My new favorite political affairs show is Fareed Zakaria's GPS on CNN, Sundays at 1 pm. I watched it for the first time yesterday and found it intelligent and broadening. The depth reminded me of BBC news - which is like a rich dense chocolate fudge cake compared to the cupcake state of television news in this country.
Kudos to CNN for giving world news a try.
In fact, quite a bit of American politics was discussed, as were issues affecting the US - Iran for one. Yesterday had a discussion among 3 British journalists including the Brit who is the New York Times bureau chief (names eludes me but he looks like Santa Claus). All bright guys.
Then a fascinating interview with Gordon Brown, which you can watch at the shows' web site.
And the hour concluding with a terrific piece on Churchill - showing the rooms he and his staff occupied during the Blitz and also illuminating other parts of Churchill's career (Gallipoli)
All was very interesting.
I don't always agree with Zakaria. He had a 30 minute weekly show on PBS, called Foreign Exchange, which I never saw. (He relinquished his hosting duties at the end of last year; the program is now hosted by Daljit Dhaliwal.) He also had a column in Newsweek, which I often read and found thought provoking even if I wasn't quite convinced to his point of view. Many of his columns won awards. I'm not sure if he's still writing for them. I stopped reading Newsweek when they hired Karl Rove. That's what my mother would have done.
He studied for his PhD at Harvard under Samuel Huntington, who wrote the largely read and debated piece, The Clash of Civilizations in Foreign Affairs magazine in 1993. (I still have my copy). Zakaria also served as managing editor of Foreign Affairs, I'm pretty sure after that time.
He is known as a "realist" Here is his wiki entry.
And apparently, Obama was reading Zakaria's latest book,The Post-American World. The link is to The New Republic which give a good annotation of Zakaria's views put forth in his latest book.
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