Philip Bennett, ASU Future Security Fellow, is a journalist, documentary film producer and teacher. He has produced 20 films on American politics and national security for the PBS documentary series FRONTLINE, including America After 9/11 (2021), America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump (2020), and the Emmy award-winning The Choice 2016 and The Choice 2020. Bennett is a former managing editor of the Washington Post, and was the Post’s assistant managing editor for foreign news. He was a foreign correspondent for the Boston Globe in Latin America in the 1980s. Until 2020, he was the Patterson Professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University.
Bennett is writing a biography of the journalist Anthony Shadid, who died in Syria in 2012. The book, co-authored with Steve Fainaru for Celadon Books, explores how Shadid’s reporting on civilians during wars and upheaval in the Middle East after 2001 provided an alternative history of the region. Bennett, Fainaru, and Shadid were colleagues at the Washington Post.
Selected Work
- America After 9/11: A FRONTLINE documentary investigating how decisions made by successive U.S. administrations after 9/11 contributed to an erosion of trust in democracy and the rise of a political culture that eventually led to the January 6 Capitol riots.
- America’s Great Divide: From Obama to Trump: A documentary from FRONTLINE examining the growth of American political polarization through the story of the Obama and Trump presidencies.
- Supreme Revenge: Battle for the Court: A documentary from FRONTLINE tracing the origins of partisanship in the selection of Supreme Court justices and the pivotal role played by Senator Mitch McConnell.
- 21st-Century Censorship: A piece for the Columbia Journalism Review diagramming how authoritarian governments utilized the Internet as a tool for suppressing free speech, spreading misinformation, and attacking dissidents.