Brian Winter: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the hardest thing to teach your writers? Humility. Circumstances have changed so much since I started doing this. I have to say, with a certain degree of embarrassment, that it is partly a function of what’s happened in world history over the last 25 years since I started doing this. Anglo-American correspondents in Latin America 25 years ago wrote with this certitude, this certainty that these countries needed to learn from the example of the United States and/or England. I worked for Reuters for many years. Not everybody was like that, of course, but that was a prevailing view. Keep in mind we were coming out of the 1990s, which was the peak of the post-Cold War period, the end of history, Washington Consensus, and everything like that. But everything that’s happened over the last several years, from the Great Recession of 2008 to things like the Iraq War, the problems that the US has had in our own democracy in that time have really, I think, impacted the way that journalists everywhere write about everything, I would hope. But specifically Latin America, which used to be treated — you still see shades of it every now and then — with a finger-wagging paternalism that not only turns people off in the region — there’s no quicker way to shut Latin American readers off than when they sense that happening. I think it’s important for us to recognize that all of our countries are imperfect and facing some of the same challenges in terms of democratic erosion, rising inequality, addiction to drugs, and all the effects that that has on organized crime. We’re much less different from people in this part of the world than many of us believed 25 years ago. Speaking of humility, is Milei going to succeed or fail?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.