Paul Bell uses the fiftieth anniversary of All the President's Men as a springboard to ask what has become of journalism's foundational mission — and whether objectivity is still possible or even desirable. Drawing on his years reporting under apartheid in South Africa, his work in strategic communications, and five years witnessing Georgia's slide into elective autocracy, Bell argues that journalism has always been a political act. Reporting facts faithfully, he contends, is not detachment but engagement — a form of witness that ties the freedom to speak to an obligation to truth. Against a backdrop of algorithmic media, state repression, and industrial-scale disinformation, Bell finds quiet reassurance in the foot soldiers of the profession — journalists in Romania, Moldova, and Somerset — who, without glamour or stardom, are still doing exactly that.

Maria Golubeva explores how wargaming can better capture the diversity and ambiguity of hybrid threat actors — hostile states, ambiguous allies, and non-state groups such as hacktivists and criminal networks — at a time when the liberal international order is fracturing. She argues that existing frameworks err by assuming hybrid threats always pursue geostrategic objectives, when disruption itself is increasingly the goal. Golubeva examines how the information environment must be reconstructed in wargame scenarios to reflect real-world sense-making, strategic ambiguity, and strategic differentiation across multiple audiences. She proposes that credible hybrid threat wargames should assign ideological or non-geostrategic rationales to red teams, simulate differentiated information campaigns across platforms, and resist the temptation to reduce complex actor motivations to a single coherent strategy.

Professor Chiyuki Aoi, Paul Bacon, Shinae Lee, Corey Wallace, and Aurelio Insisa explore why diplomatic pledges between Europe and the IP4 democracies — Japan, South Korea, Australia, and New Zealand — have produced so little practical cooperation on countering foreign information manipulation. They find the gap stems not from lack of political will, but from misaligned institutions, uneven capabilities, and divergent threat perceptions across the four countries. The authors propose a phased, minilateral approach: building shared terminology and analysis first, then capacity building, and only later limited operational cooperation.