Why Are There No More Walter Cronkites?
EPISODE 6: Judy Woodruff, longtime anchor for PBS and CNN, and Chris Stirewalt, a former political editor at Fox, join the Governors to discuss the role the media plays in our democracy
Trust in the news media is at an all-time low. This distrust contributes to both our political polarization and the spread of misinformation as Americans look to alternative sources of information for their news. For the final episode of Season Two, Judy Woodruff, longtime anchor of PBS Newshour, and Chris Stirewalt, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and former political editor for Fox News, join Governors Bredesen and Haslam for a wide-ranging discussion about the role the media plays in our democracy, the future of local news, and where we go from here. This episode was recorded at AEI in May 2023.
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“A red versus blue concept that was not accurate, wholesome, helpful, or healthful”
Stirewalt, who got his start covering local politics in West Virginia, recently wrote a book called Broken News, and opened his conversation with the governors by elaborating on how we got to our current “broken” state. “Well, people wanted worse products,” he said. “This is a demand-side issue. This is not a supply-side issue. It’s not like people are out there saying if only I could get more boring, balanced news, I would do it.”
What helped create that shift in demand? Stirewalt highlighted two concurrent factors: the rise of cable television, and the internet. Cable created the first “bespoke media experience,” allowing viewers to pick and choose what they watched, he told the governors. And the availability of information online, for free, undercut the local and regional newspapers that had been “the backbone of the American news business for 200 years.”
Ultimately, those factors helped create a situation where “national politics got washed over the country in a red versus blue concept that was not accurate, wholesome, helpful, or healthful,” he said. “People were keeping their eyes on Washington instead of what was in their community.”
“I’m not a computer, I’m a human being”
Woodruff, a longtime Washington, DC-based journalist who spent more than a decade at CNN and most recently served as the anchor and managing editor of PBS News Hour, talked about covering Howard Baker when she first arrived in DC as a White House correspondent for NBC News.
“A term we do not hear very much today is bipartisan. It was completely common to see Senator Baker talking with Democrats, working with Democrats. It didn’t mean he didn’t have strong views. He certainly did. And you knew it when you were in a conversation or an interview with him, and he felt strongly about something. But he was always able to listen,” she said. “I just found him delightful, bright, smart, brilliant at politics and respecting the other side of an argument.”
Woodruff noted that one of the questions she gets asked a lot is if it is possible to be truly objective in her reporting. Her answer? “I’m not a computer, I’m a human being, so I can’t be purely objective. I have views, I am the sum total of all my experiences,” she said. “What I can do and have to do as a reporter is to make sure all sides are heard and to try and be as fair as possible in presenting a story…I just try to keep my views out. And that’s all any reporter can ultimately do.”
“The genie’s out of the bottle”
Where do we go from here?
“I don’t see a silver bullet…the genie’s out of the bottle,” Woodruff noted, cautioning that any change or solution is going to take time. “To me, the only way we [the press] even begin to regain the trust of the American people is to do our jobs, to be humble about it, not to act as if we have all the answers and we know everything… Just every day to work really hard, to look across the landscape, think about what are the stories the American people need to know about, in our best judgment, and then report the heck out of those stories.”
Woodruff noted that she has become “a preacher for local news,” and said she encourages folks, if they have the opportunity, to support their local news organization. “These organizations are there, they’re doing good work, but we need to support more of them,” she said, citing the Texas Tribune and Mississippi Today as two standout examples.
Stirewalt acknowledged that despite the fact that “most of the things in the news are things you cannot do anything about,” the pure volume of news can be anxiety-inducing. He encouraged people to get outside of their comfort zone and read and watch a mix of sources and opinions different from their own. Being aware of and understanding different perspectives is critical to a healthy society, he noted.
“If you do not have a healthful media diet, it is a fundamentally unloving act to your fellow American because you are not in a position to be a partner in self-government with that person because you don’t even know who they are,” Stirewalt said. “If you’re a Republican and all you do is watch Fox and read Breitbart, and if you’re a Democrat and all you do is watch MSNBC and read The Huffington Post, you have no idea what Republicans are thinking, or you have no idea what Democrats are really thinking.”
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