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Against the Grain
Posted by James Hill on Friday, July 9, 2010
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Michael Gerson is pretty good at dishing it out to Democrats, much as E.J. Dionne Jr. gives it to Republicans. Solid political commentary. Turn the tables, however, as both did this week, and the commentary becomes remarkable.
Gerson's come-to-Jesus message -- warning the GOP to be wary of extremism in the pursuit of a congressional majority -- may well be one of the most important polemics of the midterm election season, arguing as it does for conservatives to maintain a high ground at a time when the low road seems to be the preferred path most traveled.
Dionne's defense of the gaffe-prone Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele was in itself a defense of the right of dissent, and he reminded Democrats that they were making calls to silence Steele at their peril.
My hunch is that neither columnist won many fans among their customary audiences. But they sure should have won lots of respect.
Let's start with Gerson, whose service as a Capitol Hill aide and speech writer for President George W. Bush gives him principled credibility with conservatives.
Looking at the potential for extremism to damage the gains that the GOP is likely to score in this fall's midterm elections, Gerson took particular umbrage with Nevada Senate candidate Sharron Angle's contention that "if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies."
Mike was having none of it. "Mainstream conservatives have been strangely disoriented by tea party excess, unable to distinguish the injudicious from the outrageous," he wrote. "Some rose to Angle's defense or attacked her critics. Just to be clear: A Republican Senate candidate has identified the United States Congress with tyranny and contemplated the recourse to political violence. This is disqualifying for public office. It lacks, of course, the seriousness of genuine sedition. It is the conservative equivalent of the Che Guevara T-shirt -- a fashion, a gesture, a toying with ideas the wearer only dimly comprehends. The rhetoric of 'Second Amendment remedies' is a light-weight Lexington, a cut-rate Concord. It is so far from the moral weightiness of the Founders that it mocks their memory."
And this was just for starters. He goes after libertarians such as Kentucky Senate candidate Rand Paul, and those who are feasting on anti-immigration hysteria.
"The response of many responsible Republicans to these ideological trends is to stay quiet, make no sudden moves and hope they go away," Gerson wrote. "But these are not merely excesses; they are arguments. Significant portions of the Republican coalition believe that it is a desirable strategy to talk of armed revolution, embrace libertarian purity and alienate Hispanic voters. With a major Republican victory in November, those who hold these views may well be elevated in profile and influence. And this could create durable, destructive perceptions of the Republican Party that would take decades to change. A party that is intimidated and silent in the face of its extremes is eventually defined by them."
Dionne, consistently one of the most respected voices among American progressives, thinks Democrats should lower the volume over Steele, who got himself in hot water -- again -- for saying that Afghanistan had become "a war of Obama's choosing." Republicans were the first to pounce, many calling for Steele's head. Democrats soon joined in.
Step back, Dionne urged the Democrats. "The issue here is less about Afghanistan than about dissent in time of war. Even if Steele was just popping off, he had a right to offer his opinion without being accused of undermining our troops or 'rooting for failure.'"
Columnists are valued for their independence. It separates them from the ideologues and propagandists, and is absolutely necessary for critical thinking. Commentators who speak for right or left are utterly predictable, and thoroughly boring.
But there's another moral to remember. Journalists often overwork the phrase "speaking truth to power," usually because they don't. By going against the grain, Gerson and Dionne certainly did.
James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
Nothing but Net
Posted by James Hill on Monday, June 28, 2010
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Enough has been said about David Weigel, who resigned as The Washington Post's blogger covering the conservative movement after derogatory comments he made on a listserv before he was hired by the newspaper showed up on other websites, including the much-viewed Drudge Report.
Not enough has been said about the www.culture now firmly embedding itself in newsrooms around the world. But maybe it should be, so perhaps we can start a conversation.
Despite the fact that most newspapers got into electronic publishing in the mid-to-late-1990s, many in our industry treat it as a field that clearly remains stuck in infancy. The most often cited excuse for this state of affairs is that the Internet was regarded as an afterthought.
This hasn't been true at The Washington Post, which has devoted a huge chunk of resources in developing washingtonpost.com. Nor has it been the case with several other newspapers, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal in particular. But yes, you could make a good argument that most newspapers are falling far behind when it comes to harnessing the Net. Or, rather, trying too hard to catch up, which is where I'd put my assessment. But what, exactly, is up?
Newsroom veterans often shake their heads, because a lot of things that were "up" turned out to be nonstarters. Not too long ago, for instance, the rage was to have a reporter shoot video while working a story. Only the video turned out to be not very well done, and editors came to realize that if readers wanted to watch television, they would usually turn on their TVs.
Blogging, however, has not been one of those false starts. Newspaper websites have largely embraced the concept, and blogs are being used to produce fine and cutting-edge journalism. One of the pioneers, Keven Willey, the editorial page editor at The Dallas Morning News, now features six blogs on her opinion pages at dallasnews.com. Fred Hiatt, the Post's editorial page editor, began the PostPartisan blog during the 2008 political campaign. It is now a regular feature on washingtonpost.com and postpartisan commentaries also show up on the print edition op-ed page.
Yet here again, most editors might be guilty of treating blogs as an afterthought. Clearly, you probably can't check out everything a writer had posted to a listserv before he was hired by your news organization, but it wouldn't hurt to look carefully at a blogger's copy before it goes public. And even the top news organizations have suffered embarrassments because they didn't.
Because the Internet is in a state of hyperevolution, it has become trendy to accept that a wired culture is something far different than the newsroom culture that existed when print was king. But here's a thought: Newspapers have always existed as the public record because they were archived, not only by the newspapers themselves but by libraries and historical societies. Now that the archiving is electronic -- and close to instantaneous in one's ability to retrieve -- doesn't it make sense to get it right when you put your name and your newspaper's name on that record?
The Internet's very immediacy would seem to demand vigorous editing, fact-checking and, yes, caution. This should never be an afterthought.
James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
Take Me Out to the Ball Game
Posted by James Hill on Friday, June 11, 2010
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Throughout his long career, David S. Broder has distinguished himself with his objectivity, the strength of his analysis, and his easygoing way of communicating with his readers. To borrow from an old advertising line, when Broder speaks, people listen.
So if you are getting a little sick and tired of all the partisan bickering that passes for national discourse these days, you might want to heed a little advice from the dean of Washington political correspondents -- and take in a ball game.
That's what Broder did Tuesday evening, along with more than 40,000 others, to watch the pitching debut of Stephen Strasburg, a young man who seems to invite superlatives because, so far at least, his pitching has been nothing short of superlative.
It wasn't lost on Broder that this could be just what Washington needs, a baseball team with the horses to become a contender.
"Much as Barack Obama's inauguration in 2009 spurred hopes that a new era was opening, so long-suffering fans fantasized that with Strasburg pitching and this year's No. 1 choice, junior college slugger Bryce Harper, on the way, the Nationals were destined for better things."
Maybe. But the point of Broder's column wasn't so much about Strasburg -- who, by the way, was absolutely stunning in striking out 14 batters, one short of the record for a rookie making his first start -- as it was getting our collective minds off of the problems, many real, many imagined, that surround us.
Broder should know. He's covered Washington since the Kennedy years, and anyone who follows his writing knows that the divisiveness, which really got cooking during the Bill Clinton administration, went thermonuclear under George W. Bush and remains that way with Barack Obama, pains him for what it is doing not only to the American character but our ability as a society to get things done. Representative government doesn't work when the representatives won't work with each other.
This is not to say that partisanship is particularly bad, or a relatively new phenomenon. People take sides because they believe something is worth fighting for, and we've been fighting for political causes since, no, make that before, the birth of the republic.
What makes it seem so hostile today, however, is that partisanship has become instantaneous. Look how long it took for that open-microphone comment by California Republican Senate nominee Carly Fiorina to go, as they say, viral. About a nanosecond.
But back to baseball, or more particularly, sport. As Broder noted, "A fascinating test of the curative power of sports has been unfolding this week on both sides of the Atlantic, as Washington and Johannesburg look to athletes to lift the gloom surrounding their political leaders."
That the World Cup can transfix the attention of most of the world for four weeks every four years indeed does say everything about the power of a game -- excuse me, the beautiful game -- to be the great unifier. Too bad America isn't as hooked on soccer (or, really, too bad the rest of the world isn't hooked on the National Football League).
Broder tossed some cold reality onto South Africa's coming out party, noting that the Cup will not solve the many problems that the beautiful but star-crossed nation faces. But at least it can enjoy its party and if it pulls it off like China did the Olympics, maybe it can get back to work with a better appreciation of itself.
And maybe the U.S. Congress might too if, taking an idea that Broder tossed out a few years ago when it became obvious that baseball was coming back to Washington after a 33-year drought, members would take in a game or two and get their minds off trying to destroy each other. Like dreams of October glory, one can always hope.
James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
In Pennant Race Form
Posted by James Hill on Friday, May 21, 2010
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Even though the Washington Nationals are vastly improved this year, politics still retains its claim as the pastime of preference in the nation's capital. And what a season it is turning out to be.
Tuesday's primary elections in Pennsylvania, Kentucky and Arkansas provided a snapshot of what the playoffs might look like come November, while a race to fill a House seat in western Pennsylvania offered Democrats a glimmer of hope that perhaps the tea party movement might have peaked too soon (alternative view: the White House really has got some game).
Voting was only the half of it. The best drama was playing off the field. Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal got caught in a lie; Rep. Mark Souder of Indiana got caught in a tryst and resigned from Congress; Kentucky ophthalmologist Rand Paul got caught dissing some provisions of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and spent his second full day as a Republican Senate nominee on a treadmill -- backtracking.
As Ruth Marcus noted: "Politicians excel at trying on costumes, assuming identities (the angry populist, the slayer of pork), delivering lines written by others. Is it any wonder that the division between fantasy and reality starts to blur for some of them?"
Yet the childish behavior of some couldn't cloud over the fact that something -- perhaps not a Thai-level protest but nonetheless a lot of anger -- was in the air. E.J. Dionne Jr., however, isn't buying it.
"Pennsylvania's 12th District (where Democrat Mark Critz won by nine points over Republican Tim Burns) is precisely the sort of seat Republicans will need to win this fall if they are to take over the House. It is, for example, the only district in the country that switched from Democrat John Kerry in 2004 to John McCain in 2008," wrote Dionne.
"Even though Obama's standing in the region is lower than it is nationwide, Burns' rote Republican campaign against Obama and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi failed miserably. Democrats, in the meantime, believe they have found a formula to keep some of the more conservative districts they now hold."
George F. Will found this an interesting, if slightly odd, strategy: "The candidate who on Tuesday won the special election in a Pennsylvania congressional district is right-to-life and pro-gun. He accused his opponent of wanting heavier taxes. He said he would have voted against Barack Obama's health care plan and promised to vote against cap-and-trade legislation, which is a tax increase supposedly somehow related to turning down the planet's thermostat. This candidate, Mark Critz, is a Democrat. And that just about exhausts the good news for Democrats on a surreal Tuesday."
But as these things go, Democrats found some good news nevertheless. Paul, the son of libertarian Rep. Ron Paul, quickly succumbed to that most dreaded of all political ailments -- foot-in-mouth syndrome.
Even before that development, Eugene Robinson wasn't too sure the GOP should be high-fiving just yet.
"The stunning result (in Kentucky) should telegraph two warnings to Republicans," he wrote. "The first is a reminder that while voters' ardor toward the Democratic Party might have cooled, this has not led to a passionate embrace of the GOP. There's a splash-back effect from unceasing attacks against the evil empire known as Washington: Voters notice that Republicans live there, too.
"The second warning is that the Tea Party movement does not intend to become a wholly owned subsidiary of the Republican Party. Strategists who hoped to use the movement's energy and passion as weapons against the Democrats in the fall should realize that many Tea Party types see the GOP as fundamentally no different."
Michael Gerson, a conservative, could be read as endorsing liberal Robinson's second point.
"Paul and other libertarians are not merely advocates of limited government; they are anti-government," Gerson wrote. "Their objective is not the correction of error but the cultivation of contempt for government itself. There is a reason libertarianism has never been -- and probably will never be -- a national political force: because too many would find its utopia a nightmare."
David S. Broder kept his eyes on the ball while speculating what the action in late spring could mean in the fall.
"We saw the anti-Washington sentiment Tuesday in Kentucky, where Rand Paul ... easily defeated Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's handpicked candidate for the Republican nomination for a vacant Senate seat -- and credited his win to the tea partyers," Broder commented.
"The same sentiment carried to Arkansas, where incumbent Democratic Sen. Blanche Lincoln was forced into a runoff by her labor-backed challenger, Lt. Gov. Bill Halter.
"And it claimed its largest victim of the year so far in Pennsylvania's Sen. Arlen Specter. Run out of the Republican Party last year by a GOP challenger, he fell embarrassingly to a less-known younger congressman in a bid for the Democratic nomination. His failure showed the Obama White House once again to be a toothless tiger -- with its endorsements now having failed in Virginia, New Jersey, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. No good news for the president there."
What does it all mean? Let George Will have the last words: "Has American politics ever been this entertaining?"
James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
Brave News World
Posted by James Hill on Friday, May 7, 2010
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Many were the obituaries when The Washington Post Co. announced it was putting Newsweek up for sale. This won't be one of them.
For one, it's a bit premature. And for another, it's not like the magazine hasn't been in this spot before. As Benjamin C. Bradlee relates in his 1995 autobiography, "A Good Life," he began hearing rumors of Newsweek's demise almost from the day he joined its Washington bureau -- in 1957.
"I dreaded these stories, not so much because I admired the management (I did not), but because I felt the bastards I knew were bound to be better than the bastards I didn't know," he wrote.
By 1961, with the magazine then in the hands of the Vincent Astor Foundation, Bradlee -- "after a bad day of brooding, and a few shooters" -- picked up the phone and called Philip Graham, then the publisher of the Post, and suggested that he should make a bid for the publication.
"It was the best telephone call I ever made -- the luckiest, most productive, most exciting, most rewarding, totally rewarding," Bradlee noted.
When Jon Meacham, Newsweek's editor who reportedly is trying to line up a bid to purchase the magazine from Phil Graham's son, Post Co. chairman of the board Donald E. Graham, writes his memoirs, here's hoping he can say much the same about his experiences.
Yet this posting is only marginally about Newsweek, a magazine I have read for years, and more about the news industry's exciting possibilities -- if we get the technological changes right.
Let Washington Post columnist Michael Gerson explain what's going on. Celebrating Apple's next big thing, the iPad (or perhaps bemoaning the fact his wife thinks the device is an extravagance he can do without), he writes: "The combination of the Internet and the iPad has changed our relation to the written word forever. The Information Age is now affordable, portable, intuitively organized and infinitely customizable. All future content, including books and newspapers, will need to assume the shape of this innovation."
That's quite an admission coming from an admitted book junkie like Gerson ("I surrounded myself with books on shelves, books in boxes, books in random stacks that caused visitors to trip"). But it also underscores what even we luddites who long for the days when big cities had multiple newspapers surely know deep within out hearts: We adapt to change when change becomes useful and friendly to us.
Think of cellular phones. When they were the size of Maxwell Smart's shoe phone, most of us vowed we'd never be caught dead with one.
That's a little bit of what the news industry has been doing the last couple of decades while wrestling with technological changes no one could even imagine when Ben Bradlee made that call in 1961. The industry first pretended it was no big deal, then changed gears but still didn't quite know where it was going. Today's fad is page views. Tomorrow's? Who knows.
It seems obvious, however, that if a device comes along that allows users to access information much as they would if they were visiting a bookstore or buying a newspaper or magazine, and have that information presented in a more orderly fashion than currently is the case on most computers (in other words, not having to print out lengthy texts you really want or need to read), then this presents a huge opportunity for news media to concentrate on core competencies rather than constantly trying to escape the trap they fell into.
Gerson is not the only one enraptured by the new Apple wonder. So is his son (who spent his own money to buy the device Mike plays with) and so is my sister, a charter member of the gadgeterrati who is passing along to me her MacBook because she loves her iPad so much more.
And Gerson offers a clue as to where this is going: "We know that even bibliophiles like me will purchase books that arrive via the Internet because it represents a quantum leap in convenience. We know that people will consume both good and unreliable news on the Internet when it comes free. Because of the iPad (and its eventual competitors), we will be able to test whether people will pay for excellent news content delivered on a platform that multiplies its usefulness and enjoyment."
A word of caution: You should probably read this column by Daniel Lyons in Newsweek (there's that name again) on Apple's pricing strategy.
But you also better start thinking that with this type of device taking off, Newsweek and other publications might just have a better future than any oddsmaker was willing to offer them just months ago. In other words, not dead yet.
James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
Arizona Roars, Again
Posted by James Hill on Friday, April 30, 2010
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Arizonans have a way of making a newspaper editor's day. In the fall of 1990, I had just joined the editorial page staff of The Arizona Republic as editor of the Sunday Perspective section, and was looking for the perfect cover story to highlight my debut issue -- when the voters turned down a state holiday honoring Martin Luther King Jr.
I went digging through my Rolodex and started putting out calls. The following Sunday, the Republic featured articles by William Kuntsler, the radical lawyer who had defended the Chicago Seven and was a friend of King's; Roger Kahn, author of "The Boys of Summer," one of the better books on the meaning of sports in America; and Bruce Babbitt, a former governor of Arizona who was expected to make a presidential bid in 1992.
Their collective assessment: Arizona had a problem. And did it. The National Football League had awarded the 1993 Super Bowl to suburban Tempe but had strongly implied that it was conditional on the state establishing the holiday. And when the voters roared their disapproval of that threat, the NFL roared back. The game was shortly yanked -- and the NFL made it clear there would be no consideration for future Super Bowl dates until Arizonans had a change of heart.
I haven't lived and worked in the Grand Canyon state for some years now, and so I don't have a sense of how things will work out now that Arizonans have roared again with a law designed to curtail illegal immigration into the state. But my hunch is that with the possibility of Major League Baseball yanking the 2011 All-Star game from Phoenix, civic leaders are already looking for a way to walk the state back from the precipice.
Yet if they do -- it's surprising how quickly the threat of lost dollars can work wonders in a state heavily dependent on tourism and the big bucks coming in for major sporting events -- Arizona will still have a problem. This is because, as commentators as varied as David S. Broder, George F. Will, Richard Cohen, Eugene Robinson, Michael Gerson, Ruben Navarrette Jr. and Edward Schumacher-Matos have all pointed out, the U.S. government has a problem with illegal immigration and securing the border with Mexico.
Broder recalls the effort three years ago to enact an immigration reform bill, noting: "That ended the last effort by Congress to meet the federal responsibility for managing immigration. The states -- not just Arizona but all of them -- are ill-equipped to solve the problem.
"The blame for this mess rests with those who killed that bill."
Will also finds it strange that federal officials can be critical of Arizona when they are the ones responsible for controlling the border, but then points out: "Arizona's law makes what is already a federal offense -- being in the country illegally -- a state offense. Some critics seem not to understand Arizona's right to assert concurrent jurisdiction. The Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund attacks Gov. Jan Brewer's character and motives, saying she 'caved to the radical fringe.' This poses a semantic puzzle: Can the large majority of Arizonans who support the law be a 'fringe' of their state?"
Cohen, writing from Scottsdale and deploring the measure, nevertheless has words of warning to those who would so easily dismiss it: "The Obama administration had better pay attention to the conditions that produced this law. In a way, another tea party movement has emerged -- a scream of pain and anger from a constituency that has seen immigration laws turn meaningless and the impotence of the government flaunted on a daily basis. These are people who didn't have a particularly high regard for Washington in the first place. This is the Anglos' last stand."
Robinson notes the downside of Arizona's action: "One of the concrete problems with the law treating undocumented immigrants as criminals is that it gives those without papers a powerful incentive to stay as far away from police as possible. This will only make it more difficult for local police to investigate crimes and track do wn fugitive offenders, because no potential witness who is undocumented will come forward."
While Gerson wonders what Arizona was thinking: "American states have broad powers. But they are not permitted their own foreign or immigration policy. One reason is that immigration law concerns not only the treatment of illegal immigrants but also the proper treatment of American citizens. And here the Arizona law fails badly."
For Navarrette, the issue is personal:: "Many Americans have long been baffled by the fact that Latinos who have the right to be in the United States – whether they are native-born citizens or here legally – will often interfere with efforts to harass, round up and remove illegal immigrants.
"Some of them want to know: “What’s this to you?” Others ... accuse the obstructionists of having 'divided loyalties.' Still others assume it’s simply because these Latinos must have 'relatives who are illegal.'
"Now you know the real reason. Look at Arizona. To some people, we’re all the same.
"Fine. In that case, this isn’t some someone else’s fight. This is ours. Game on."
For Schumacher-Matos, however, everyone may be chasing the wrong horse. Looking at the numbers, he notes that illegal immigration is down -- from an estimated high of 12.5 million in 2007 to 10.8 million in the first quarter of this year, a sign, he says, that stepped-up enforcement is working.
"After the dangerous overreaction in Arizona, what we need now is for everyone to calm down," he writes. "The best thing that could happen would be if responsible Republican and Democratic leaders -- and there are many -- tuned out all the noise and started a discussion over who we want to admit into our country and what kind of country we want it to be. Only two basic premises should guide our response to illegal immigration: what is best for America and what works."
After the passions aroused by the 1990 King Day rejection died down, Arizonans again voted on the issue and it passed -- overwhelmingly. Two Super Bowls have now been held in the state, along with a couple of college national championship games.
The issue is bigger this time, and the solutions much more complex. Yet Arizona's roar has been heard around the nation. And for those politicians who haven't been listening, well, elections do matter.
James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
The Optimism Summit
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, April 14, 2010
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Last year when the American Society of News Editors was scheduled to meet in convention, everyone expected it to be a wake. But it got worse. The wake itself was canceled.
This year, as world leaders gathered a few blocks away for the Nuclear Security Summit, the editors came back to Washington for what ASNE billed as the NewsNow: 2010 Ideas Summit. I would have called it the Optimism Summit.
For this surely was the mood among attendees and presenters -- and it was catching. Gone were the long faces and worries about the future. Back was a can-do spirit, a reflection of the fact that editors and their publications had gone through the beginning of the digital transformation and the worst economy since the Great Depression, and found themselves still standing.
Indeed, the more remarkable thing about the last few years, a period that no doubt ranks as the newspaper industry's darkest hour financially, is how few papers actually bit the dust. No one is saying the crisis is over -- the need to make money became the 800-pound gorilla in the room at Wednesday's closing panel on "A View From the Top: Where Do We Go From Here?"
Elizabeth Brenner, publisher of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, noting the many changes her employee-owned company had needed to implement just to stay on its feet, said that yearning for the old days was a no-win strategy. "We're not going back," she said. "It's not cyclical this time."
But another panelist, Donna Barrett, president and CEO of Community Newspaper Holdings, begged to differ. Her newspapers, which serve primarily small markets nationwide and are still heavily reliant on their print editions for both circulation and advertising revenue, are seeing returns that indicate to Barrett that perhaps much of the losses newspaper companies suffered were indeed cyclical.
Time will tell on that one. But the big message of the Optimism Summit is that digital production is no longer seen as the reaper knocking on death's door. Rather, it is now embraced as the opportunity that can't be missed to spread American journalism around the globe.
This was the challenge set down in the keynote address by Google Chairman and CEO Eric Schmidt, and the theme continued throughout the two-and-a-half day conference. "Partnering," Webspeak for collaboration, was an oft-heard word. (And wouldn't you know it, The New York Times won a Pulitzer Prize as the convention was under way by partnering with ProPublica, a nonprofit reporting project, to underscore the point.)
More importantly, the quality of the presenters and the quantity of subjects covered made this convention one well worth the price of a ticket. Pity that despite all the optimism, too many editors are still being forced by budget constraints to stay away. Again, only time will tell if this trend is not cyclical.
But Charlotte Hall, the editor of The Orlando Sentinel who had to cancel last year's session, was spot on when she promised then that ASNE would be back this year and better than ever. Give heaps of credit to outgoing ASNE President Martin Kaiser of The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel and other ASNE officers and staff. And give some credit to those who made Hall's promise a fact. In a downtown Washington nearly locked down while world leaders discussed nuclear doomsday, newspaper editors hunkered down and pronounced themselves beyond Armageddon and ready for the digital future. Too optimistic? Well, take your pick: We're either an incredibly stubborn lot, or you ain't seen nothing yet.
James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
Bravo, Kathleen Parker
Posted by James Hill on Monday, April 12, 2010
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One of the true joys of the news business is seeing your colleagues rewarded for the hard work they do. For Kathleen Parker, the winner of the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary, it is doubly joyful -- she's not just our colleague but our friend.
To her fans, and there are legions, she's a friend too. Her graceful columns are more like treasured letters -- newsy, for sure, but also filled with understanding and logic, an elaboration on both the celebration and pathos of American life.
Although she has been at her craft for more than 20 years, Kathleen is relatively new to The Washington Post, her column having won a twice-weekly spot on the op-ed page only in 2008. Yet when she joined The Writers Group in July 2006, she was already  well-known to millions of readers nationwide.
And a great part of the column's charm is that it still has that outside-the-Beltway feel. Kathleen Parker does not do pretention.
But she does do empathy. And she does do Southern charm. And she does do patriotism. And she does all emphatically.
In her speech in the Post newsroom Monday, Kathleen recalled her long journey from being a one-woman bureau at a Florida newspaper to a Pulitzer-prize winner standing before one of the largest and most talented collection of journalists in the country. She loved where she was at that moment, she said, but noted she has always been a one-woman bureau, working out of a basement office or converted garage as she developed her column into the must-read it has become today.
Like so much she does, it was a brava performance. Congratulations, friend, from all of us at The Writers Group.
James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
Let's Play Two
Posted by James Hill on Wednesday, March 24, 2010
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E.J. Dionne Jr. is about as close to being a happy warrior as anyone you'll find commenting on the American political scene. Good-natured and respectful, he approaches politics not as a blood sport but as a contest of ideas, the more the merrier.
Were he wearing a Cubs uniform, no doubt he would pick up the where Ernie Banks left off: "Let's play two."
On Sunday, as the health care reform debate dragged on, Dionne starred in his own double-header. And hit home runs both times. But let me switch from sports metaphor to journalism-speak to explain his triumph.
Because the vote had been scheduled for a Sunday, editors here at The Washington Post decided he should write his column for Monday's editions on deadline, rather than filing it on a Friday as would normally be the case. But as the debate resumed on Sunday, a complication arose: Our long-winded House of Representatives wasn't going to finish by late afternoon. Maybe not until midnight or beyond, too late to make the home editions.
So Dionne did what enterprising journalists have always done. He wrote a column for the early editions that could also stand for the final. Then, when the vote did come in with time to meet the last deadline, he wrote a completely new column.
But there's more. Dionne is syndicated, so the change in his writing schedule required some footwork on the Friday before, when his column would be sent to more than 100 newspapers. (Most newspaper editorial and op-ed pages are not "open" on weekends, having been put together ahead of time to accommodate production schedules.) He filed a column for immediate release that was used on the PostPartisan blog in The Post. Then the column written for Monday's Post went to his client newspapers early Monday morning.
What happened to the article that Dionne filed for the early editions? (A masterpiece, by the way, on why he thought the debate had not been conservatism's finest hour.) We sent it out to his clients on Tuesday as a special, or bonus, column, and it was then picked up by washingtonpost.com. And for two days now, it has been one of the most read items on the Web site. Wow, a triple-header.
Those of us who work with him would have expected no less from Dionne, who has "owned" the health care story for the past year. He brought the same type of energy and passion to this issue that he routinely brings to political campaigns, when his "let's play two" outlook results in some of his greatest journalism.
And speaking of other "owners" and great journalism, take a look at this work by Eugene Robinson, Richard Cohen, George F. Will and Michael Gerson that ran on Tuesday following the health care vote, and then check out Ruth Marcus and Kathleen Parker, who ran on Wednesday.
Readers say they want a diversity of opinion. Well, consider these columns Exhibit A.
James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
Getting a Second Opinion
Posted by James Hill on Friday, March 12, 2010
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Kathleen Parker hit it right on the head when she recently wrote that the health care reform debate has been healthy for the nation. So too did Michael Gerson when he argued that the issue had seriously damaged Barack Obama's presidency. And so too did Richard Cohen when he noted that despite widespread opposition, Obama had an obligation as a leader to insist the measure be "rammed" through Congress.
In fact, it's difficult to say who hasn't been hitting it on the head once health care reform was put under microscopic examination. Since Obama assumed office, 16 columnists in our shop have offered their prognosis on the moral issue, the financial issue, the policy issue and, of course, the political issue of health care reform. If a great op-ed page is an ideological stew, they've certainly spiced it with any number of intriguing ingredients. (In addition to Parker, Gerson and Cohen, they are: David S. Broder, Marie Cocco, E.J. Dionne Jr., Ellen Goodman, Jim Hoagland, David Ignatius, Charles Krauthammer, Ruth Marcus, Ruben Navarrette Jr., Eugene Robinson, Robert J. Samuelson, Edward Schumacher-Matos and George F. Will.)
That's a lot of intellectual firepower, and it's a testament to how important this debate has become to the American public. Remember, this all began as an assumed done deal. Democrats controlled the White House, the House of Representatives, and had a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. To argue against the bill was to whistle in the wind.
Whistle they did. Conservative writers such as Gerson, Krauthammer and Will largely built an opposition case that the costs and procedures to implement the bill would far outweigh the benefits of such a radical restructuring of the nation's medical delivery system. Centrists crunched the numbers -- Broder counting votes, Samuelson the fiscal tab.
Liberals didn't hold their fire, either. Dionne was particularly active in advancing the issue and anticipating the legislative zigs and zags. Cohen, Marcus and Robinson countered opposition arguments with appeals to the heart and to the purse-strings.
Then in January, lightning struck. Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts special election to fill the late Edward Kennedy's Senate seat changed the calculus (the Democratic filibuster-proof margin was gone) and the political outlook. Obama, who seemingly had walked on the Potomac to get to his inauguration, was now sinking into a quagmire of his own choosing, and threatening to pull his congressional majority down with him.
This is the conventional view for now, anyway. Yet maybe the wrong one. Given that there are other ways to get a bill through the Senate (reconciliation), health care appears headed for a showdown vote by March 21. So it could get passed despite Brown's victory, and as the terms of the legislation begin to be implemented, all could be forgiven. Or else Democrats could have hell to play.
That's getting ahead of the story. What we need to keep in mind is that health care has the shelf life it does mainly because it is a question vital to the lives of every American. And so it is vital that voters consider the implications -- thoroughly and vigorously.
There is absolutely no other way to do this than through an independent press that allows for second, third, even 16 opinions.
In an article posted on washingtonpost.com, Howell Raines, the former executive editor of The New York Times, argues that there is something wrong with the media in this national discussion. "Through clever use of the Fox News Channel and its cadre of raucous commentators," he writes, "(Fox News chief Roger) Ailes has overturned standards of fairness and objectivity that have guided American print and broadcast journalists since World War II. ... This is not a liberal-versus-conservative issue. It is a matter of Fox turning reality on its head with, among other tactics, its endless repetition of its uber-lie: 'The American people do not want health-care reform.'"
Well, perhaps. But my guess is that serious people do not trouble themselves much with Fox News or MSNBC or other cable news outlets for that matter. What serious people want, have always wanted, is a richness and diversity of opinion to help them make up their minds on the important issues affecting their lives. The news media, newspapers in particular, may be having problems. But engaging the nation in a great debate is not one of them. We've hit it right on the head. And it's been one of our finest hours.
James Hill is managing editor of The Washington Post Writers Group.
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