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Dan Balz, the Henry J. Pringle Lecture, Journalism Day 2008May 20, 2008 
Transcript of Mr. Balz's remarks. I would like to begin by thanking Dean Nick Lemann and the Journalism faculty for inviting me to participate in this ceremony. I understand the role of any speaker at any graduation event: Avoid being long or dull and try not to dispense too much advice. At the very least, I’ll try to avoid being long. Let me simply say congratulations to all the graduates on this milestone. You should see it for what it is—a marvelous achievement that has prepared you for the next great chapter in your lives. I applaud you and urge you all to applaud one another. I can honestly say that when I was sitting where you are today—well, and to be totally honest, I never was sitting exactly where you are because it was not as cool back in the Sixties to attend graduation exercises. But had I been sitting where you are, I could never have imagined that I would be asked to speak to the graduates of any journalism program, let alone here at the Graduate School of Journalism, Columbia. If you take away nothing more from the next fifteen minutes, be warned: This could happen to you! I share something special with the Columbia Journalism School community and that is the wisdom and uncommon spirit of the late Jim Carey. He was a young professor at the University of Illinois when I was an undergraduate there. He instilled in all of us what he instilled in Columbia students during his time here. That is an appreciation for the journalist’s critical role in a democracy and the values that make journalists, as citizens, vital participants in America’s ongoing experiment as a free society. I know journalists are often math averse, but I will throw out some statistics: minus 3.9; minus 5.1; minus 3.6; minus 4.4. What are these numbers, you may ask? Perhaps you instinctively know. These numbers represent the percentage declines in circulation over the last six months for the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, and the Chicago Tribune. So here is your first assignment. No matter where you next land, no matter what you do, please, please subscribe immediately to a newspaper! These circulation statistics make clear that this is a terribly difficult time in the newspaper industry. Although more than a hundred people accepted buyouts at my newspaper last week, I did not come here to wring my hands about the future. The truth is—and I genuinely believe this—that despite the challenges newspapers face, this is an extraordinarily exciting time for anyone in the business of news and information, a wonderful time to be a journalist. Because of the internet, more people are reading our work than ever before. Speaking from my seat in the bleachers, I can tell you that this is a truly fabulous time to be a political reporter. This is really what I want to talk to you about today: political journalism from the perspective of a political journalist. I became a political reporter both by design and by accident. When I left college, I wanted to be a Washington reporter. I believed Washington was where the action was—politically and journalistically. I started out covering economic policy. I didn’t really know much about it. For me, it was a ticket to the nation’s capital. It turned out to be an extremely good way to learn the connection between politics and public policy. Eventually I found my way to the Washington Post and, by luck, to the political reporting staff. There I learned from people like David Broder, the best political reporter of his or any generation; from Lou Cannon, who showed you can’t cover politics if you don’t understand government—and can’t cover government if you don’t understand politics; and from the late Ann Devroy, probably the best reporter you’ve never heard of, who covered the White House with more tenacity than anyone I ever knew. To say that I have loved every minute of my career as a political reporter is not an understatement. And yet, it was not so many years ago that people would ask me how in the world could I stand to cover politicians and elections. Was this really grown up work, they would ask? Well, as I am led around by advance men and women younger than my own son, penned in behind barriers by security people and forced to file from the back of a foul-smelling bus from a laptop with a poor cell connection, I sometimes wonder whether it really is grown up work! But there were other, more serious, questions. Did I not recoil at the nastiness of political campaigns? Did I not tire of repetitive stump speeches and endless spin? Did I not understand the essential irrelevance of events I spent my time reporting and writing about? Why was I not cynical? The truth is I don’t get those questions today. Today people are hungry to hear tales from the trail. People of all kinds—journalists on other beats who perhaps took pity on our tribe during some past campaigns, friends and neighbors, acquaintances who have rarely expressed any interest in politics—all are engaged as never before in this marvelous election that is underway. They are engaged for the obvious reason. This election is not only the most exciting but also the most consequential in a generation. It may be the most important since 1968, when a country convulsed by an unpopular war, experienced a traumatic election year that included two assassinations. That election marked the beginning of a conservative era that has lasted almost four decades. Certainly it is the most important election since 1980, when Ronald Reagan won the presidency and engineered a radical break from the policies of the New Deal and the Great Society that had governed American since the Great Depression. This election reminds us of something that has too often been ignored: That Washington matters. That government matters. Most of all, that who wins the White House matters. As we have seen over the past eight years, the choice of a president affects the way America projects its power around the world and how the world sees us. It affects who gets health care and at what price. It affects who gets taxed and at what rates. It affects the distribution of wealth in a society where income inequality continues to grow. It affects how we educate children and how we care for older Americans. It affects what this nation does to combat global climate change and therefore the world your children and your grandchildren will inherit. Almost every step along the way, this election has been compelling and I am fortunate to be witnessing it close up. I first saw the awakening—and the potential sea change underway in our politics—on a wintry night at the end of 2006. John Edwards had announced his candidacy earlier that day in the Katrina-ravaged Ninth Ward in New Orleans. We had flown to Des Moines for an evening rally. This was the week between Christmas and New Year’s, nearly two years before the election and a full year before the Iowa caucuses, a time when people should be disinterested in presidential politics. We arrived at the Iowa Historical Museum around dinner time and there, awaiting Edwards: more than a thousand people! It was an unexpected outpouring and it has never let up. The past 18 months are filled with indelible images--snapshots of a truly remarkable American album. I will not soon forget the bone-chilling morning in Springfield, Illinois, when nearly fifteen thousand people turned out as Barack Obama announced his candidacy, nor forget the parents who brought their children from hundreds of miles away, believing that, whatever the outcome of the election, this was a history-making quest. I will not forget the women, many young but just as many in their 70s or 80s, who have turned out to see Hillary Clinton in the hope that she would shatter the ultimate glass ceiling, and who still today hug the railings of the rope lines at her events to encourage her against now overwhelming odds to keep going. I cannot forget a conversation with a subdued John McCain on a short flight back to Washington just before the 2006 midterm elections as he talked in almost matter-of-fact terms about how his presidential ambitious were now hostage to the war in Iraq. If elections matter, so should political reporting. But what is the role of a political reporter? Many people think it is little more than trailing candidates, listening to the same speech again and again, chronicling the horse race and calling it a day. Yes, some days are like that, but to assume those days constitute all that is political reporting is to misunderstand the ambitions that the best political reporters I know bring to their work every day. There is understandable interest in the personal battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, a compelling drama if there ever was one. But presidential campaigns are about far more than personalities and individual candidates—and particularly this one. A presidential election is a referendum on the state of the country, a referendum on all of us. It is a measure of how we see ourselves. Good political reporting devotes as much energy and curiosity to plumbing the state of the country, the aspirations of all Americans, the clash of ideas and the changes that may be realigning the nation’s political power structure, as it does to what candidates say or do on any given day. Peter Hart, a very smart pollster who also is wise about our business, once told me that the job of a political reporter is not to predict winners. You are not horse pickers or handicappers, he said. Your goal as you cover a campaign ought to be this: to be as sure as you can be that when a new president is elected, your readers will understand why that person won. What were the forces, the conditions and the coalitions that delivered an Electoral College majority to the winner? What were the essential characteristics of the candidates and the ideas they advocated that made the winner more appealing than the loser? I have now been at this long enough to see how different the world of political reporting is today than it was when Timothy Crouse wrote “The Boys on the Bus.” For starters, there are as many women as men on the bus. And we now have not only television but also the virtual, web-based bus as well as the real campaign bus. The virtual bus does as much as the real one to create the narratives that shape perceptions of the candidates and the campaign. We live in an atomized journalistic world in the age of YouTube. There is no longer a series of news cycle, just a never-ending news continuum. Whatever is new pushes out whatever is old. Sometimes, the new, no matter how small, pushes out the important. The influence of the dreaded MSM—the mainstream media—has been reduced. A smart young blogger can sometimes speak with a voice as loud as or louder than a veteran reporter. There is much good about how changes in the structure of media have affected political journalism. I would like to think we are closer to our readers and viewers than ever before—and some days, given my email, I wish we were not quite so close. Because of the style and ethic of the internet, we are forced to create a more genuine conversation with the public, or at least we are groping our way in that direction. We better reflect the diversity of a changing country. We have many more voices involved in describing and reporting events. These changes—along with new forms of packaging—are rejuvenating our craft. Everyone is adapting. I now write as much copy exclusively for the web as for the newspaper. We all do video reports and podcasts, television and radio. We report our findings instantaneously no matter what our basic medium—filing round the clock. Newspaper reporters, magazine writers, television correspondents and web-based journalists are rapidly converging. Still, not everything is good about the way we are doing our jobs as political reporters. My first concern is that we talk more and more about less and less. We seize on trivial developments rather than big ideas. We obsess over process and but not over policy. We over-cover a snide remark by David Geffen about the Clintons and under-cover a major speech. We spend too much time speculating about the future and not enough examining and understanding the present and the past. We write for one another and talk too much to one another. In other words, we are in danger of reducing to an insider’s game the most important set of decisions people are making about the future of our country. My second concern is that we do less reporting than we used to do. We engage in non-stop commentary, sometimes without the information to make the discussion informative. Harold Ross of the New Yorker told Janet Flanner when he sent her off to Paris in the 1920s: “Don’t tell me what you think. Tell me what they think.” That is still useful advice for anyone covering politics in 2008. Political reporting should begin with reporting. These are legitimate issues for all of us to debate about the state of journalism, but I am not pessimistic. Not with the story we are witnessing. As I said at the beginning, this election represents an awakening, not only among the millions and millions of people who have turned out to vote this year; for those in the news business, it has been a reawakening to the central role that journalism plays in the advancement of democracy. None of us should be pessimistic about journalism itself. In whatever form and however it is delivered, the work of journalists remains crucial to a healthy and functioning democracy. I wonder sometimes if this election will do for political reporting what Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein did for investigative reporting. Will this incredible campaign inspire more journalists to report and write about politics and government? If you go in that direction, I hope you will imagine your role in the broadest terms possible and that you will seek to answer the biggest questions you can ask about how we elect our leaders, who they are and how they govern. We need the best to keep to keep this craft vital. If you choose this particular corner of journalism, I can assure you of this: that you will have a richly rewarding and stimulating life—with a great deal of fun along the way. Thank you for listening to me. I wish all of you every possible success. |
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