The Power of the Pen: E.J. Dionne on Journalism, Politics, and Propaganda

Practitioner Bio: E.J. Dionne, Jr. is a syndicated columnist at The Washington Post, a professor at Georgetown University, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and author of Why Americans Hate Politics. He is a nationally recognized commentator and regular contributor to NPR, MSNBC, and NBC’s Meet The Press. Dionne spent 14 years as a reporter on state and local politics and served as a foreign correspondent in Paris, Rome, and Beirut.

How do you see your role as a journalist, and do you seek to impact politics and policy?

In my life as a journalist, I’ve had two quite different roles. In my earlier life, my task was not to impact policy but to inform people about what was going on, what the debate was, and, if I was a foreign correspondent, what was happening overseas. And your task – the discipline you agree to take on when you’re a non-opinion journalist – is a discipline that says readers of any point of view will be able to read you and be informed, not believing that your take on the event, the policy, and the debate is shaped by your own views. That’s complicated, but it’s doable. Now, my job is to reflect my viewpoint, so my job is to be in the debate and to affect the debate.

How do you think journalism and reporting will impact the upcoming 2016 Presidential primaries?

“Randomly” is probably the answer. But let’s just look at the last couple of weeks. Scott Walker gave what everyone generally thought was a very effective speech in Iowa. Suddenly, there was this outpouring for Scott Walker, almost as the new frontrunner, but certainly as the next new thing. It was very positive. That speech really penetrated the conservative movement, and he started rising very quickly in the polls. Then, he had a second week. Then he had another week, where back-to-back-to-back, he didn’t answer the question in London on his views on evolution. Giuliani says, ‘Obama doesn’t love America,’ and Scott Walker is very equivocal on Giuliani’s statement. And suddenly, all the coverage goes the other way.

Now, does any of this mean anything in the long run? Maybe not. My colleague Dan Balz wrote a very good piece about two weeks ago saying, “Let’s read almost everything we write with a grain of salt.” It didn’t say that directly, but it was a piece about how we still see lots of things happening at this moment that seem so important and will disappear by the time people actually start voting. Nonetheless, it can affect the flow of the campaign, how many people think, and how activists think.

The other thing is that we’ll make mistakes. Dan and I were together recently in New Hampshire talking about how both of us thought Obama was going to win the New Hampshire primary. Both of us in retrospect should have seen Hillary coming more clearly than we did. I actually wrote a column on the day of the primary saying, “This is why Obama is going to win,” and then I wrote a follow-up column saying, “This is why I was wrong.” If I had looked at this just slightly differently, I could have seen Hillary coming.

In one of your recent columns, you mention that having more media critics should “cheer” journalists. In what ways do you think this growing presence of critics is going to be really good for journalism?

For a long time, the bulk of criticism was coming from the right because, I think, the assumption was that there was a “liberal media.” My view is that the media tend to be biased toward the educated upper-middle class because many journalists are members of the middle or upper-middle class. I think if you’re looking for media bias, it’s more complicated than liberal.

The ‘rise of critics’ means you have people hitting the media from the left and the right now. Sometimes the criticism is fair, and sometimes it’s not, but you have a balance in the criticism so that, more now than fifteen years ago, editors and reporters have to look over both their left and their right shoulders.

The other thing is that there’s just more accountability. More people call you out on a mistake. Some of it is just blatantly partisan and unfair, but there’s a need to force people to look back and say, “Was that really right?” Even when you’re an opinionated columnist like me, whether you have the media critics or not, you really don’t want to make some stupid factual error that undercuts your whole argument. It really pushes you to never cut corners.

What do you think of President Obama’s remarks at the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, particularly his urging Americans to do more to counter terrorist propaganda online? Do you see this affecting journalism and reporting on foreign policy?

It’s very tricky because, when you are a foreign correspondent, as I was for thirty years, you are an American out there. I think most of us really do care about our country.

The example I always give is of a gentleman called William Buckley who was kidnapped in Beirut when I was covering the war there. All of us looked at [Buckley’s] resume and were certain he was in the CIA, but not a single one of us pointed at it or hinted at it because we didn’t want the guy killed. It turned out that the people who kidnapped him already knew he was in the CIA because of documents taken from the American Embassy taken over in Iran.

On the other hand, when you are out there, you are not making propaganda for the American government. Our job is not to propagandize. I think it’s very dangerous to free press if reporters come to be seen as some arm of the government. Oppressive governments all over the world will use that excuse: [Journalists] aren’t really free – we’re secretly working for the CIA or the State Department. That’s not true, and we can’t feed that perception without empowering these oppressive governments that want to block free expression and access to information.

When I hear something like that from the President, I think that countering propaganda in general is a good function of journalism because we’re supposed to be trying to present the world as it is, not how some propagandist presents it. Obviously, I think ISIS’ ideology is hideous and dangerous and – I guess I would use the word – evil. As a columnist, I’m not sure what difference it makes, but what exactly is the responsibility of somebody covering ISIS? You certainly don’t want to be complicit with them in covering their propaganda. On the other hand, you do want to explain to Americans who the heck these people are. Why are they thinking like this? You don’t want to give up on that task. I think it’s a tricky issue when it comes to journalism.

I always tell that CIA story at the beginning to say journalists are not indifferent to the men and women serving us. I found as a correspondent that, in private conversations, I sometimes found myself defending the Reagan administration even when I disagreed with it. I wouldn’t necessarily present myself as agreeing with it, but when I ran into what I thought was stupid anti-Americanism, I would be offended, and I was an American. In my journalism, I would try to be as balanced and fair in presenting the war to my readers back home and around the world as I could, but I still felt like an American when I was overseas.

Feature Photo: cc/(Michele Ursino)