The Media Beat with David Tereshchuk
Sep 25, 2026 · 13 min · 6 segments
Trump’s week of trying to be global - latterly with Xi of China. THE MEDIA BEAT’s public radio podcast considers weaknesses in "mano a mano" summit coverage. Subscribe to join veteran journalist…
Journalists have an inbuilt tendency to relish summits, almost always presenting them as personal toe-to-toe dramas.
T'was ever thus, it seems, such personalized man-to-man set pieces, they've usually been men, of course, abound throughout the history of our lifetimes.
President Kennedy resolved the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis through direct exchanges with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
President Reagan negotiated with then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to achieve the landmark arms control agreements that started to wind down the Cold War.
And with China in particular, the personal touch can seem to mean everything.
After all, there was 1972's completely game-changing moment when President Nixon went to China for a week-long visit and met with Mao Zedong.
And then, in the opposite direction, seven years later, President Carter threw open the White House doors to Deng Xiaoping with great pomp and circumstance and formally established diplomatic relations for the first time ever with the communist megastate.
But buying into such personality-based pieces of theatre can mean corralling ourselves within the limits of that dubious old great man theory of history.
And we have to recognise instead that forces are at work which are much larger than individual leaders, no matter how personally aggrandised a particular individual may be.
It was described at the time by the respected journal Foreign Affairs as, I quote, a geopolitical heavyweight matchup that could, quote, change the course of US-China competition.
Perhaps even it would achieve, quote, constructive strategic stability, which is how many US reporters phrased it in a tone of hope and appropriating a term then being used by the Chinese side.
The truth is, as the Foreign Affairs editorial analysis has acknowledged since then, that summit did nothing to change the fundamentally adversarial nature of the two countries' relationship.
They have remained locked in a dynamic that's been most pointedly characterized by repeated rounds of punitive chokehold measures, with each exploiting its control over critical supply chains to pressure the other.
Not least here, there's been the employment, by both sides, of Trump's own favorite weapon, the import tariff.
Journalists have an inbuilt tendency to relish summits, almost always presenting them as personal toe-to-toe dramas.
T'was ever thus, it seems, such personalized man-to-man set pieces, they've usually been men, of course, abound throughout the history of our lifetimes.
President Kennedy resolved the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis through direct exchanges with Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev.
President Reagan negotiated with then-Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to achieve the landmark arms control agreements that started to wind down the Cold War.
And with China in particular, the personal touch can seem to mean everything.
After all, there was 1972's completely game-changing moment when President Nixon went to China for a week-long visit and met with Mao Zedong.
And then, in the opposite direction, seven years later, President Carter threw open the White House doors to Deng Xiaoping with great pomp and circumstance and formally established diplomatic relations for the first time ever with the communist megastate.
But buying into such personality-based pieces of theatre can mean corralling ourselves within the limits of that dubious old great man theory of history.
And we have to recognise instead that forces are at work which are much larger than individual leaders, no matter how personally aggrandised a particular individual may be.
It was described at the time by the respected journal Foreign Affairs as, I quote, a geopolitical heavyweight matchup that could, quote, change the course of US-China competition.
Perhaps even it would achieve, quote, constructive strategic stability, which is how many US reporters phrased it in a tone of hope and appropriating a term then being used by the Chinese side.
The truth is, as the Foreign Affairs editorial analysis has acknowledged since then, that summit did nothing to change the fundamentally adversarial nature of the two countries' relationship.
They have remained locked in a dynamic that's been most pointedly characterized by repeated rounds of punitive chokehold measures, with each exploiting its control over critical supply chains to pressure the other.
Not least here, there's been the employment, by both sides, of Trump's own favorite weapon, the import tariff.
The rest of this transcript — segmented and speaker-labeled, so you land on the exact moment something was said
Search every transcript — by keyword, by phrase, or by meaning, across every show Radar indexes
Trends — what is surging across podcasts, measured against its own baseline
Alerts — when a name you follow appears in a newly indexed episode
No account is needed to search Radar.
