I had the privilege today to attend a small event with Howard Fineman, on tour to promote his new book The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates that Define and Inspire Our Country.
Having just gotten my signed copy, a book review will have to come later. But we had a good Q&A session with him, during which I asked:
17 years ago Wolf Blitzer and CNN brought the first real-time look at a war zone into American living rooms. Today, a half-dozen 24 hour news networks justify their existence by catering -- or in some cases pandering -- to different viewer demographics.
In the modern media environment, what responsibility do journalists have to disclose their biases, and how much responsibility do journalists have for shaping the narrative?
His response to the question, and the fascinating statement that gives this diary its title, below the fold.
(I must work from notes here because I didn't want to sit and type through his answer -- he speaks directly to his questioner and seems to build on feedback cues, and I was there to really hear him. So I apologize for a lack of verbatims.)
"Be your own editor"
Mr. Fineman began by saying somewhat woefully (but with good humor), "Well, I have one or two minutes to answer that..."
He remarked first that, for better or worse, in the modern media reporters and pundits are personalities and celebrities with the accompanying accoutrements. He feels fortunate to have been "grandfathered in" to the cable news system as a reporter, and noted that because he tries to report on the facts as much as possible he has been accused of being in everybody's back pocket at one time or another. "And that's the way I like it," he told us.
This is how media is now, he went on, and we can't put the genie back in the bottle. As a result, he does think that journalists have a responsibility to let people get to know them and understand who they are and where they're coming from. He said that journalists do know that they shape the narrative and take responsibility for it (although he later agreed with another questioner that the campaigns can do a very effective job of driving that narrative as well). He doesn't feel that shaping the narrative is an entirely negative thing, although the theme of his talk and his book is that we should be arguing more about the really critical issues that define us as a country and as Americans.
He noted that all people have biases, whether they intentionally report along those lines or not. This is part of why knowing journalists as people becomes important.
As for his own background: he said that in the course of writing his book, he became an even bigger fan of the Constitution than he was before, and that he returns to it frequently as a starting point for thoughts and discussions. He grew up in Pittsburgh, PA with "FDR Democrat" parents. He is educated as a lawyer. He got his start in journalism in Louisville, Kentucky. He has covered politics since 1983.
Part of the hazard of news produced for particular consumers, he said, is that it allows people to remain within their comfort zone and doesn't expose them to other points of view that are critical to having constructive arguments. "I'm a great fan of local papers," he pointed out, because they don't hew to a particular agenda and they force the reader to see things they weren't expecting.
So his advice to us as consumers of news from the modern media is to be our own editors. There are shortcuts one can take -- for example, identifying people and sources we trust, and giving brand-name credibility to those people and sources. But he emphasized the importance of going outside our comfort zones while being mindful of who those additional sources were, and what their agendas might be.
"If you don't like MoveOn.org, start StayPut.org"
After my question, he was asked (with sufficient snark) whether his support of arguing meant he favored going back to caucusing for all primary elections, and how he felt about MoveOn.org activists dominating the discussion in such situations.
He replied that activism in itself is a good thing, and that it has been activisim that produced great changes in this country in the past. Rather than bemoaning activist organizations, he encourages people to become activists themselves with other like-minded people. "If you don't like MoveOn.org, start StayPut.org," he quipped. (I confess that at this point I went from merely thinking he's one of the better commentators on TV to genuinely liking him.)
"Jeremiah Wright does matter"
He talked a bit about Jeremiah Wright on two different occasions today, and one got the sense he was perhaps a little sad that he was at our PAC event instead of covering the press conference in North Carolina. Wright does matter, he opined, although not in the context of 8-second sound bites. Instead, the importance of Wright is in the historical context of religious movements that have become some of the greatest social movements in American history (for example, the Civil Rights movement and the shift to conservativism). It's a legitimate political issue because it speaks to the undercurrents of minority experiences in the US today. His phrasing was interesting: he said that obviously Wright's perspective and statements are very different from the campaign that Barack Obama is running and the person he is as a candidate, but that we have a right to ask questions about the 20 years spent in the church in that context.
"Democrats have to re-argue again the first principles that make them who they are"
I was paying attention before, but this was the epiphanic moment of the discussion for me.
From my 120wpm-typed notes:
What the Democrats have forgotten is that-- They don't realize they have to re-argue again the first principles of what makes them who they are...If they say health care should be a right they need to dig down into the roots of that argument to support it...like the Mayflower compact, the social movements...But the Democrats have assumed, too much, that people agree with them on philosophy. Go back and look what people were saying in the progressive movement about the outrages of disparity of income...buccaneers of industry taking too much for themslves, and so on.
This is general election talk here, and it's something we really need to pay attention to. He went on to say that Karl Rove understood the need to re-state and re-argue Republican principles, and that is how he managed to win the election for Bush not once, but twice. He took the central tenets of the argument in support of conservativism and made George Bush the vehicle for those tenets.
"Democrats must be both strong and smart"
In the discussion of Rove and re-arguing progressive principles, Fineman said that, "Democrats must be both strong and smart." While Hillary Clinton is talking about obliterating other countries (representing the "strong" half of the mix), Barack Obama's "tremendous talents as a diplomat" are smart, but lacking some of the strength she is attempting to project. (He also commented that she was over the line in her statements.)
"If you make a prediction and become committed to it, you start subconsciously editing out things that contradict it."
Mr. Fineman was asked for his predictions with regard to the primary election season. He began with a lengthy disclaimer: He doesn't like to make predictions because he's usually wrong, but even more than that, people hear a commentator make a prediction and assume that the commentator is making the prediction as a statement of what he wants to see happen. That isn't the case, he said, but people misinterpret predictions so much that he shies away from them.
Going one step further he said, "As a reporter, as a scientist if you will, [if] you make a prediction and become committed to it, you start subconsciously editing out things that contradict it." (Again, he scores another point for journalistic honesty.)
With all of that out of the way, he concluded, "The Democrats might go to the convention," (to groans and noisy exhalations and murmurs of "Oh god, really?" from the audience) "and journalists love that." I wonder how many audience members were able to remember back thirty seconds, when he said that predictions don't equal what the journalist wants to have happen.
Debt, education, healthcare, and competition
Here again I have no verbatims because I got so caught up in listening and had to make notes after the fact.
A questioner wanted to know what we should be arguing about in this country right now. Mr. Fineman's immediate first response was "the economy." He noted that the country was founded on debt, and that George Washington had to personally go and collect the taxes from western Pennsylvania to cover the bonds that Hamilton sold. A tension has always existed in our national economy between fiscal responsibility and debt. We've ended up in a position where we simply can't ignore the debt any longer, and we must begin to deal with it. To do that, to maintain our economic standing in a global economy, we must improve in other areas. Guaranteeing better education and health care, he said, are two issues critical to our ability to compete with China, India, and other developing nations that saw what the US was doing with capitalism and free markets and decided they would do it even better than we did.
"God knows we need a good teacher now."
In conclusion, he said,
The presidency has a teaching function to it. Good presidents have to explain things. One of Bush's failings is that as firm as he is in his beliefs, although that's also a good quality, he doesn't think he has to explain anything to anybody, and God knows we need a good teacher now.