Rash: PBS’ Nick Schifrin on the importance of journalism, from local to global

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Being in key geopolitical locations like Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan (and eventually Venezuela, it appears) is important to Nick Schifrin, the foreign affairs and defense correspondent for the "PBS NewsHour." But so too are trips to places like Minneapolis, where Schifrin visited on Monday, Dec. 15.

“I can’t say enough,” Schifrin said in an interview before appearing in front of hundreds at a Global Minnesota “Behind the Headlines” event, “about what [the Minnesota Star Tribune] or what my colleagues at Minneapolis PBS [TPT] do. Nobody understands their communities like the people who are living and working in them. Nobody understands the kind of desires, whether it’s local or foreign policy, more than local journalists. We cannot know each other as Americans, we cannot understand each other as Americans, if there is no local news.”

And understanding is important, imperative even, in today’s turbulent world where international issues become domestic ones.

“Regardless of what the U.S. policy is, it impacts around the world, and it does impact Americans,” said Schifrin, citing tariffs, a geoeconomics as well as geopolitical matter, as just one issue that hits home. Or another, which was announced just minutes before our interview: the tragic news that the two service members who were killed in Syria just days before were members of the Iowa National Guard.

Completely conversant with the intricate issues involved in deploying soldiers to Syria — just as he’s fluent on other defense and diplomatic policies — Schifrin discussed the dynamics in Damascus and Washington, ending with: “The bottom line is that the United States believes that despite this tragedy,” President Donald Trump “seems to want to keep going on Syria and wants to help [Syrian President Ahmed] al-Sharaa succeed. And part of that is keeping the military there, if nothing else to just keep that pressure on all the different parties” and to “try to keep that centrifugal force to Damascus rather than it going apart.”

“How that unfolds, the winners and losers, may not be known today or tomorrow or next week or next year even, but our children or grandchildren will certainly live in a different world if certain things happen and the United States is not helping shape the order.”

The children and grandchildren (and parents and grandparents) of the Mideast have already been enduring endless enmity between Israel and Palestine, which makes the eventual resolution of Gaza a seminal event. “Fixing Gaza is not only required for the 2.1 million people living there and all of their descendants and the people of Israel in order to have peace, but also it is enormously important for the world to see that this war ended,” said Schifrin. And in Gaza “that the people who were not Hamas, who live next to them or above them or underneath them, get their homes back, their lives back, and their children see a future in which it is better to economically cooperate than violently target.”

Other countries’ convulsions — especially in Sudan — are also integral to international alignment and thus to the U.S., Schifrin said. But, he emphasized, “the enormous, enormous challenge that the United States has is a Chinese government that has launched the fastest military modernization in world history since the interwar years in Germany, one of the fastest economic growth in history since it joined the World Trade Organization, and diplomatically is not afraid to throw its weight around in the region and the world.”

Interpreting international issues and their impact domestically takes reporters. And reporters face risks — sometimes deadly ones, as an analysis issued Dec. 10 by the Committee to Protect Journalists reported. “With more than three weeks still to go to the end of the year, the number of journalists and media workers killed worldwide in 2025 already equals 2024’s record figures,” CPJ reported.

Some of the threats are not new, Schifrin said, recalling living in Pakistan in the years after Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl was brutally murdered by Islamic extremists. Hot wars present the most peril, as evidenced by CPJ tracking almost 250 journalists killed by Israel since the war with Gaza started in 2023 (Schifrin stressed the “enormous risks” taken by his colleague Shams Odeh, “who lost countless friends and colleagues” reporting from Gaza). But cold wars, however undeclared, are also a growing risk, said Schifrin, who said he and other foreign correspondents are routinely warned about travel to Russia, China, Iran and other repressive regimes, lest they be detained on spurious charges and used as diplomatic bargaining chips. Doxxing and harassment of families is also a growing concern for foreign correspondents.

Programs like the NewsHour — and likely the new weekend foreign-affairs program, “Compass Points from PBS News,” which Schifrin will host when it debuts in January — are an oasis to news deserts, providing the internationalism integral to understanding what’s happening in this country, in our community.