Douglas Herbert
As a Foreign Affairs Editor at France 24, a Paris-based international news channel, Douglas Herbert has spent more than a decade fighting disinformation, “false equivalency” and “bothsidesism” in his daily commentaries on geopolitics - with a heavy emphasis these days on Russia and its war against Ukraine. It’s a task made harder by the advent and rapid spread of bots, trolls, psy-ops, cyber-hackers and AI tools bent on sowing confusion and division. Douglas began his journalism career in Moscow, in the chaotic wake of the Soviet collapse. As a freelancer in The New York Times Moscow Bureau in the mid-1990s, he reported on a catastrophic oil spill near the Arctic Circle in Russia’s far north that the Russian authorities had tried to cover up. Over a quarter-century roving career, Douglas has lived in and reported from the Baltic States, the US, the UK and, for the last 19 years, France.
At France 24, Douglas has covered nearly a dozen G7 and G20 summits, four US presidential elections, and the recent Arab League summit in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. He reported from Kyiv, the Donbas, and Crimea in 2014, during the first phase of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In recent years, he has taught a graduate seminar on fact-checking and sourcing at Sciences Po Journalism School in Paris, and at IJBA, in Bordeaux. Douglas, a native New Yorker, received his Masters Degree in Russian Studies from Harvard University. He studied at the Moscow Energy Institute in 1989. The scariest moment of Douglas’s reporting career came at a press conference, when he was asked, “What is your name?” - by Vladimir Putin.