaphone” to a “competition for moral framing.” She cautioned that while a plurality of perspectives is necessary, the global supply of well-researched, accurate news has become a rarer commodity.
“Perhaps this sort of democratization of news could be an opportunity, but it has also sown a lot of chaos,” Khalid said. “Because if anyone and everyone can shape the story, then the question that has been on my mind is: ‘Who is responsible for the truth?’”
Khalid closed her talk by emphasizing the central role of news reporting in shaping U.S. foreign policy. When done effectively, she said that robust journalism can bring little-known issues to the forefront of the national conscience in a matter of hours.
“The media may not really set foreign policy directly, but I do believe it helps define the emotional map that policy follows,” she said. “And so if attention is the new currency, if it’s really the power — which I kind of believe it is nowadays — then we all have a stake in how it’s spent and how we choose to spend our attention.”
