Feature

How the World Sees America

Amar Bakshi, a reporter for the Washington Post and Newsweek, spoke to Harris School students on March 5 about his experience traveling around the world for his blog, "How the World Sees America," which appears in the publications' online editions.

Excerpts below are from a Harris School interview with Bakshi prior to his talk. You can also listen to Bakshi's interview (segment entitled "Global Views of America") on Public Radio International's The World.

Q: How did you land this beat at the Washington Post and Newsweek?

A: I started editing a foreign policy website for the Post out of undergrad. I just was desperate to move out from my family and do what I had done in college, which was to use video to tell the stories of a bunch of different people. And really use that as a way to put a face on stories that are often just told through political leaders and poll numbers. So I pitched it to Fareed Zakaria [editor of Newsweek International] actually on our first meeting. As soon as Fareed was behind it-to split it with the Post-it was pretty easy to get the Post behind it. I spent about four months ironing out the proposal, making initial contacts with these people [and] journalists around the world, trying to think about what would sell, what would work. [My editors thought] the best thing to do would be to get the world to comment back on the United States and really get at international issues, but in a way that is immediately accessible to Americans. I also argued that the video component could be really fruitful. If there's anything YouTube teaches us is that quick videos can do very well, and so my argument there was you can make a really efficient use of video by not trying to tell a whole story through it, but by just telling the parts that are best conveyed through video and leaving text to do the rest of the work.

Q: Considering the state of the world, how do Muslims view America?

A: One big thing that poll numbers don't get you is the demographic breakdown. One thing I think is interesting is the generational divide. Soon more than half the world's population will be under 18 years of age. And so you've got this generation of young people coming of age in a new America. The older generation tends to have relatively fond memories, depending on where you are. The younger generation tends to be much more vocally anti-American in terms of views on its policies. It's often for very personal reasons that people feel a certain way about the United States, and it's really different not only depending on where you go but who you talk to within those countries. And that diversity is something I think Americans don't pay enough attention to, and it's really important. To move towards the Muslim world, we tend to focus on the radicals. And the point is just that: you have to find a way to problematize their view of the United States. And the only way to do that is to engage them directly in certain types of communication and if you dismiss it as a lump whole, you're missing the great diversity within the community that could actually become an asset in whatever your ends are. In a nutshell, obviously views of the United States have declined radically . but it's affected different people differently, and I think that's something I'd want to stress.

And the other thing is how personal it is, it's not just disagreeing with a policy. But anywhere you go . people have a visceral reaction to the United States. And I think it's really important to understand that it's certainly not all hate. I think that's what I want to convey and then give hope because it is so personal. There's a lot of stuff ordinary people can do outside of government.

How do you tackle such a broad issue?

A: I think in retrospect I would have done things differently. It evolved. It began with me wandering the streets of England, following my nose, which inevitably led me to clubs, beauty pageants, and singers. It became clear that there are certain stories that people in a given country feel very strongly about, whether or not they're true-sometimes they are conspiracy theories-about how the United States affects them. So then it became a matter of finding out just through talking, through spending time in different parts of the country, what those stories were and who were the best representatives. I think that worked for this project, but I think this project also opens up a lot of ways to think more deeply in a more targeted way about these issues.