Transcript: I think the war on terror construct won’t seem that important. And I . . . When 9/11 happened we all believed, including me, that it would be . . . first of all that it was an epical event like Pearl Harbor; which now, you know, doesn’t seem to be the case; and second of all that there would be many more 9/11s, or several more 9/11s. And there haven’t been, and I hope there aren’t obviously. It may be with hindsight, which is always unfair, that people will say even though it was by far the worst terrorist attack in American history, you’ll have to explain to your grandchildren why there was such an extreme reaction to one terrorist attack; and why that, you know, seemed to “change everything” about American life and America’s role in the world. I suspect that that’s what we’ll think a generation from now. And then the other thing I think is I suspect – although this may be more of a hope, but I think I’m right – that when we’re sitting around with our grandchildren, the level of mistrust of the public sector will seem nutty in how high it was during this era.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: It’s really tough to answer that because it’s very hard to trust your impressions in real time. In the conservative world, people are starting to say already, “See? It’s all gonna work in Iraq, and everybody’s gonna thank Bush for this.” I’m skeptical of that. I think the war in Iraq will look like a mistake by Bush, and that his . . . that generally his approach in foreign policy to, you know, eschew diplomacy and go with unilateral force will be seen as having been counterproductive and having decreased rather than increased American influence in the world. So I would predict he will be seen as a rather unsuccessful president in the realm of foreign policy. In the realm of domestic policy, but in my opinion by far the most important thing he’s done, is the No Child Left Behind Law which has been wildly under-covered by the press. And that’ll take years to sift out. But basically what he has done is it’s a little bit like Nixon to China – you know that a Republican president did this – is to say for the first time, we’re gonna make the federal government a real forceful, dispositive presence in the American public school system. And really this will be seen as the moment when we western Europeanized ourselves, and went from being a place where public education seemed just a completely local function to making it much more of a national function. And that will play out in lots of interesting ways – whether good or bad, I don’t know.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Question: Did the Israel lobby take us into Iraq?

Transcript: Well I know them both. I know Walt better. If they had sought my advice about the book, I would have said to them, “You should write a book that says U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East is too far tilted toward Israel, and we wanna make a case that it should be tilted away, and why that would be in America’s interest.” That’s the stronger part of their book. When you then take the step of calling the book “The Israel Lobby”, and sort of saying that . . . that . . . that the reason that is so is there is one group that has a sort of nefarious, somewhat mysterious, extra large force in American politics, it starts making me uncomfortable, and it also starts getting very hard to prove. You know the idea . . . It’s a pretty flat statement they make – “no Israel lobby, no war in Iraq” – I don’t think that’s true, if you asked me a straight up yes-no, but it’s very hard to prove. You know the war in Iraq in that setup is what social scientists would call a “dependent variable”. And the Israel lobby is one of a number of possible independent variables. And when you’re studying questions of social science, you’re taught there’s never one independent variable that is 100 percent responsible for the independent variable. Causation almost never works that way, and there’s always sort of a multitude of causes of anything. So I think even Walt and ________ don’t really . . . It’s not really fair to them to say . . . They don’t really say in the book APEC specifically caused the war in Iraq. They do say if there had been no Israel lobby – you know this is sort of a counterfactual, which they define more broadly – there would have been no war in Iraq, and I tend not to agree with that. I would say that’s not true. Most of the people they are calling the Israel lobby were for the war in Iraq. But you know there’s a whole bunch of questions, such as if . . . Even those people weren’t for war in Iraq before 9/11. They had a sort of slightly different program in mind. And why at this moment did that group’s views become dispositive when they hadn’t been before since is another question that needs to be answered.

Question: Would you invite them to speak at Columbia?

Transcript: Yes, absolutely. Yeah. And of course they have spoken at Columbia. But . . . but yeah I would. I’m on the side . . . We had . . . at this event at ___________, we had an interesting sort of debate about that question. And all the other panelists said, “I would never debate them. I would never invite them anywhere.” And I don’t agree with that.

I believe in the marketplace of ideas. And you know one of the panelists at this thing at ___________ was Danny ___________, and he has a legitimate position. He says look, I’m a historian of Nazi Germany. I just don’t believe in the marketplace of ideas. Sorry. You know there are cases where I just think that really dangerous and pernicious ideas, if they’re given open expression and put out for debate, are gonna win. And I tend not to believe that. And I also think, you know, they’re not anywhere near the category of Nazis. So you know yeah, I would . . . I believe that it’s good to debate these things.

And also it makes you sound like, you know, they’re really right and, you know, we don’t really have a position or an argument to make against them. It’s just . . . it’s just . . . it’s just we . . . that’s why we won’t debate them, you know?

Transcript: The common answer at this moment while I’m giving this interview is the Israel lobby, and that makes me intensely uncomfortable for, you know, a number of reasons I don’t have to go into. I guess the standard answer you would get is, you know, organized business lobby groups, because they have money, are . . . are disproportionately powerful. So that seems to me to be the strongest argument. To make the argument that a group that just essentially organizes very effectively around its point of view is “too powerful”, that makes me uncomfortable. I guess you could say groups that have access to unlimited financial resources and are able to make campaign contributions by advertisements and so on, they have a kind of thumb on the scales of politics, and they get more, you know, than they should. I’m not sure I believe that if that were true, you know, there would be a tweak to the system. I’m also not persuaded that campaign finance reform ever works, because it’s kind of like you cut it here and it pops up over there. That’s what we’ve seen in the last few rounds.

There’s a lot of money that wants to find its way into politics and tends to find its way into politics. I mean in a certain way the most egregious example is small states are too powerful. You know Iowa and New Hampshire are too powerful relative to their population because they get to have two senators, and because they have these early presidential primaries. So their sort of special concerns get elevated over those of others.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Question: Is the influence of special interests overblown?

Transcript: Again, I mean, I have found that in recent years I have gotten drawn to what is known in political science as “pluralism”, which is a sort of strain in political thinking that tends to take a much more benign view of lobbies than . . . than most journalists take. So I am . . . The premise behind the horror over lobbyists is that there’s something called the “public interest” that would emerge naturally if there were no lobbyists. Or if there were only good lobbyists and not bad lobbyists. Or if there were only . . . there were lobbyists but lobbyists who had a lot of cash to throw around, etc. And I’m very, very suspicious of the idea of a public interest, because it’s one of the oldest problems in politics and government – who gets to decide, you know? I think the term the “public interest” is inherently elitist because people just don’t agree about what it is. And so I . . . I like the idea of democrat . . . of a democracy’s politics as being a kind of market system where (51:22) everybody has a different take on what the good is, and they sort of fight it out in the political arena. Now some of these groups are gonna be more organized than others. Politics favors the organized, and I . . . You know all these groups are gonna lobby. I don’t necessarily think that a so called public interest group lobby is more legitimate than a lobby like, you know, sugar farmers, or a labor union, or a traditional economic-based lobby. In other words I’m uncomfortable with the idea that there are “good guy” lobbies and “bad guy” lobbies. I guess I’d agree that, you know, bribery should be illegal in politics. And I like . . . I think information is good, and under that flag campaign finance reform to the extent that it involves disclosure is a very good idea. But I just don’t . . . I think the idea that you can sort of extirpate K Street from American politics is an illusion. And you might not even want that because it’s very hard to define “K Street” in a sense. Is the group that you’re . . . If you’re in a group that is opposed to, you know, female genital mutilation in Africa, are you K Street? Are you a lobbyist? You know, or are you a reformer crusading for the public interest?

Question: Are those groups comparable to the biggest lobbies?

Transcript: Lobbying isn’t a Coke and Pepsi system, because the country is so complicated and there are so many groups that you can’t say, “These two groups predominate.” There’s a tremendous amount of . . . There isn’t such a thing as the business community, for example. And there isn’t such a thing as the labor community, because they have tremendous internal dissension. So it’s really a question of do some . . . But I don’t accept . . . You know there’s a wonderful book called “The Process of Government” published 100 years ago almost – in 1908 by Arthur Bentley, a former journalist turned political scientist. And he . . . The term “public interest group” wasn’t around then, but he calls these groups “talk groups”, which is a little mean. But I’m very uncomfortable with the idea that a group that – you know to use my example of FGM in Africa – exists on a higher moral plane than a group that fights for higher wages for itself, for example. I don’t understand why that is necessarily so. And you could say that this group of wonderful people fighting against FGM in Africa are actually trying to impose their will on people half a world away who may not sign on to the idea that this is in their interest. So the only real question is . . . This is a system designed to create, you know . . . It’s like antitrust. There’s a sort of . . . This is a market. And so markets, I think, shouldn’t be totally unregulated. You wanna create conditions inside of markets where, you know, one player and one category of players doesn’t have an unfair advantage. So the real question is not can we get rid of lobbying, but have we got . . . Is there a problem in the system where one group has disproportionate advantage over others? And then if so what should we do about one type of group? But that’s a more fine-grained way of saying it than just saying, “Yes, these lobbyists are awful and let’s get rid of them.

Transcript: American politics is a miraculous thing in its adaptability, particularly as to technique. Technique is always changing, or has throughout my life. I think anything you hear about the Internet’s effect on any realm of society, you should immediately sort of knock off by about 50 percent, just because of the millenarian rhetoric around the Internet is so exaggerated. You know if past is prologue, every time there’s a new communications technology it revolutionizes politics but . . . It changes politics greatly but doesn’t wipe everything else off the table. And that’s true of, you know print, and radio, and television, and so on. The Internet is clearly a useful organizing tool, and a way of, you know, reaching targeted populations that aren’t necessarily in the same neighborhood. My suspicion is that we’ll find that the Internet is especially important insofar as it promotes face-to-face contact within people . . . between people. I still think . . . I think we’ve forgotten, because we’re so sort of “me” oriented, how important personal contact and group dynamics face-to-face still are in politics and in American life in general. There’s a tremendous tendency toward the aforementioned chattering classes to say, “Oh, you know, we’re a nature . . . a nation of _________ individuals. And no one knows their neighbors. And no one knows anybody else. And we all just sit at home and access the world through television and the Internet.” And you know, “Well at least Internet isn’t a sort of one-to-many model, and it’s more distributed.” Fine, but I think people are still out meeting and greeting each other more than that model allows for. And the Internet becomes a way . . . a sort of enabling mechanism for doing that.

It’s an organizing tool. It’s not the only organizing tool. It doesn’t make all the other organization tools and communications tools irrelevant, but it’s an important new, you know, tool in the tool box.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Question: Are two parties enough?

Transcript: You know in my native Southland, we had a saying. You know, “If frogs had wings, they wouldn’t bump their ass so much.” So it’s kind of like that. It would be great to have more than two parties. You know it’s very easy to sit here and say, “No. Two parties aren’t enough. We must have three parties or four parties.” Fine, but we’re not going to. So that’s . . . You know that should be the caveat on my answer. I just . . . I am constantly amazed by how sort of robust and survivable the two major parties are; and how little any meaningful challenge of them ever gets going. And so I would be immensely surprised if when my kids are my age, there actually are three or four major parties.

Question: Why have they survives so long?

Transcript: Well partly it’s sort of this aforementioned Coke and Pepsi phenomenon. And partly it’s that they are willing to be flexible. You know not out of . . . not out of any altruism just because they wanna win. The down . . . In my lifetime the Republican party was pronounced dead after Goldwater lost in 1964, and then it sort of came back to life. And the Democratic party has been pronounced dead several times, and it has come back to life several times. Bill Clinton essentially resurrected the Democratic party in many ways. So it’s that. It’s kind of market behavior by the parties – that they’re willing to . . . they wanna win so much that they’re willing to sort of figure out where the voters are and go there.

Question: Why do we only have two parties?

Transcript: Many countries . . . sort of First World countries have two major parties, so we’re not the only one. If you have a parliamentary system, there’s more of an incentive to have minor parties because they have more of a sort of seat at the table. But the way our system is designed, not being a parliamentary system in the way Congress is organized, and most of the state legislatures . . . all the state legislatures, it really pushes you toward a two party system. Because if you are a party that regularly gets 15 percent of the vote, there’s nothing much for you. Whereas if you have a parliamentary system there is something . . . You know you can have that . . . If you’re in Italy you can have . . . or in Israel, or in another country that’s a parliamentary system, you have 15 percent of the seats in the national legislature, and that’s a very powerful body, you’ve really got something. But 15 percent doesn’t do much for you in the United States.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: No. Definitely not. No. I mean I would ask those who say that, “When was it broke and when was it fixed exactly?” No. That’s another one of those kind of . . . The world is just . . . We touched on this several times in this interview already. The world is full of these kind of ahistorical and excessively pessimistic constructs of how things are now. Everything used to be great up to some point like maybe 20 years ago, and since then everything is horrible. You know I’d really, to respond to that intelligently, need to know what you mean by “broken”.

Well think of it this way. In . . . Political participation in the United States among registered voters was by huge margin the highest it’s ever been in the 19th century. So was politics broken then? Women couldn’t vote. Politics was the most corrupt it’s ever been. Patronage graph bribery were rampant. There were no campaign finance reform laws or anything like that. There was no clean government laws. But political participation was extremely high. Basically anybody who could vote, voted. So was it broken then and it’s fixed now? Or was it fixed then and broken now? But I don’t think . . . No. I do not think American politics is broken at all.

We’re ahistorical, and for some reason these sort of chattering classes who discuss public affairs are drawn to these sort of Cassandra-like arguments about everything is horrible today and it used to be good. I mean just a tiny example. If you ask anybody in the world . . . Not anybody in the world . . . anybody in the U.S. upper middle class, they will sign on instantly the statement that it used to be really easy to get into college. Now it’s really hard to get into college, and there’s something deeply wrong with that. And that’s just simply not true, but it feels so true. People just can’t believe it’s not true, even though they can’t produce any data to support it.

It’s human nature. You know the past seems safe. We lived through it. It seemed like we wouldn’t at the time, but we did. So it’s safe, and we remember the good things, and we blot out the bad things. And the contingent nature of history is very apparent to people in the present, and it’s very hard for people to make the leap backward and see that at every moment things were contingent.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: Less than meets the eye. It’s about . . . I mean in a sense it’s about all these, you know, horrible buzz words like “branding” and “first mover advantage”. It’s . . . In national politics, two things. First of all having a recognizable name makes a huge, huge, huge difference. I mean that’s why in the 19th century so many generals were . . . became president. And then secondly you know more than most people who aren’t practitioners of politics realize organization matters a lot. Parties are important . . . still very important. So if you’re a Bush or a Clinton, you inherit . . . You can . . . you can take over sort of an organization that a new candidate has to build from scratch, and it’s an enormous advantage. It’s just a little bit like, you know, Coke and Pepsi don’t taste that different from every other soft drink, but it’s very hard for other soft drinks to compete with Coke and Pepsi. Why? I think it’s a self-limiting phenomenon. I’d be very surprised if we’re sitting here in, you know, 30 years and there are still Bushes and Clintons running for president. But it is an odd thing that you’d have, you know, Bush-Clinton, Bush-Clinton.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: Well I’m like a lot of people. I’ve been very surprised in the last couple years at the enormity of the backlash against immigration . . . illegal immigration, or even just immigration period. That really took me by surprise, as it’s taken Governor ___________ by surprise, and President Bush by surprise, and so on. And I personally think yes, there’s some prejudice in that reaction, and it’s obviously directed primarily at Latinos. So in a way that’s impossible to prove, I think that the Black-White relation is more charged than the Latino-White relation. There’s just . . . There’s a lot going on there, but I can’t sort of scientifically prove that. I think it’s a lot of things. It’s history. It’s mostly history. It’s to some extent just looks based. You know that if you’re White and African-American looks “differenter” than a Latino. But I think it’s mostly historical.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: Well no. I mean nobody is. I would say though, you know, I don’t wanna at all go anywhere near constructs like race relations have never been worse in America. Because if you know the history . . . You know I just . . . I just . . . My last book was about reconstruction. Race relations are so much better now than they were then. It’s sort of unbelievable. We’re in a period now where the race issue is not front and center in the national consciousness. And that has some good effects and some bad effects. But that’s kind of my read – is in my lifetime, this is a low point in the level of national awareness of, you know, Black-White U.S. relations as a primo issue towering over all others. And that’s for a number of reasons, including demographic factors.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Question: Can journalists be truly objective?

Transcript: Yes. And the very widespread critique of objectivity sort of drives me crazy, because it’s . . . it has this sort of eternal quality, and it entails a quite unsophisticated understanding of what objectivity means, or a way of sort of defining it very tendentiously as a possibility. I think objectivity is really important and is a goal to strive for. And the fact that people can’t achieve it doesn’t mean it should be thrown out as a goal. It’s like saying, you know, so many marriages end in divorce. We really should abolish marriage. There’s a not a fun beach read, but a very important book that’s just out that I’m learning about now called “Objectivity” by two historians of science named Lorraine Dastin and Peter Galison. And it’s not about the press. It never mentions the press. It’s about . . . It’s a history of scientific atlases. But you know from it you can get a very useful sort of vocabulary and taxonomy and definition . . . or series of definitions about what objectivity is. And one of the things they say is objectivity has meant different things at different times in history. What objectivity is, they argue – and I find this persuasive – is objectivity is about subjectivity. To hold objectivity up as a goal means that you believe that totally subjective responses to everything by people whose job it is to sort of seek information is not a good thing. And so you have to put some mechanism in place to try to avoid being just completely individual and subjective in how you look for information. And then the question is what is the mechanism, and how does it work, and what are the strictures? They make a forceful case that the idea that, you know, you have to be totally non-judgmental is one, but only one of several versions of objectivity. So to conflate objectivity with complete sort of stenography in journalism is not accurate – a refusal to take sides, or a refusal to say one side’s right and one side’s wrong. There’s another really good book about this – and also not about journalism, but you can kind of extrapolate – is called “Objectivity is Not Neutrality” by Thomas Haskell, a historian at Rice University. And again it argues that it is wrong to understand objectivity as requiring people not to have an opinion or not to make judgments about everything.

Question: How do you define objectivity?

Transcript: Well again I’m comfortable with Daston and Galison’s version, which is objectivity is any attempt to avoid total subjectivity in the pursuit of information. And what form it can take, you know . . . Probably the most common form it takes today is through sort of professional debate and communication. In other words, you know, academics do this in a very formal and structured way because they are licensed, in effect, and require a degree and all that. Journalists do it in a more informal way, but the idea would be you belong to a sort of community that is involved in the same pursuit; and you are allowed to, you know, say whether things are true or false, who’s right and who’s wrong. And you share your findings with others, and they’re allowed to dispute them. And out of a kind of vigorous juried conversation, the truth tends to emerge; not from just one person’s report.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: This question comes up again only in a tiny little slice of the stratosphere of the press. And I support strongly the stories that primarily the New York Times has reported that has gotten this charge against them by the Bush administration – the warrantless wire tapping and so on. Every day – and people don’t realize this – the editor of the New York Times and papers of that caliber decide not to publish things. So it’s not like they just will publish anything willy-nilly. I think they were right to report this. They made a careful decision, and you know they’re not really holding themselves above the law either. They’re catching the Bush administration holding itself above the law. That’s what the press is supposed to do. As an example on the other side just to show, rightly or wrongly, that the press does self-restrain, look at the coverage of Israel’s bombing of the . . . whatever it was in Syria not too long ago. And it was . . . It’s very clear from the outside that there was some kind of self-censorship going on at the request of government. And several other incidents have slipped out where, you know, people in the press were asked by people in government to hold off on something and they did so. So I’m on the press’s side on that one.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: Well this gets to a larger question. The larger question is, “To what extent is the press a kind of determinative factor in political outcomes?” And that’s, you know . . . A lot of people have studied that, and it’s very hard to prove that the press has any effect at all on political outcomes. Reporters love to think we do, and politicians . . . They would say, “Politicians wouldn’t spend so much time paying attention to us if we didn’t matter a lot.” The primary responsibility for the war in Iraq lies with the Bush administration. And Congress voted for it, and it was popular in the polls, and it was in some non-logical way fueled by 9/11. So we’re talking about a fairly fine-grained thing here, which is the leading voices in the elite press who we rely on is, you know, by weight of very small part of journalism, but a leadership part – a part we rely on – to sort of set signals about outcomes didn’t have its finest hour at that moment. It was a hard story to report. Some people reported it well, and there were some, you know, overly credulous reporting. So . . . But I don’t think the press is responsible for the war in Iraq. I mean let me put it another way. My own belief – and we’ll never know this for 50 years – I don’t think the war in Iraq had anything to do with the question of whether there were weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. I don’t think that was the motive for the Bush administration primarily in wanting to go . . . in wanting to go wage war in Iraq. And it was an argument that was put forward for war. Not the only argument. It was sort of the narrative leading up to the war because it . . . it was kind of available as a rationale. And in the end, you know the way it was set up, there is no way to tell whether a country has weapons of mass destruction. And furthermore I would add I can’t think of an example of the outside world really being successful in stopping a country, any country from having a nuclear program. So you know I’m not really buying into the idea that there was this massive . . . that the press bears primary responsibility. I’m not saying the press performed magnificently or couldn’t have done a better job either.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: First of all a lot of these things it was effervesce. If you go to the . . . I don’t know who took the picture, but you know if you go to the Library of Congress web site, Thomas, which is very good, or LOC.gov, and there’s a site within that called American Memory that has these huge photo archives. And there’s all these wonderful pictures in there from the 1930s, the Depression era, of newsstands. And if you look at these pictures, you will see it’s 90 percent, or maybe 98 percent celebrity gossip and sensational crime. That’s kind of what people are interested in. There was never a time when there was a mass audience for journalism whose primary interest was sort of sober-sided public affairs reporting. So I just think it’s human nature, and you could say it’s the sort of democratic and classless nature of American society. Except if you go to class-ridden UK, the same very intense interest exists there.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: Yeah. I mean I don’t wanna get into that one, this who is and who isn’t a journalist. I mean basically we’re not a licensed profession. We don’t have to decide . . . Anyone who says he or she is a journalist is a journalist as far as I’m concerned. The person who does the horoscope for the newspaper is a journalist. The person who does the comic strip is a journalist. You know I really don’t wanna get all kind of huffy about saying, “This person is a journalist. This person is not a journalist.” The distinction with the difference to me is who goes out and does original news gathering? And you know most bloggers don’t. And the thing I would like to call the bloggers on is their claim that by virtue of sitting at home, you know, searching the Internet they are doing meaningful, original reporting; that should rank on a level with a reporter who goes on site and talks to people and sees it with his own eyes. And I don’t think that’s fair, but I don’t wanna say “No, bloggers are not journalists.” Journalism began, arguably, with people very much like bloggers – pamphleteers and other purveyors of individual opinion. I wouldn’t even call them quasi journalists. I would just call them journalists, but I would not call them reporters. They’re columnists basically.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: I think news organizations can survive the digital revolution. This is a very fast moving picture. I would say if you asked me to predict as of today, then my prediction might be different in three months. Let’s say you’re the Cleveland _______ dealer. What are you gonna look like in 25 years? You will be the dominant news gathering organization in Cleveland, Ohio probably. You (15:43) will have somewhat fewer employees on the news side than you do now, but you’ll still exist and you’ll still be profitable. You’ll be exploring creative arrangements – you know freelance, contract, part time – all the things that those of us who come from the magazine business know and love so well in the newspaper business. You will have your primary audience on the Internet. Your print audience will be much smaller than it is now. You’ll be charging three, four, five times as much for daily newspaper delivery as you do now. And as a result the daily newspaper will be a more sort of elite product that offers more kind of specialized analytic information. It’ll feel more like a sort of mini New York Times. It’ll be pitched to advertisers as such. One the Internet you’ll have a free Home page that has . . . is more sort of general and has a big circulation. And then inside of that there will be what’s known in the trade as verticals or channels that are about very, very thinly shaved, specific interests, and you’ll probably have to pay to enter those – something about your high school football team; very specific information about the suburb where you live; things like that.

I mean the New York Times is sort of a magazine. It has the feel of a magazine. So in that sense, yes, it will be a magazine. It won’t be printed like a magazine, but it will feel more “magazine” and less “newspapery”. But the main thing is I think these news organizations will live on as news organizations in their communities. They won’t just go out of business. But they won’t be understood as newspapers.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: Well first of all, you know, every younger generation faces challenges. And one of the advantages of learning history is it gets you over the temptation to be ahistorical and think . . . You know when I entered journalism at a salaried level, it was considered an existential crisis time in journalism. Now it’s considered an existential crisis time in journalism. What’s going on now is you have a . . . I mean the big thing that’s going on . . . Probably the biggest thing that’s going on is the advent of the Internet, which is as a delivery system for journalism . . .

As a delivery system for journalism, the most important thing to come along since television. And that has, you know . . . It’s a challenge for us at the school, and it’s a huge part of the life of what we do and what our graduates will do after they graduate. Partly because of the Internet there’s two other things going on, which is one, a change in the economic model for reporters who work for salaries, which is evolving in ways that we can’t be sure of, but it’s evolving. And then the second is an effacement of borders. It used to be that most journalism was pretty local really, and journalism took place within community. And that’s less and less true. It’s . . . American journalism is more national, certainly on the Web, and it’s also more international.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: Well that’s the question. First of all I wanna say a couple of things preliminary to this. Because journalism is not licensed and shouldn’t be licensed, you’re in the realm of . . . you don’t have to go to journalism school to be a journalist. We’re like public policy schools and business schools. The question about us is, “Does it add value to you as an individual to go to our school?” And that to some extent depends on who you are. All professional schools have to answer this question in some way or another. And if they sit inside research universities, in a way it’s easier and in a way it’s harder. The model of Columbia University is that it’s a research university. So the sort of core elements of the university are completely impractical. So in a certain way, all of the professional schools – including the medical school and the law school and so on – are kind of out of sync with the core ideals of the university, which are to do pure research and not people teach people how to do anything practical. So you know if you imagine pure scholarship and research at (10:03) one end, and at the other end a kind of apprenticeship systems, which is how professionals were taught up through the late 19th century; the job of a professional school is to find something in between that. Journalism schools traditionally . . . And there are many different answers to that question. One answer is to teach sort of underlying theoretical material, you know, in the way that you’d learn anatomy in a medical school. Another is to do some kind of version of apprenticeship. Another is to do a kind of workshop model where you do the work of the profession in a sort of slowed down way with a lot more mentorship than you’d get in the outside world. And we do variance of all those things. The tradition of journalism schools in America is that they are known by their critics as trade schools, and known by their fans as craft-oriented schools. In other words they tend to veer to the realm of teaching entry-level job skills, such as in journalism how to write a lead; how to write a nut graph; how to cover a story inside the news cycle in a concise, clear way; and to try to sort of experientially replicate what it’s like to start out in the profession. So the . . . . Myself in particular, I came into Columbia in what . . . you know in the kind of low barrier for drama in higher education would be fairly dramatic circumstances where the president of the university essentially, you know, came in and said, “I don’t think this journalism school or any journalism school is good enough. And the reason is there isn’t enough intellectual analytic content. So my charge in particular was to add that to the school. And so that leads to a different kind of answer to your question about what does a journalist need to know, or how do you teach journalism.

You can teach essentially epistemology . . . applied epistemology and say in a way that you’re teaching journalism. You can teach the history of journalism and say that you’re teaching journalism. We do these things now in our school. I think they’re very useful as part of the intellectual equipment of journalists over their career, but they’re not job skills. So what we try to do is make sure people graduate knowing how to perform in the workplace; but beyond that try to sort of tweak toward teaching you things that you can’t just pick up on the fly in the newsroom.

Recorded on: 11/30/07

Transcript: Well I can tell you specifically. I mean it’s sort of hard to say. I didn’t know any journalists when I was growing up or anything, and I just . . . I was very much drawn to it for some reason. So the way I got into it specifically was, you know, other than working on school papers and so on, when I was a . . . I guess the ‘60s came to New Orleans in the early ‘70s when I was finishing high school. And the sort of center of that culture was down in the French Quarter, so there started to be some underground and alternative newspapers in New Orleans. And one of them I particularly liked called the _________ Courier. It no longer exists. It had started in the early ‘60s as an architectural preservation publication. It sort of morphed into our first weekly. So I, you know, had decided that I was really interested in journalism. I liked this paper, and one day when I was a senior in high school, I just kind of screwed up my courage and went to their office and said I wanted to write for them. And we made an arrangement where, if I would agree to be the person who took all the papers when they came out and put them in the coin boxes and emptied the coin boxes, they would let me write an article. So I took that deal. So then I started, you know, emptying coin boxes and writing for them. And I wrote for them through, you know, the sort of spring and summer when I was finishing high school. And then went off to college and came back and worked for them again the next summer, and then sort of was off to the races from there.

Recorded on: 11/30/07