SwatTalk Live: “Off the Record: The State of Political Journalism in 2026”

Tune in virtually for SwatTalk Live, a premier Alumni Weekend showcase that brings the energy of campus to you. Join us on YouTube for this signature Alumni Council program, featuring milestone reunion alumni sharing their expertise live on stage and streamed directly to you. 

This year, we are proud to host a timely and vital conversation with three veteran journalists who will discuss the challenges of covering U.S. politics in 2026. Featured speakers include:

• Eva McKend ’11: former CNN national politics reporter

  • Eva McKend ’11 is a national political journalist based in Washington, DC. At CNN, she covered some of the most high-profile political stories in the country, including Vice President Kamala Harris’ 2024 run for the White House. McKend previously served as an on-air Congressional Correspondent for Spectrum News and as an anchor at the CBS affiliate in Vermont. After graduating from Swarthmore with a bachelor's degree in English and a minor in Black Studies, she earned her master’s degree in broadcast and digital journalism from the S.I. Newhouse School of Communications at Syracuse University. Eva thrives on telling stories that amplify the experiences of marginalized groups. She reports on a wide range of policy issues and also appears regularly on the WAMU/NPR program 1A.
     

• Mattathias Schwartz ’01: legal affairs correspondent for The New York Times

  • Mattathias Schwartz ’01 covers the federal judiciary for the New York Times. His current focus is on the lives of judges and litigation over President Trump's second-term agenda. During his years writing longform pieces for magazines, he won a Livingston Award for "A Massacre in Jamaica," a New Yorker investigation into the killing of dozens of civilians during the extradition of Christopher Coke, a drug lord from Kingston. He also wrote interview-driven magazine profiles of Bill Barr, John Brennan, Mike Pompeo, James Clapper, and Paul Manafort. In 2022, he persuaded an editor to let him write a lengthy, first-person account of his experiences taking ayahuasca. The following year, he revealed that Peter Thiel had been a paid informant for the FBI.
     

• Jason Zengerle ’96: staff writer for The New Yorker

  • Jason Zengerle ’96 is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of Hated by All the Right People: Tucker Carlson and the Unraveling of the Conservative Mind. He previously wrote for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, New York Magazine, and The New Republic and has been a New America fellow. He is a winner of the Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, and his writing has been anthologized in several books, including The Best American Political Writing, The Best American Medical Writing, and Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. He lives with his family in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.