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AP®︎/College US Government and Politics
The media and partisanship
John Dickerson shares his views on how changes in media have influenced the national discourse over time with Sal.
John Dickerson is co-host of CBS This Morning. He was previously CBS News' Chief Washington Correspondent, Political Director and anchor of Face The Nation. Dickerson is also a contributor to Slate's Political Gabfest and to The Atlantic. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Dickerson moderated CBS News' two presidential debates. Prior to CBS, Dickerson was Slate Magazine's Chief Political correspondent and covered politics for twelve years for Time magazine.
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Is it possible that all of these very astute observations will be dismissed by those on the right? The right seems to be more nationalistic, less tolerant of just about any other sector that doesn't look and think like they do, oblivious to environmental issues and the impending crisis that climate change is going to bring, willing to seat a petulant, non-distinguished jurist to the Supreme Court with the sole purpose of dismissing the future charges that will be forthcoming against a corrupt chief executive, and the list goes on. 10/18(8 votes)
as one of the people in the middle I have to say the main reason we are less active is because we don't see any candidates who represent our ideals. the parties have all the power and if your views don't align with them than voting feels like choosing the less of two evils. at the same time I feel very strongly about politics, I just don't have a way to share my voice without dedicating a lot of time and money to it, and I do have goals and aspirations that don't involve being a politician that feel more achievable. y'know like winning the Hugo award. because the idea of me being able to cause radical social and political change is more absurd than becoming a respected science fiction author.(1 vote)
Video transcript
- So John, when our nation was founded there was media. It was essentially newspapers. How has the evolution of media affected the evolution of political discourse? - At the beginning of our country the editors of the rival newspapers, there was no middle of the road newspaper, you were either for one or the other, you were either a Federalist or you were the Jeffersonian
Democratic Republicans, as they called themselves, and the editors were at each
others throat so violently, they would sometimes get
in fights in the street and knock each other down. And you had lawmakers who were supposed to be men of virtue as
all men in those days would be leaking documents. Alexander Hamilton,
the Treasury Secretary, and Thomas Jefferson,
the Secretary of State, would leak documents to
their favorite papers in order to attack the other. And eventually George
Washington had to come in and say knock it off fellas, because this isn't good for the country. So the bitterness carried out in the press was with us from the founding. What changed over time is
that it became interestedly, newspaper particularly, to
appeal to a larger audience. That means you didn't want
just the left or the right. You wanted both. So that created a tradition,
along with a few other things, where there was an attempt
to give just the facts, a kind of middle of the road perspective. We are changing from that now, where the economics of covering the news and the digital change
where you now can have anybody speaking and
gaining access to the public has created a situation where you have a more partisan press now, and we're in the middle
of trying to figure out where that's going next. - This is interesting
because a lot of people when they talk about well,
not it's getting polarized and partisan, the good ol'
days when you got the truth, the wisdom from Walter
Cronkite or whoever, but what you're really
talking about is maybe what's going on now is a
little bit of a reversion back to where we started. - That's right. In terms of the partisanship of the press it is a reversion towards
the early days of America, and in terms of the partisanship
of the individual members of Congress or of the White House. What is a little bit different
is that the call to virtue, which would snap people
out of their partisanship, is still up for grabs. The founders, when they
fought like cats and dogs during the early years
of the administrations, Thomas Jefferson was best
friends with John Adams, and essentially then
hired a newspaper writer to undermine Adams when he was president. I mean, this was a very dirty pool. The argument they were making
was our country is new, and what is at stake is the very survival of the American experiment. So they were fighting for real stakes. They weren't just trying
to primarily keep power. They were really trying
to make this flower bloom that they had just planted. So now the question is
what role does virtue play in the American experience
to pull people away from their partisanship? To make them work together
for common interests? And what is that shared
area of common interest? What pulls them away from, what the founders knew,
people would behave like dogs sometimes, but they thought
they could pull away if they thought about the common interest. Well, is that pull still there? - So there's a lot of talk
these days about polarization of the media or polarization
of politics in general. How much of it do you
think is due to things like social media, or do
you think it was inevitable? - We've always had polarization
in American politics, but there was a dose of something else, which was a call to a
higher American ideal. And also voters would vote on
people based on their virtue, on their larger than life statesmanship, which was not partisan. So you had to keep a balance. If you were being highly partisan, you kinda did it in quiet. What's changed now with
social media and also with the flood of money
in politics is that it has encouraged people to
be more and more partisan. The louder and hotter I
talk on a specific issue the more money I'm gonna be able to raise, the more interest groups
are gonna like me, and the more clicks I'm gonna get because I'm the one making
the most flamboyant noise. The problem is that means the arguments are always containing flamboyant noise. And the people who want a calm
steady measured conversation, well, they're not getting
read on social media. They're not in charge
of the interest groups that pay millions and millions of dollars. So the system encourages
people to stay apart, and that's one of the biggest challenges Secretary of Defense, James Mattis, says it may be the greatest
threat to American democracy, that polarization. - Do you see a way of
this getting resolved? Or does it get worse? Does it get better? - There have been periods
of American history where we have been this split. Obviously the Civil War was
a period of great rending in the American fabric. What changed it was an actual conflict. So that, God forbid,
would be one way to do it. Another would be if there
was a threat to America from outside its borders
and people would feel an acute sense of national
pride and patriotism. But other than that there doesn't appear to be at the moment a quick fix for what is a complicated problem
for why the two parties have gotten into a inescapable fight that they can't seem to
get themselves out of. - It's like we need a
shock to remind ourselves how much commonality there is so all of the polarizing
quibbling goes away, or at least gets covered up a little bit. - Big changes in American history usually happen from a shock and it's what breaks people out of their behavior, and also which tells a lot of the people in the rest of the country
who don't participate in presidential elections
and don't participate in congressional elections, it reminds them that
something real is at stake. And there is a vast group of Americans who really want solutions in the middle, who don't care about the
bickering and the ideology. But a lot of them don't
participate in politics. And so the kind of shock
that would make people behave who are partisans
is also the kind of shock that would draw in people
who are just apathetic and not participating
in the political system.