Tagged: media

On Tuesday the U.N. General Assembly approved a treaty to regulate the global arms trade, and the panel explores what role the CIA is playing in Arab and Turkish military aid to Syria.

Ambassador Cynthia Schneider joins Suzette Grillot and Joshua Landis to discuss how culture influenced her diplomacy while representing the United States in the Netherlands between 1998 and 2001.

While serving as the U.S. Ambassador to the Netherlands in 2001, Cynthia Schneider used Hollywood to approach sensitive drug issues between American and Dutch officials.

Schneider invited embassy staffers focusing on drugs, and their counterparts in the Dutch Ministry of Justice, to a screening of Steven Soderbergh’s Oscar-winning film Traffic.

“It's a very powerful film that shows the intricacies of drug trafficking, and really shows how complicated it is,” Schneider says. “That was a fantastic experience because it kind of leveled the playing ground, and after seeing that film together we were able to have the most honest, direct conversation that we ever had, and really make progress.”

Suzette Grillot,  Joshua Landis, and Rebecca Cruise discuss the election of Pope Francis, the financial situation of the Vatican, and the influence of the New World on the Catholic Church.

Deputy Director for Research at the Mohyla School of Journalism at the National University of Kyiv-Mohyla Academy Anastasiia Grynko joins Grillot and Cruise for a conversation about media ethics and transparency in Ukraine and other post-Soviet countries.

In 2004, a disputed presidential election in Ukraine sparked a two-month series of economic and political protests known as the Orange Revolution.

The U.S. Department of State reported in 2006 that Ukrainian media outlets were freer and politically diverse than any time since the country gained independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.