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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
You're listening to TED Talks Daily, where we bring you new ideas to spark your curiosity every day. I'm your host, Elise Hu. Today, we're bringing you another special episode of TED Explains the World with Ian Bremmer.
Ian, president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, sits down with Helen Walters, TED's head of media and curation, to discuss topics ranging from news gathering and intelligence to access to world powers. All of that and more is coming up right after a break.
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And now our conversation of the day.
Hello, everyone. It's May the 20th, 2026, and we are doing something a little different today. We are going behind the curtain to talk about how reliable, trustworthy analysis and reporting actually happen. So as the founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media, Ian Bremmer is one of the most closely followed voices in geopolitical analysis. He has access to the rooms,
the conversations and the world leaders who make and respond to the news of the day. And today we are going to get a better sense of how he does what he does. I am Helen Walters. I am the head of media and curation at TED. And here is Ian. Ian, thank you so much for being here. A pleasure as always.
Helen, very good to see you.
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Chapter 2: How does Ian Bremmer build trust with world leaders?
So what public sources of information and analysis do you trust the most and what makes a source trustworthy?
Public sources. Well, it's getting harder, first of all. I think we all feel that. I mean, I used to trust what I would read in the newspapers a lot more than I do today. So much of that is framing. It's not that the journalism is wrong, but the stories that are being picked and the way that they are being reported and the angles on them are much more politicized than they used to be.
I would say 10 years ago, I felt that the op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal had clear slants, but that the coverage in the general news did not. I think that's changing. I probably still see the Financial Times as, in terms of their news coverage, both politically and economically around the world, as quite good. and objective.
It is it's not the most serviceable website and it's pretty dry and it's pretty technically detailed. But frankly, I think in part because they don't care necessarily about having the broadest distribution and subscriber set, it's more doing what they do well for the people that need them. They've probably been most true to that over the last ten years, 20 years.
I think that there are plenty of places that you can turn to for good global coverage outside the US. So one thing I try to do all the time when I'm adjusting my own media diet is spending some time with NHK in Japan, in English, and Deutsche Welle from Germany. And I mean, the CBC in Canada and the BBC in the UK and Al Jazeera in the Middle East.
And all of them have their specific biases, but their worldviews are generally pretty good. And of course, they're interested in a lot of the same stories in terms of global coverage. that American media is. And they're also all very consumed with what's happening in the United States, but they're trying to figure it out. And they're usually doing that with less of a structural bias.
I would say that's particularly true for Germany and Japan. And so that is something that most of my friends in the United States don't do that. Most of my friends in those countries don't consume the media outside their countries. I think that's an increasingly smart way to go.
And then the final thing that I do, and again, in terms of public consumption, we're not talking about private consumption, of our own analysts and our own network and who we talk to and how we engage is I probably have among the 2,000 people that I follow on Twitter, which is the platform that I personally spend more time on to get information,
and I don't do the for you feed at all, I do the who I'm following, that's been pretty carefully curated to be a broad political spectrum of people that have a great deal of expertise covering most of the issues that I think are important globally.
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Chapter 3: What sources of news does Ian Bremmer trust the most?
it is a whole bunch of people that are interconnected with each other. They meet constantly, they share information constantly, they have different perspectives, but they do have a general shared understanding of what's happening in the world, much of which they're not necessarily saying to other people. And if
you build those relations over time, the ability of any one individual leader to spin you, that'll be true if you're, that'll be a problem for you if you only talk to that leader. But if you have a broader set of relationships, that one person spinning you isn't going to be very effective at all.
And I think that that is, I see this happening all the time with media sources who are deep, deep journalists, but they're deep journalists on the basis of a very strong connection with one individual leader or government that gives them all their information. And that's a problem.
because then even if the journalist is really good and really professional, all of the scoops they're getting, all of the analysis that is really, feels like it is not in the public domain, but needs to be out there is only from one perspective and one filter. And so they're at risk of being spun.
And even if they're not being spun, they likely are promoting a very narrow worldview, which does not really help the readers get what's happening globally.
What do you make of the changes that have happened to the media industry over the years? So I'm imagining that when you're in these rooms or when you're talking to people, you're not, do you call yourself a journalist, for instance?
I'm a political scientist.
Right. So you're a political scientist. So that actually gives you a kind of a different credibility from a journalist who is there to report on the topic.
Do you feel like... I'm not there to like break news or write stories. I'm really there to try to understand like how...
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