cc >> Frederica Freyberg: I am honored to be here to facilitate this conversation
with the esteemed Gwen Ifill. Before we turn it over to Gwen, a little insight from here at home.
On Here and Now a couple of weeks ago we interviewed former Congressman Dave Obey. He told us that he believes that
the polarization in this country is worse than he has ever seen, and it isn't just politics, he thinks, but society is also in
the same boat. He tells us to take a look at what happens in the television people watch.
He says if you're a liberal you watch MSNBC; if you're a conservative you watch Fox. He says the people watch media
outlets that reinforce their own views and don't listen to the views of others. Obey says societies don't work
that way over the long haul and neither do political systems. Both Here and Now producer Andy Moore and I had to
our heads when Obey said that. We also had to agree that Wisconsin Public Television seems like it's among the last
news outlet standing that works for bridge that polarity. We are serving the mission. We feel like it's a sacred trust
to inform and engage viewers across this state, be they liberals, conservatives or somewhere in the middle.
We work diligently to tell both sides, all sides. Andy Moore offers these thoughts.
He says consuming political news is like taking a walk through a fully operational car wash. [LAUGHTER]
That's so Andy, isn't it? [LAUGHTER] Nuance and depth are lost in the noise and the spray
of social media, blogs and talk radio hosts eager to tell you what you already know or agree with.
It's no accident, he says, that one of Wisconsin's current US Senate candidates announced his candidacy on talk radio.
The reality of bias in the media, Andy says, has nearly overtaken the perception of it. We work every day to preserve
the craft of journalism, the act of taking facts that don't always go well together and turning them into truth.
Wisconsin Public Television shares this mission with PBS, and today we are privileged to be joined by one of its very
best. Gwen Ifill is moderator and managing editor of Washington Week
and senior correspondent for the PBS NewsHour. She is the best selling author of The Breakthrough: Politics
and Race in the Age of Obama. Before going to PBS, Ifill was political correspondent for NBC
White House correspondent for the New York Times and political reporter for the Washington Post.
A graduate of Simmons College in Boston, Ifill has received more than a dozen honorary doctorates, and so I welcome
Dr. Gwen Ifill. [APPLAUSE]
Gwen Ifill: Thank you. [APPLAUSE CONTINUES] Thank you. Thank you, Frederica.
She has been our guide at the NewsHour to Wisconsin. [LAUGHTER] For the last year or so whenever
we would sit there in the morning we'd say did you hear what happened in Wisconsin? [LAUGHTER]
Let's see if Frederica is available. [LAUGHTER] And she would give us some sort
of guidance about what had happened and leave us less confused than before. Everywhere I go, it's really fun
to travel the country and get out of our bubble and talk to people, but everywhere I go, I tell you, I learn something new.
Now I know how to get Washington Week on a television set in a bar. [LAUGHTER]
You buy the bar. [LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE] My mind broadens every time. [LAUGHTER]
I'm also happy to be in Wisconsin today because, if you can believe it, it's snowing in Washington in October.
so I get to tell all my friends, "Oh, snow? I went to Wisconsin to get away from it."
[LAUGHTER] Not bad, not bad. I'm going to talk for just a few minutes about my love for what I
do and what we all do. It's nice to be in a crowd where I don't have to sell us. I know that you're members of
the choir. But also it's kind of good to be reminded from time to time how we come to be and why we're
valuable and why I could be doing anything else but I'm doing this. As you heard in my bio, I
started, wake me up in the middle of the night, I'm still kind of a newspaper girl. When I was still in single
digits, not that I'm that much older now, but when I was in single digits I wanted to be a reporter.
I wanted to write. I wanted to ask questions and be nosy. I wanted to have a deadline
because I could never get anything done. And the idea of working in a newspaper was very appealing to
me. I liked everything about it. I liked the smell of the ink, newsprint.
I liked the fact that it landed on people's front steps. I liked the fact that it had a byline so I could get credit
for the work I did. And so I started out early on knowing I wanted to be in newspapers.
I got to college and I knew I wanted to be in newspapers. I tried out advertising. Nah.
Tried out radio. Not so much. I tried out television. Absolutely not.
Hated it. Thought it was shallow and lacked depth. [LAUGHTER]
We come full circle, don't we? [LAUGHTER] And then when I came, I did that for a while and it
was fine, and I worked in Boston at a newspaper and then I worked in Baltimore at a newspaper and I loved every minute of it, and
had I went to work in Washington for the Washington Post, I started covering national politics and that was a lot of
fun. I got to, as the lowest person on the totem pole, I got to actually travel around the
country covering the candidate who was about to lose. [LAUGHTER] So whenever I walked into
a room, there would be this, oh, no, she's here. [LAUGHTER] It's like the angel of death.
[LAUGHTER] When I went to work for the New York Times I got the chance to cover a candidate
who actually won, who was Bill Clinton in '92. Little did I know that was going to be a roller coaster that took
me all the way through 1994, because there were always banana peels when it came to Bill Clinton that he would hit.
And there are some of us who still compare our scars all these years later. If I hear "Don't Stop Thinking
About Tomorrow," I get chills. [LAUGHTER] Things I still can't do. But it was a perfect job.
It was covering the White House for the New York Times. Every now and then they would invite me on Washington
as a panelist, which my idea was a great idea. First time I'd ever done television was on a
reporters' roundtable called Maryland Newswrap, which was a baby Washington Week, where we sat around
about the news of the week in Maryland. So to me public broadcasting was a great place to go to do what I
now encourage people to do on Friday nights which is empty my notebook. Explain why things happened,
how they happened. And I would do that, I would do Meet the Press. These shows were great for
getting phone calls returned. There were two things that happened in my life. When I would call people and
interview them, they would often think, oh, she seems fine. And then I would meet them, and I could tell a lot about them by
how they responded. [LAUGHTER] It was always, "Oh, you're Gwen Ifill?
You don't sound, I mean..." [LAUGHTER] So you can always use that to your advantage.
[LAUGHTER] But also after I started working in television and I was outed, as it were, people began
to return my phone calls, because they saw me on these television shows talking sense and not talking smack.
So when I decided I was going to-- So I was happy. I was all set and then Tim
Russert, my friend and mentor, dared me to do television full time. We have him to blame for all of
this that's happened since. Because I said I'm really happy, Tim, I don't want to do that all the time.
And he said, well, you know, are you chicken? [LAUGHTER] Or something like that.
Some Irish version of "Are you chicken?" [LAUGHTER] And he finally talked me
into trying it. And he promised to be my mentor and to protect me and to make sure that I had what I needed to
learn television. And he did for five years at NBC News, and then he did another favor, which showed he was a
friend as much as a boss, which is when PBS came knocking, he looked at my contract, I was still under contract at NBC, he
flew to New York and he said you got to let her out of her contract, so she can do this because this is important.
And he could have kept me there. He could have said, no, honest to goodness we got a legal hold on you, but he made it work so
that I could pursue my dream. And my dream, in this case, was a job I couldn't turn down which was to work for the
and host Washington Week. It's a job that cannot tell you how jealous my other reporter friends in Washington are and
I just smile mysteriously and don't turn my back on them. [LAUGHTER] Because things could happen.
[LAUGHTER] It was an offer I couldn't refuse and I never, ever, questioned my decision to do it.
People say, really, you left commercial television to go to public broadcasting? Wasn't that a step, don't you
have fewer people watching? I said yeah, but they're smarter. [LAUGHTER]
I'm not sucking up to you, it's true. It's reached the point now producers love to go with me
around the country because if I just walk in a crowd and stand still, somebody will walk over to me and say something smart,
we start the camera rolling and I'm done. [LAUGHTER] I was in Ohio not
long ago where you may have heard they're doing something similar to the trouble that you created here in Wisconsin.
The difference being that their legislators came back more quickly, and they actually passed a law which is now on the
ballot for repeal. And I was at a, I think it was an apple butter festival a couple weekends ago, I love my
job, and I'm wandering around and we talked to all these people who think this is a bad idea but we know we need to talk
to someone who thinks this is a good idea. So I said, okay, let me pull my trick.
And I stood there for a moment. Then I walked over and bought some apple butter. And the guy selling the apple
butter, the farmer said, "Oh, I know you." I said really? What do you think about issue
two? He said, well I don't like it very much, or I like it very much.
Whatever it was I needed him to say, he started saying smart stuff. We rolled the camera, went home.
[LAUGHTER] And I got some apple butter out of it too. It really worked out well.
So the combination of opportunities has been perfect for me because by the time I sit around on a Friday night in what
I call my sandbox where I invite all my smartest friends to tell us what they know, not what they think, what they know,
I'm having fun. And if you're having fun too, an ideal program for me feels like your eavesdropping on a cool
dinner party. You've been at dinner parties which were not cool and where you think how did I get seated
next to this guy? You don't want that. I will tell you the places you can go for that kind of dinner
party on television. [LAUGHTER] On ours it's kind of like you're hearing things the way
you hadn't heard them before. My goal in doing this is to explain why politics matters to people.
A lot of people are sick of politics for good reason, often. There seems to be, as we were talking before, this car wash
mentality. I love that, by the way, I'm going to use that. Don't tell him I said that.
He's here? Uh-oh. [LAUGHTER] But it's true.
There's so much going on. There's so much heat and so little light that people think to themselves, why should I
bother? So our task, not only on the NewsHour but also on Washington Week, is to say,
okay, this is why it counts. This came to me naturally. I grew up, even though I look like I was born just yesterday.
[LAUGHTER] I grew up when the Civil Rights Movement was in full flower. My father was a preacher and he
marched in the Civil Rights Movement. He brought home this notion that what was happening out there
mattered to us. What we saw on that television, which I am sad to say was black and white at that point, that
what happened on that television had a direct effect on what was going to happen in our lives, little black kids growing up in
the projects in some cases. And so as a result I always saw the lie, the connection between what we do, how we say it, how
we tell it and why it matters. And I always had this belief that government had an essential and impactful role in our lives.
A lot of people say the government just gets in the way. I think sometimes it does but I also think sometimes you can
listen and you can put your ear to the ground and if it doesn't do what you need it to do, it is in part you're fault because you
have not invested in the government that's around you. It affects all of our lives. It then brings us to the front
row, which is where I always wanted to be. I wanted to be sitting there and asking those questions.
It didn't occur to me until many years later that often people will not answer your questions. [LAUGHTER]
Which, you know, what are you going to do? But it doesn't mean don't ask and it doesn't mean you don't
trust the audience to understand when you're questions are not being answered. I believe being a front row to
history is not just an ego trip. It's that I'm a stand-in, I'm a funnel for you, and that you're sitting at home saying but why?
My good day is when I beat you to that question. When I beat you to following it up.
And the hardest part, and Frederica will back me up on this, in doing an interview is listening to the answers.
My great fear is that one of these days I'll be interviewing someone, I'll have a list of my questions and they'll say and
then I killed my wife, and I'll say uh-huh... [LAUGHTER] And next...
[LAUGHTER] It would be terrifying. So that doesn't happen but what does happen is that you have to
come prepared. You have to come prepared ask and prepared to listen and prepared to know when news is
being made. My very, very, very first news job in Boston, Massachusetts, they sent me off to cover the
school committee which in the '70s was wrought. There was busing fights, there were desegregation battles, and
I went it cover what was supposed to be routine school committee meeting. And as I sat there, there was
all this gobbly gook and bureaucrats, and then everybody leaped up and ran from the room.
I sat there thinking, okay, something happened here but I have no idea what. And so this very nice man who
then saved my career. He was a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor and I know his name,
Lewis Overby, to this day. He stopped at my chair on the way out and said you might want to go follow the story.
They just fired the superintendent. Which I saw my life pass before my eyes.
This wasn't a good thing. I did not see this coming and I had to go and recreate, then do what I should have done in
advance, learn the story, understand the relationships, understand what politics played in this decision and write a
story which ended up leading the page one of the newspaper the next day. I learned from that moment that
you have to not only listen, but comprehend. And that's what we're trying to get you to do.
Now, when I worked in commercial broadcasting, I would do this in a minute and 10 seconds, a minute 50, two minutes if it was
in-depth. [LAUGHTER] See what I'm saying? And that's a really hard one.
In public broadcasting, we don't have the resources we could have. The resources we have are thanks
to you but we do have the time. And that time is actually invaluable. Hello?
[LAUGHTER] Mr. President, I can't talk right now. [LAUGHTER]
Tell Michelle-- Yeah, I'll be in touch. Thank you. [LAUGHTER]
And public television it's where all these things come together. It's where the questions are asked and hopefully they're
answered and we have the time to follow up, to listen, and to press for an answer. We understand we're not
representing ourselves. We hope you don't know what we think. We hope we're representing you.
We hope that we're giving serious attention to serious questions, whether it's learning how to count on Sesame
whether it's learning how the Senate counts on Washington Week. I hear a lot from our viewers,
and I never hear enough, but what I hear often is a frustration with where we are right now in our politics and
our discourse, not just in journalism but also in our public policy. And it seems to me we can't give
up. We can be frustrated, we can, I'm an optimist so I think it's a cycle and we're going to work
our way around. I think it's been nastier than it is now. There were no swords, last I
checked, being pulled out on the floor of the House or the Senate, and that has happened in the past, but I do think that we
have a vested interest in understanding and knowing and being poised to ask the right questions and not just throw up
our hands and walk out. So we have this moment in Washington where were at this interesting crossroads.
There was this moment of excitement in 2008 in which a lot of Americans, whether they voted for him or not, were kind
of proud that America had done something kind of daring, something certainly I didn't expect.
You have to understand that one of the reasons I'm not a pundit is I never see it coming. [LAUGHTER]
I didn't see Bill Clinton getting elected even though I was there every day, and I did not predict Barack Obama.
So don't ever go by me. If you ever here me by accident say I think this is right, tell me you must know I'm wrong.
[LAUGHTER] But the point is that you're listening enough so that when it unfolds you know what it means.
Somewhere is there to explain what it means or to put it in some sort of context. The book I wrote a couple years
ago about breakthrough candidates, it was the fulfillment of just that philosophy for me.
I had been gathering string, as reporters say, inadvertently for years, kind of gathering information about different
people I had covered until I looked up and realized in 2006, hey, there's something in common with all of these people I had
discovered and stumbled across along the way. The people I had met when I was covering the school committee in
Boston and worked with the people I met when I covered city hall in Baltimore and the suburbs of Washington and the
city hall in Washington and every presidential campaign which is they were people who were, especially the African
Americans, who were children of the people who had marched in these Civil Rights marches. Their parents had sat at the
lunch counters. The kids didn't know what the lunch counter was anymore, and yet they were walking through
the doors that had been open for them. So I thought there was a way to tell their story and especially
in the context of a 2008 campaign where it looked like, at the very least, that Barack Obama was going to make an
impact on this. It was great. It was a very good way to view the campaign, even though, it
should be said, you may recall during the 2008 vice presidential debate I came under some assault for this by people
who said, you know, I think she's writing a book with the word Obama in the title, so she must be biased.
Really? And did any of them read the book after it came out? No.
[LAUGHTER] You know they didn't because they all fell silent. One thing I learned after years
as an African American in this business is that a lot of things will be presumed about you, and it's just your job to do your
job and prove them right or prove them wrong. Hopefully the stuff they presume that's good, you prove them
right; the stuff they presume is wrong, you prove them wrong. So we're in this wonderful moment where everybody is
feeling pressured. Democrats are feeling pressured. Republicans are feeling pressured.
Americans are feeling pressured. We're at a time in which people don't know whether their children are going to do better
than they did, which is kind of the most precarious moment to be at in American history because that always goes back
to the incumbent. Whoever is in charge, pays the price for the fact that Americans feel insecure.
The good news about this is it means these guys have to, and women, have to explain themselves.
They have to get up there ever four, every two, every couple, six years, and say this is why I can make your life better.
Barack Obama didn't get elected because he was black or because he wasn't black or because he was a senator from Illinois
and people were thinking about Abe Lincoln. He was elected the way people are always elected because he
made people think that he was more like them than not like them. That he shared in common their
concerns, and to the extent that he is not doing as well now is because he seems more removed from people's concerns.
And the challenge for the people who would take his job from him is they, now, have to replace that trust, that faith.
They have to make people think that they can do better than they're doing now. So we're in an interesting
moment. All the debates actually don't change. We're still debating taxes and
spending and abortion and immigration and affirmative action and the nation's defense abroad and our security at home.
Whoever becomes the next president is going to have to find a way to make a case that they are the best person to
carry those issues into the next four years. It's a challenge for those of us who ask the questions.
It's a challenge for them to answer the questions even though my mantra is that all news is good news.
So I'm going to take that and I'm going to run with that, and I'm going to hopefully get your questions tonight
and follow up on that too. I will take questions about anything except, well no, anything.
[LAUGHTER] Thank you. [APPLAUSE]
I'm going to anticipate one of them. Those of you who were at the civics club today know
what it is. Yes, I liked it when Queen Latifah played me on Saturday Night Live.
[LAUGHTER] It's extremely, extremely cool. And I'll tell you another story, too.
Monday night, probably I think the Mark Twain Award is going to run at Wisconsin Public Television, I was there at the
taping on Sunday night at the Kennedy Center, and they gave me the chance to introduce one of the clips that they were running
of Will Ferrell playing George W. Bush, which is very funny, let me tell you, but I'd never met Will Ferrell,
I didn't know Will Ferrell, but this was fun, I got to hang out with comedians and stars back stage and pretend
like I was somebody, not so much, and pretend to be a standup comic. Well, at the very end of it,
I'll give you a little hint, if you stay till the end you'll see this point. At one point Will Ferrell comes
out, he accepts the award and he does his little standup and I'm standing back stage with the stars and he says, well, you
know, he says to his wife, I love you honey but, you know, this is my night, I'm going to do whatever I want to do
tonight. If I want to leave here and I want to go down and climb the Washington Monument and go on a
bender with Gwen Ifill, I will. [LAUGHTER] And I would tell you whether I did that but then
I would have to kill you. [LAUGHTER] Okay, first question from you. "I appreciate your good humor,"
thank god, "who or what do you credit on how you do it in these contentious times?" You know, if we don't have a
good sense of humor about this, we might as well throw up our hands and cry. The truth is I don't think it's
worth laughing at most of it, but I think it's always worth having a sense of humor about ourselves for our part in it.
Some of it is just wacky. Herman Cain came out with an ad this week in which at the end his campaign manager was smoking
a cigarette for no apparent reason. That was wacky and we talked about that in our webcast last
night, and everybody just went, I don't know what that was. [LAUGHTER] That's funny.
But we don't want to laugh at things that matter in people's lives. But context is really important
because I really think that people don't respond well to us taking ourselves too seriously and being too caught up in the
idea of our own self-importance. Like I should break out a pipe somehow and tell you this is what you need to know,
my friends, on Friday night. I can't to that. Even though Washington Week used to do that,
not the pipe but the kind of self-importance. What we want to do is come in your living room as friends who
have explained it to you. I think one of the reasons why Shields and Brooks are so popular on Friday night, and
they are very popular on our program on Friday night, is because they're two people who disagree, they disagree with
information that they've gotten from actually talking to people other than their navels, and they like each other.
And it shows. And respect each other. >> It really shows. >> It does.
Get with it, girl. [LAUGHTER] She digs through and she gives me the hard ones.
"Are there plans for a successor to Jim Lehrer?" See what I'm saying? She's trying to get me in
trouble. If you've been watch watching the NewsHour for the past year or two, you've noticed
we've been in this interesting transition period. We went from the, those of you who go way back know we were
The Robert MacNeil Report, then The MacNeil/Lehrer News Report, then there's about four or five
then it ended up as, when I joined it was the NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Now, about two years ago
we changed it to PBS NewsHour, and that was part of Jim's master plan. Jim's master plan is that he
wouldn't retire, he doesn't use that word, but he would gradually step away from the anchor chair.
And it's really gone kind of flawlessly. What he did is he surrounded himself with a group of five
people who really get along, respect each other, like each and don't have sharp elbows. This does not happen in
broadcast television, let me tell you. And as he stepped away, more and more, sometimes he went
on speaking tours. When he wrote a book, you know, he writes a book a year. Shocking.
I don't know how he does that. Actually I do know. He writes every morning for two hours before any of us arrive in
the office. It's amazing. And then he would publish a book a year.
Travel to stations. Visit them. Sell his book. Come back.
Do his work. But each time he'd take a little bit more time off. So now the way we have emerged
is that there are five of us, as you know. It's me, it's Ray Suarez who does a lot of our global health
coverage, Margaret Warner who does fabulous work traveling to war zones, I'll tell you a Margaret Warner story in a
moment, Jeff Brown who is one of our co-anchors but also goes out and does arts coverage, amazing arts coverage.
Who am I missing? >> Judy. >> Judy, my friend Judy Woodruff, and me.
And we kind of just cycle in and out of the anchor chair. And you know what? People are kind of okay with
that because we didn't just replace him. So the answer is there is no replacement for Jim Lehrer.
But what we have done is recreated a program which now is something that you've never seen on broadcast television which is
a rotating cast of people who all have the same sensibilities. Now here's the Margaret Warner story.
She was in Egypt... She was in Egypt not long ago. Was it Egypt? Anyhow, there was an attack on
the Israeli embassy. It wasn't Egypt. Anyway, there was a huge fight going on.
It was Egypt. There was a huge fight going on and she ended up in the middle of it.
Now, understand, she's sitting in the car, her translator and fixer was out in the middle of the crowd and was being pushed
around and pushed to the ground and roughed up. A CNN producer who saw it threw himself on top of her and then
grabbed her, dragged her through the crowd back to the car where Margaret was and said, "Drive!" Margaret climbed over from the
back seat into the front seat and floored it and got them out of the mob. And later on when they finally
found their driver who they had left again, later he said, "You drive like American cowboy." [LAUGHTER]
It's a great, let me tell you. I love that story. I tell it over and over.
I gave her a cowboy hat when she came back. "When you know what is being said wrong, factually,
what do you do?" Well, you know, the key part of that question is when you know. Sometimes people tell you things
which are purposely not factual and say it in a way that it slips right by you. But when you know that it's
wrong, I think that in our setting the secret is to come back with another question. Someone says, well, of course
the world is flat. And you could say, what? Are you crazy? Everybody knows the world...
Instead you say, you're saying, sir, the world is flat? And if he repeats it then you say, okay, you understand that
many scientists say the world is round? And he'll say no, the world is flat and I believe in simplicity
and clarity and I'm sticking with it. And then you stop. Because you have made your point
to the viewers that the person is incorrect. You don't have to be rude about it.
You don't have to turn it into a story about you saying, aha, I have discovered you're wrong, but you've done your job which
is to make sure that people understand it. Now, the complicated part of this is that you don't always
know, or sometimes if you're not listening as carefully as you might, it will slip by you. But you try.
And I find that the hardest part is that there are so many shades of gray. People think we're searching for
the truth. We're actually just searching for the closest thing we can get to accuracy.
Because I don't know if there's something as a truth. And often truth is subject to people's opinions about what
they believe rather than what the actual truth is. There are many issues which particularly bring this dilemma
out. One of them is the Israeli/Palestinian conflict in which there is no truth that
either side will accept from the other. Another one is climate change, where there is a scientific body
of evidence but yet there are people who feel passionately in opposite of it. And so you negotiate it.
You let the viewer have as much information as possible and you try to the extent that you can, clear it all up, but sometimes
you just can't do it.
"What or who was the most challenging story or person you've covered? Please explain."
[LAUGHTER] Golly. So many. [LAUGHTER]
Let me see if I can pick one for you. It was challenging, it was challenging to cover
Bill Clinton. Bill Clinton, I covered starting in 1991 for the New York Times, because I had met him once or
twice when he was governor of Arkansas and he seemed okay. And I had learned from covering previous presidential campaigns
that if you're going to spend a long time on the road covering an individual you might as well not be bothered by them.
And he didn't bother me. He seemed amusing, interesting and smart. But I discovered, shortly after
beginning to cover him, that you could never wake up in the morning and be sure there wasn't going to be a scandal in the
newspaper that you had missed. And so it was exhausting. Whether he had decided not to go to war.
Whether he had told somebody he wasn't going to war. Whether he was ducking it. Whether there was another,
as one of his aides called it, bimbo explosions waiting under a rock. No matter what it was, there
always seemed to be some complication, mysterious land deals. And that was before he got
elected. [LAUGHTER] And so after he got elected you were kind of always
on edge because on one hand, there were things he was doing that were incredibly consequential.
On the other hand, there were things that were incredibly distracting. And you could never feel like
you ever had the complete story. Now the interesting thing about Bill Clinton now, of course, is that post-presidency he's turned
into a really kind of fascinating philanthropist and world leader in a way that many ex-presidents fall short of.
So, yeah, he's been challenging because you always have to be on your toes.
"How would you describe the republican candidates for president?" [LAUGHTER]
Well, there's eight of them. Where do I start? [LAUGHTER] I would describe them
as searching for purchase. We have an interesting election right now. We have every single poll
showing that Mitt Romney, who many people presume eventually, if he can survive this, will be the nominee, always getting just
under 25%. He never seems to go above. He never seems to go below. While he's doing this, other
people spurt around him. Whether it's Michele Bachmann, who jumped up at the Iowa straw poll, and even at that
straw poll people said to me, I really like her but if she doesn't win, it's okay and I'll go to somebody else.
They weren't expecting her to be the nominee but they were trying to make a statement. And then we saw Rick Perry
who I think spiked before he got in the race. [LAUGHTER] And then somehow actually
getting in the race seemed to have worked against him. And he's still struggling to get back.
Now, not to be discounted, because he's raised a lot of money and he's not going away. He's still a factor.
And now the latest spike is Herman Cain who has almost no money by presidential standards but has somehow caught the
imagination of a lot of republican voters. Now, the interesting thing to me about all of this is that it
tells us more about Americans than it tells us about these individuals. It tells us that people are
discontent, that they are looking for something to hold onto and that the one unifying factor among the republican
primary electorate is they want him to beat Barack Obama. And if they can find someone who they are satisfied might do
that, that's the person who I eventually imagine will win the nomination because even though you fall in love and fall out of
love with people who catch your attention or catch your fancy, or speak to you in a way that's appealing and genial and
accessible, in the end the one thing they all agree is they really, really do not like this president and want you to beat
him. And if they find a way, and republicans, in general, do end up rallying around, at least
historically, the person who is next in line. It's how John McCain got the nomination, when you think about
it. Bob Dole. So we'll see what happens. I think it's an interesting race
to watch not because of the horse race parts but because of what the rise and fall, or the rise and dipping, or the
steadiness of some of these candidates tells you about where we are as a nation and how ready we are to change the direction
that we're on. This is really hard work for you, isn't it? Just handing me cards?
[LAUGHTER] >> I've got to listen. >> Oh, okay, that's right. She's got to listen,
that's right. It's tough. [LAUGHTER] Okay.
[LAUGHTER] "Have you ever considered lengthening Washington Week to an hour?"
I consider it ever single week when I look up and go, oh, look we're out of time. I would love to.
This is something which we take to PBS, and your lips to God's ear, we would love to be able to provide an hour of good public
affairs analysis that maybe included interviews and other things which we would have in mind for an hour
on Friday nights. It is not up to us. It is up to individual stations. So, you know.
[APPLAUSE] It's up to PBS and it's up to us to get the money to do it. So, as always happens in public
broadcasting, it's not just someone saying I think I shall make you an hour. There are about 85 different,
and then of course I have to find another half an hour in my life, but I think it would be a lot of fun.
The other thing we like to do during an election year, and we won a Peabody Award for doing it last time, is take the show out
of Washington and do it in front of audiences and big cities. And we had a ball doing that last time and we were rewarded
for it. "Please tell us how you get participants on the panel for Washington Week ?"
I put a gun to their heads. [LAUGHTER] I offer them stunning amounts of money.
Not. You know, it's a really interesting process which I think we've gotten down.
We have about a couple of dozen reporters in our stable. They are people who cover all of the major beats in Washington,
and we keep track on a running basis, if you go to our website you'll see that every single day we post the stories they're
writing during the week, and we use that as a way of saying, okay, who wrote about Afghanistan this week,
if something happens? Who wrote about Pakistan? Who wrote about, you know, the super committee?
And my producers, I work at the Washington News Hour three days a week, Washington Week two days a week,
by Wednesday, I start getting emails. This is what everybody's working on.
This is who is in town. This is who is going out of town for a wedding or a bar mitzvah or an 80-year-old uncle's
birthday or just has a date. [LAUGHTER] And they tell me who's available, because
it's Friday night, what are you going to do? And we always have more people who want to come on, as you can
imagine, than we can get around that little table. But by Thursday we sit down and we start to kind of toss the
names in the air. Who's available? Who fits? Who's written the most
interesting story that nobody else wrote? Who is the kind of smartest person on the topic we want to
talk about that week? And then in the end we kind of toss it around with a little bit of fairy dust and come up with a
chemistry experiment. Who will be fun around the table with each other? When we try a new reporter, for
instance, who's never been on the program before, we make sure we have a lot of veterans with them so that they can make them
feel more comfortable around the table and include them in the conversation because what I'm really aiming for is a
conversation not a presentation. Not people saying this is what I know and I will give you my great thoughts.
I want there to be exchange around the table, which turns out is just a more delicate thing than you would think.
It requires me to be the person who knows what everybody else might say. I interview all, we settle on
four reporters. I talk to each of them that day, that Friday, and I ask them what do you want to talk about?
What do you know? What do you think? And much of the time they'll tell me things I didn't notice
in their stories or they'll say, you know, this is point I really want to make. And I will then show up with
10 questions for every panelist but they don't necessarily have questions for each other. And they're under strict pain of
Gwen rules not to talk in the green room when they're getting their makeup on because the worst thing that could happen is
they talk about the show so much beforehand that when they get on the air they say, like we were saying, you know.
[LAUGHTER] So they know on pain of Gwen they can't talk about it. But I do, I'll let you in on a
little secret, we do sit down just before we go on the air and we go around the table and say what would you like someone to
ask you about? And so John Dickerson will say be sure to ask me about what they were saying about
Herman Cain in Iowa. That's all. He's not allowed to answer the question right then, but he's
allowed to ask it because the person across the table may have spent the entire week worrying about Afghanistan and didn't pay
attention to Iowa. So we're helping them on to keep the conversation rolling, and when it works, it keeps--
And then when they don't do what we want them to do, or they don't bring up those issues, because I've talked to
all of them, then I interject and keep the conversation going. So the ball's in the air. "How difficult..."
What? >> Sorry, John's giving me hand signals over there. >> Am I getting?
One more question after this one. >> Okay, fine. He's being very difficult.
I can see. [LAUGHTER] "How difficult is it to be a woman in the news business?"
No more difficult than it is to the a woman in any business. [LAUGHTER] I went to a women's college
and didn't fully appreciate at the time all the things I was picking up from being in a women's college.
One of them was that I could raise my hand and somebody wouldn't shut me down. One of them was that I could be
a leader and it was a perfectly reasonable place to be. And even though, let's put it this way, women in television
get a lot more comments about their hair and makeup and earrings than the men do. [LAUGHTER]
Even though one of my panelists did walk in last night and say what do you think about this tie?
A friend from high school, she called me and said my ties are too boring. [LAUGHTER]
I said I have never heard a guy say someone complained about their ties. But women say all the time that
people talk about their looks. What you understand, what I figured out years ago is you just try not to be distracted.
You're trying to be what you can to tell the story. You don't want to get in the way of your story.
You'll never see me wearing those little party dresses they wear on cable. You know what I'm saying?
[LAUGHTER] Because I'm trying to tell you the story. I'm trying to make sure that
you're paying attention to what I'm saying and not getting so distracted by what I'm wearing, or how I look, or how I say it,
or that I'm flirting with someone I'm talking to, that you're sitting there thinking, "really?"
Does Gwen have a thing going with him? What's going on? What did she just say about
America blowing up? I don't know. [LAUGHTER] So to that extent,
that's the viewers, I have not reached a point where-- It's shocking to me, actually, that I am one of the few woman
doing what I do. It is surprising to me that when I first started doing Washington Week, that
Woodruff, who then was at CNN, and I were the only two women hosting political talk shows. I find that amazing to me.
Now there's more on daytime cable but still not that much on nighttime cable. And I think that's something
we hopefully can get over, but we're still kind of stuck in a white guy world, and what you want to do is know that you're
bringing something additional to the table. You're not just there because you're window dressing,
you're there so they can say you're there. You're there because the world view you bring, the veil of your
experience, the kind of questions you might ask, the kind of evasions you might hear are something that maybe
somebody else would not. That's the reason for diversity in the news business or in any business because you're bringing
something more. In addition to that, we're fast approaching becoming a minority/majority country,
a majority/minority country, so it really makes sense that we hear from as many different voices as possible.
And the final question. And I don't trust her to have picked it-- Uh-huh, yeah.
This is a question she wants the answer to, just so you know. [LAUGHTER]
"How often are your conversations with politicians off the record? And how do you use
this information?" Politicians I know say nothing is off the record. And to this extent, it's true,
which is no one is talking to you for fun because they like your face. They're talking to you because
they want to influence your thinking, they want to get their point of view in your brain and they use off the record to hide
behind it so their names are not linked to it. I find that kind of use not very useful.
I don't talk to politicians very much off the record. There are all these, in Washington, there are all these
layers of not for attribution ways of using information. There's off the record. There's don't put my name to it.
There's call me a campaign official but not a White House official, an administration official but not a campaign
official, it's very, there are many, many ways. I think, in general, every time that you don't identify someone
you're quoting, you lose a little bit of creditability. That said, I find it's very useful sometimes to be in the
presence of people I would otherwise not get to know, meet or understand in an off the record setting, not that I would
use on the air but it would inform my understanding of, I could tell you who it was but they were off the record.
Okay, fine, the Chief Justice of the United States. [LAUGHTER] So I would have no reason
to meet him. I would have no reason to talk to him. And he is still, even off the
record, not going to tell me anything about the deliberations of the court, but I would have reason to watch the way he
interacts, the way he thinks, and it just influences my understanding of him. I don't think that's bad but I
do think that when someone comes to you and says, you know, if Mitt Romney comes to me and says off the record that
Rick Perry is a real idiot. I'm not going to entertain that conversation with him. I'm not going to use
off the record to assassinate someone else. And I also know that when they say it off the record, they're
trying to put in the shiv without them having to be responsible for it. But I have to say that very
seldom happens to me in this situation, partly because so much of what I do is in front of a camera that it's on the record
for the world to see, and any conversations that I have that are not on camera I use to inform the conversations
that I have on camera. So, on that note, thank you all so much. [APPLAUSE]