2024 Presidential Election: The Media, Campaigns, and What’s at Stake

As former White House press secretary, Ari Fleischer was the primary spokesperson for President George W. Bush and delivered the daily White House press briefings from 2001 to 2003. In his almost four years working for President Bush, Ari served as spokesperson during the historic presidential recount, September 11th, two wars, and the anthrax attack. Ari is also an author of two best-selling books. His latest book, Suppression, Deception, Snobbery and Bias, takes a deep dive into how and why the press keep getting so much wrong. His first book, Taking Heat, details his years in the White House and reached #7 on The New York Times Best Sellers list.

Prior to joining the Bush campaign, Fleischer was the national spokesperson and communications director for Elizabeth Dole's presidential campaign. He has also worked on Capitol Hill as a press secretary to three Congressmen and one U.S. Senator.

Fleischer is a native of Pound Ridge, New York and a 1982 graduate of Vermont's Middlebury College. He is currently president of his own firm, Ari Fleischer Communications Inc., where he offers advice and media training to clients in the corporate and sports worlds on how to handle the press. Ari is also a Fox News contributor.

Jay Carney leads Airbnb’s Global Policy, Communications, and Crisis Management teams. He also oversees Airbnb’s 21st Century Company team, which develops key initiatives to serve Airbnb’s Hosts, guests and communities, including sustainability, anti-discrimination, and partnership initiatives.

Prior to joining Airbnb, Jay established and led Amazon’s Global Corporate Affairs organization for seven years, overseeing public policy, communications and community engagement, including investments in affordable housing, disaster response and refugee relief. He joined Amazon from the White House, where he served as press secretary to President Obama from 2011 to 2014 and, before that, as director of communications for then-Vice President Joe Biden. Prior to entering government, Jay spent 20 years at TIME magazine, including as a Moscow-based foreign correspondent and later as Washington bureau chief.

Jay sits on the boards of the Urban Institute, which focuses on housing affordability and racial inequality, and Human Rights First, which assists asylum-seekers, calls out human rights abuses and combats violent extremism. He also serves on the board of Tech:NYC, which is the leading voice for the technology industry in New York City. Jay was raised in Virginia and earned a B.A. in Russian and East European Studies from Yale University, where he is also a member of Yale’s University Council. He lives just outside Washington, D.C., in Northern Virginia.

Margaret Talev is founding director of Syracuse University’s Institute for Democracy, Journalism & Citizenship, in Washington, DC, and senior contributor at Axios, where she previously was managing editor.

She appears regularly on CNN, Sirius XM, NPR and other outlets. She has covered or directed coverage of the White House, U.S. elections, Congress and local, breaking and politics news in California and Florida. She is a past president of the White House Correspondents’ Association and the Washington Press Club Foundation, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. She is a professor of practice at the Newhouse School of Public Communications and an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School, and she serves on the Board of Visitors for the Merrill College of Journalism at the University of Maryland in College Park, her alma mater.