Senior Staff of Newsweek Magazine
Michael Elliott, Editor, Newsweek International
Joseph Contreras, Miami Bureau Chief, and former Jerusalem Bureau Chief
Steven Strasser, National Affairs Editor and former Asia Editor
Mark Miller, West Coast Editor and Los Angeles Bureau Chief  

"Countdown to the Millennium: Some Predictions for the Future"

MICHAEL ELLIOTT:

Those of us who do this kind of circuit know that in the United States there are world affairs councils and there are world affairs councils and there is the Los Angeles World Affairs Council, which has a reputation nationwide and, I know for a fact, worldwide.  All of us here are delighted to be with you and thrilled to see such an enormous audience at the start of the holiday season when there are so many other attractions in this great city.  So, I thank you all very much for coming out to hear the little things that we have to say.  I think this is my third visit to the Los Angeles World Affairs Council over the last fifteen years so it must be six or seven years since I was here in this very room, I think, meditating with others on what we thought the post-Cold War world would look like--just a couple of months after the Berlin Wall fell down.  It is, indeed, a different world that we look at tonight from the one that I and you and all of us grew up assuming was normal and would last forever.

Let me reintroduce the three “desperados” that I have on the podium with me.  To my immediate left is Steve Strasser, the National Editor of Newsweek Magazine in charge of all of  Newsweek’s domestic coverage, gearing up, of course, for the 2000 presidential election, which he will be in direct control of--coverage of, at least, I should say, although one should never downplay Newsweek’s influence.  As Michael Tennenbaum said [in his introduction of this panel], Steve returned to the United States just this last summer after seven years in Hong Kong, initially as Hong Kong’s Bureau Chief and then as Asia Editor of Newsweek working closely with me in editing the international edition, masterminded Newsweek’s fast-breaking and prize-winning coverage of the handover story of Hong Kong to China.

On my right is Joe Contreras, Miami Bureau Chief of Newsweek Magazine and also our coordinating editor for all Latin America coverage.  He covered the beat--I’m going to steal this line from him--from Tallahassee to Tierra del Fuego.  In a nineteen-year career in journalism at Newsweek Joe spent sixteen years of it overseas with spells in Mexico City, Buenos Aires, during which he was briefly a guest of Sindero Luminosa--or uninvited guest.  South Africa, where Joe covered the transition to majority rule and the election of President Mandela, and most recently in Jerusalem where Joe covered the premiership of Benjamin Netanyahu and the coming to power of Ehud Barak, and much more.  He is one of our most distinguished and experienced foreign correspondents.

On my far left, coming to you from the dangerous and unpredictable territory of Mulholland Drive and Santa Monica Boulevard is Newsweek’s West Coast Editor and Los Angeles Bureau Chief, Mark Miller.  Mark is on his second stint as Los Angeles Bureau Chief for Newsweek and before that was a ground-breaking journalist in his coverage of the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign when Mark legendarily won his way into the confidence of the Clinton camp over an eighteen month period and produced story after story that was then wrapped up into our special election issue immediately after President Clinton’s victory and which set the standard, I think, for all recent coverage of presidential campaigns.

One of the things that we thought we’d do [tonight], just to kind of get this evening rolling, is to make a few comments ourselves and then we’ll take all of your questions.  What I’ve asked these guys to do and what I’m going to do myself is just to give you some indication of how I spent last week [working] and how I’m going to spend this week [working].

Last week was rather unusual for me because normally I kind of bury myself away inside my office and do nothing but edit.  This last week I decided, rather late--or it was decided for me rather late, on Friday--that I would write one of the stories in Newsweek this week, coming off the events in Seattle during the beginning of the week.  My task was to assemble from a variety of reports that we had from around the country who the heck were these guys who trashed Seattle and who laid waste, as it were, to the agenda of the World Trade Organization ministerial meeting last week.

I found it an absolutely fascinating exercise, because the advantage of Newsweek International, the thing that I spend most of my time thinking about, writing about and, as it were, being, is globalization--that most over-used word of the decade.  I publish, or edit, a global magazine and the issues of globalization, of economic and commercial globalization, are front and center for everything that I try to do as the editor of Newsweek International.  Here was this motley collection of people in favor of a free Tibet, people dressed as turtles, steel workers, Pat Buchanan, the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, students against sweatshops, grannies against free trade--did you see those?--marching in the streets of Seattle and between them, between them completely wrecking the best-laid plans of more than 130 ministers and international bureaucrats gathered there.  But one of the things I tried to do last week was to try to make sense of that and to get some idea of whether it presages anything for the future and I think to an extent it does.

I think globalization in the sense of a gradual interpenetration of countries and peoples, fueled by commercial activities with businesses increasingly investing abroad, sourcing abroad, trading with each other, with people moving effortlessly from one country to another--all that, I think, continues without much impediment because that’s just the nature of the world.  Technology has made internationalism infinitely easier and cheaper than it has been before.  One of my old colleagues, an economist, wrote an extremely good book a couple of years ago called The Death of Distance, which is a kind of wonderful way of summing up the way the world has changed.  So I think globalization continues the pace.

But, what I think we learned in Seattle is that one kind of globalization is now impossible to prosecute and that is what one might call “formal legalistic globalization.”  It’s extraordinarily difficult for me now to see how the United States Congress, for example, enacts fast track trade legislation at any point in the next few years.  It’s actually quite difficult for me to see how the United States Congress passes legislation that is necessary to admit China to the World Trade Organization, because I think the degree of popular opposition to that, post-Seattle, is likely to be surprisingly strong.  So what I think we can’t depend on in the next few years is formal legalistic measures either at the national level or the international level that advances the globalization agenda.  Instead, globalization will simply continue because it’s the way of the world, but I don’t think we’re going to get massive trade bills, I don’t think we’re going to get massive trade opening agreements, I don’t think we’re going to get massive agreements on direct investments, which we had hoped we might have got in 1998, and I think we have to recognize, those of us who are as it were in the debate, that there are now two sides, there are now two kinds of globalization.  There’s a globalization that’s led by commercial interests, that’s led by trade, that’s led by multinational companies and there’s a globalization of the free turtle people, of the free Tibet people, of the save the rain forest, of the let’s protect Indonesian workers or Pakistani makers of soccer balls, or whatever it is.  That, too, is a sort of globalization, which found its voice in Seattle and I think it’s a voice that is unlikely to be silenced at any time in the near future and I think that inevitably that realization post-Seattle is likely to infect all of our thinking.

Joe [Contreras], an interesting story you had to cope with last week, the young boy, and an interesting trip that I hope you are going to make this weekend.

 JOE CONTRERAS

 That’s right, Michael.  Last week I was spending time with the members of the extended family of Elian Gonzales, the then five-year old, now six-year old Cuban boy, who survived a harrowing 48 hour ordeal at sea off the Florida Coast, clinging on to an inner-tube after his mother perished along with ten other Cubans in a failed bid to find freedom on these shores.  I basically went to the house in Little Havana where his great uncle and great aunt have taken in Elian and spoke with members of the Cuban-American community in Miami and did a story about how this boy quite unwittingly and quite accidentally has become this international poster child for both camps in the Cuban community, certainly for the exiled community in South Florida who, in the words of one of the organizations, printed posters showing the boy’s image and described him as another child victim of Fidel Castro and for the regime in Havana, for whom Elian Gonzales was basically the victim of an international kidnapping.

This coming week I’m going to be going to Caracas, Venezuela, to do a kind of end-of-year retrospective piece on the remarkable story of President Hugo Chavez, who in some ways has been described as a throwback to Latin American leaders of another era, like Juan Domingo Peron, but to his supporters represents a very refreshing and overdue break from the traditional and largely corrupt elites who ran Venezuela for the past forty years and who ran an oil-rich economy largely into the ground.  In between, I’m still waiting to hear from the authorities in Havana to see if they’ll grant me a visa to get Elian Gonzales’ father’s side of the story.

 MICHAEL ELLIOTT

Steve [Strasser], you spent part of last year editing me, and also thinking about globalization in Seattle.  Is there anything else on your plate?

STEVEN STRASSER

Editing Mike [Elliott] is such a hard job that I don’t have time to think about much else.  Actually, that’s not true.  Globalization, to me, what was most interesting about covering Seattle is how little it had to do with trade, at least in our own minds.  Everybody was complaining about globalization but nothing that happened up there did anything about globalization.  We were grasping about, we found ourselves calling old ‘60s radicals to find out what they thought about it, so we tried Tom Hayden and he answered on his cell phone as he was marching in Seattle.  He boasted, telling us “we won, we won,” and his line was that they lost in Chicago but they won in Seattle--the movement won.

At any rate, I think that it’s certainly true to say that globalization is just something that’s happening, forces are driving it.  If you travel overseas these days--for example, I just came back from Hong Kong, as Mike mentioned, and the Consul General there who, incidentally, runs a much bigger operation than the embassy in Beijing does, spends a lot of his time worrying about how you sell frozen California chicken feed to the Chinese.  These are the kinds of issues that are really occupying diplomacy around the world, and I think larger events are driving the process even more than anything like the WTO or anything like the demonstrations on the streets of Seattle.  One of those, of course, is American information technology.

We’ve always been fairly--well, I guess we’ve been internationalist in our politics since World War II, but we’ve been very isolationist in our commercial activities, even since World War II.   I think that the information age is driving Americans overseas with more commitment than ever before.  It’s impossible to think of Microsoft, Dell and Cisco and any other big companies you can mention even conceiving of a business plan that doesn’t include the whole world.  So, I think you have to look at these broader trends that are happening no matter what the WTO, sitting in Geneva, does or does not do.  I think one of those trends which, of course, you’re very interested in, here in Los Angeles, is how China develops because just as the United States is developing a more global attitude toward its business atmosphere, I think that China which, if you excuse the Communist era, also has a very, very strong commercial background, and will now enter that field to a greater extent than it ever has before.  I think that in a way the United States and China are both evolving as extremely important global competitors in a commercial sense, much more so than in a political sense, and I think this is the kind of trend you have to keep your finger on here in Los Angeles.

 MICHAEL ELLIOTT

 One of the things we are very conscious of at Newsweek and in particular at Newsweek International is that foreign affairs is a two-way street.  It’s not only the people in the United States that are interested and need to be informed about what happens in the rest of the world--it’s also an increasingly important part of my job--it’s also a question of satisfying, in the rest of the world, a great hunger to know about and understand what goes on in the United States.  Mark [Miller] had a particularly interesting week last week and produced what I thought was one of the most interesting stories in this week’s issue of Newsweek, or indeed any issue of Newsweek recently.  Mark, do you want to tell us where you were?

 MARK MILLER

This is a variation on going from the sublime to the ridiculous.  We’re going from some very high-minded discussion of trade and Seattle and international relations, globalization and then we come to my portfolio, which is O.J. Simpson.  We were talking with some high school students before we came in here and they were asking some questions about what we did and how we ended up being journalists and how did our careers develop the way they did and I sort of began to tick off the big stories of my career--O.J. and JonBenet--this sort of endless list of stories that are, at least on the surface, extremely titillating.  But the point that I tried to make--and I don’t think it’s the justification that I use to go to work every day--but the point I made was that these kinds of cases, particularly all of us who lived through O.J., I think we probably recognize this, these kinds of legal issues, these kinds of cases, expose a sort of fault line in society and that’s why they’re interesting.

Beyond just the titillation factor of crime there were very legitimate issues of race, money, class and justice, which are issues that we spend a great deal of time thinking about at Newsweek.  As part of that, last week I went back to Littleton, Colorado, where I did an interview with the principal at Columbine High School who largely has avoided the media since the events in April.  They’ve been under a lot of scrutiny, and it reminded me again of the O.J. saga: as I was standing at the high school there would be cars that would arrive and people would come out and take pictures and then leave.  At one point a member of the Columbine alumni association asked one of these people why they were doing this and they said, and I thought this was quite interesting, that they really felt they had to see it because they felt like it was their high school as well.

I think that that’s probably something that a lot of parents feel, which has led to something that I talked about with the Columbine principal, which is this idea of zero tolerance.  How schools, how administrators, how authorities respond now to all threats, perceived and real, and how we deal with those issues in the absence of some greater understanding of why these kids seem to be doing what they’re doing. As you may know, we had another shooting yesterday in Oklahoma--fortunately, nobody was killed.  Again, that was something that we wanted to try to get at this piece, which is what do you say to schools around the country?  What do you say to parents around the country?   What wisdom, if any, can Frank deAngeles, the principal at Columbine offer?  His answer is very simple, which is that he doesn’t know, he doesn’t have the answer, and he gets a lot of calls from fellow school administrators and from parents wondering what they can do--and clearly it’s going to happen again.  It did yesterday and it will again, and that is clearly a challenge that has to be dealt with in some way. 

We’ve attempted to come to a number of different issues, from writing about parenting of teenagers--how you may never know your teenager, the stranger living among you--as well as gun control issues, which we did as a special package after the shooting at the day care center here in Los Angeles.  We took a look at gun control laws and our most conservative editor, a son of Tennessee, in the end wrote this piece calling for more research on gun control, taking an editorial viewpoint, which Newsweek rarely does but did in this case because the topic seemed to warrant it. 

Thank you.