The 2011 Goldsmith Awards and keynote by Frank Rich

yes good evening everyone my name is david elwood and i want to welcome you to the john f kennedy junior forum here at the harvard kennedy school those of you that are veterans of this particular evening know that this is one of the great nights of the year it's a great night because in no small measure because we honor the people that do some of the most extraordinary and important work in our democratic nation there are people that put a lie to the frequent concerns that the press is dead soon we've all been replaced by a twit or a tweet or something that facebook can bring down governments and therefore is all we need in exchange for a free and effective and independent media it's also an opportunity to honor some people that have done exceptional work and to recognize their their spectacular ideas our honored guest tonight frank rich of course is someone who has contributed really a lifetime of remarkable service in many different re um ways and is off to start the next chapter of that remarkable lifetime but i'm sure we'll hear more about that later um but i want to start by commenting on someone who we lost this year walter shorenstein uh who um walter and and his wife phyllis really made all of this possible they're the reason why we are here tonight because 20 years ago the schwernstein's created the center for press politics and public policy then the jones jornstein center for breast politics and public policy or has been changed slightly over time in memory of their beloved daughter and the schwerenstein center of course promotes very serious probing analyses about the news media about politics and how they interact in critical ways uh in this country and well beyond and increasingly the shorenstein center is taking the lead in its activities to understand what the next generation of media is going to look like what do we do in a world where the print media or even the television media have been replaced by other kinds and forms and so on how do we go forward walter was a truly visionary man he was the energy behind much of what we did indeed it wasn't a good week when walter didn't call but he was always pushing the school and the center to be at the forefront to think about the next idea to figure out how to make the world better and of course his generosity extended well beyond harvard's walls um he was is it was he he did things varying from uh keeping the san francisco giants in his home in his hometown uh to fine arts in contemporary asia and i'm told that he was the single largest donor to united way imagine the single largest donor but it's been an enormous pleasure to work with walter over the years and so forth and now i'm very very pleased to say that we are joined tonight by his son doug right over here and his daughter-in-law lydia and their granddaughter danielle all three here so we have several generations of florences yet to come [Applause] so let me now turn our turn the podium over to the lawrence m lombard lecturer in press and public policy alex jones alex says i think all of you know is the director of the uh schwernstein center uh he covered the press for the new york times from 1983 to 1992 and was apported to pulitzer prize in 1987. in 1991 he co-authored with his beloved and late wife susan tift the patriarch the rise and fall of the bingham dynasty in 92 he left the times to work on the trust the private and powerful family behind the new york times also co-authored with susan and it was a finalist for the national book circles uh circle award he's been a neiman fellow at harvard a host on national public radios on the media and a host and executive editor of pbs's media matters he's on all kinds of journalistic boards ranging from the committee of concerned journalists uh to the black mountain institute the neiman foundation and many things in between but most importantly he is a man who brings a deep and abiding belief in the fundamental importance of this institution which we variously call the press the media and everything in between he has led us in our understanding of where we are and i think he will help lead us where we're headed uh though god knows where that is uh in the years ahead but i would also say one other thing that i have the opportunity to make many introductions and and many descriptions of people when i because of my role here as dean of the kennedy school but i always regret i always have a twinge of concern when alex comes up because he's way way better at that and so setting those expectations high let me now introduce alex jones this is one of my favorite nights as david said it is a very very happy night for the shorenstein center it's the night that we get to celebrate the kind of people that we most admire who do the kind of journalistic work that i'm very glad to say is still being done it's the 20th anniversary of the goldsmith awards this year and i look forward to this this event this night every year with a special kind of pride because i feel that the schwernstein center and the kennedy school at harvard really do through the goldsmith prizes do something for journalism do something to bolster it and it needs bolstering as i think you will all agree the goldsmith prize is something that has a very interesting history bob greenfield then a philadelphia lawyer had a client named berta marks goldsmith who had told him of her intent to leave him her entire estate him her lawyer her entire state he declined to accept it and when searching for a good way to use the money for a purpose that berta would have approved of she was passionately interested in good government and followed the news very carefully and she was particularly outraged at misconduct by people with public responsibility eventually bob connected with marvin calb the schwerinstein center's founding director who i'm glad to say is with us tonight and the result was the goldsmith awards in political journalism which includes the investigative reporting prize book prizes fellowships and the career award thank you to the greenfield foundation of which bob is chairman and to the board members and to the family the greenville family is really most remarkable and i'm very glad that many of them are here tonight mike greenfield who serves as a goldsmith judge and his wife elaine wang jill greenfield feldman bill and joni greenfield ben greenfield and bill epstein also here barbara and charles kahn who are foundation trustees without the greenfield family's support and continued good faith this night would not be possible and i'd like to ask the members of the greenfield family and those associated with the foundation to stand so that we can express our things one of the pleasures of this night for me has long been the chance to publicly thank the man principally responsible for the existence of the schwerenstein center you heard from david about walter shorenstein he died last year at 95 and while his body finally failed him his mind was sharp and his will strong right up until the end walter made his fortune in real estate by harnessing a bottomless supply of drive and optimism those same things plus an enduring passionate concern for his country marked his life it was this public spiritedness that led him to endow the shorenstein center as a memorial to joan his daughter who died very much too young of breast cancer she was a journalist at cbs walter has now been succeeded by his other children doug and carol carol is a tony award-winning broadway producer doug is chairman and ceo of the shorenstein company and chairman of the federal reserve bank of san francisco in his eulogy at his father's funeral doug said that the two things of which walter shorenstein was most proud were his family and the shorenstein center on the press politics and public policy that is our legacy and we are determined to keep that pride intact doug and his wife lydia and their daughter danielle are here as david said but i want to ask you once again to raise your to clap your hands in favor and in thought and in thanks for the shorensteins the first goldsmith awards are the book prizes and making those presentations will be my colleague tom patterson the bradley professor of government in the press here at the kennedy school thank you alex we award two goldsmith goldsmith book prizes each year uh one for the best trade book in the field of press and politics the other for the field's best academic book but first i want to thank the judges who picked the tonight's books alex was one of them mary unjust matt baume and i was the fourth judge on that committee service on the committee has a perk you get a large large stack of books free many of them quite excellent we're here tonight to pick the best two or to talk and recognize the best two as we all know the traditional news media faced shrinking audiences and declining revenues any number of possible solutions have been proposed new platforms new ownership structures cost and staff sharing between news organizations foundation grants even government subsidies the winner of this year's goldsmith book prize in the trade category has a different suggestion he argues that journalists need to better understand their audience drawing upon recent studies in neuroscience jack fuller a pulitzer prize winner and the chicago tribune's editor and publisher at one time argues that today's information-rich environment has changed how audiences think about information and that understanding this change is a key if journalists are to recapture their loyalty he calls for a more emotionally rich type of news coverage one that is strong in its storytelling and compelling in its content and yet one that remains faithful to journalists obligation to inform the public what's happening to news is filled with ideas and insights bill covich says this of the book it is one of the most interesting innovative and important new books on journalism of the past decade the award committee agrees jack fuller please step up to accept your goldsmith book award in the trade category for what's happening to news the award committee tries its best to break thai votes this year we were unable to do so in deciding upon the goldsmith academic book award winner not because we had a two to two deadlock on the committee but because we were unanimous in thinking we had two extraordinary books that should receive this award one is when politicians attack in it ucla professor tim grohling shows that journalists are not equal opportunists when politicians go on the attack journalists tend to discount attacks aimed at the other party those are routine and not especially newsworthy attacks that occur within a party are a different story journalists perk up on those occasions tim growling's research helps to explain why a political party that controls both the white house and the congress has trouble protecting its brand party squabbles within the congressional majority or between it and the white house are sure to make the news think chuck hagel and george w bush on iraq thank ben nelson and barack obama on the health care bill the book lends support to ronald reagan's 11th commandment no republican shall speak ill of another republican any partisan who attacks another of the same party is likely to show up on the evening news tim grohling please step forward to receive the goldsmith award for your remarkable book when politicians attack the other goldsmith academic book prize goes to davidson college professor patrick sellers his book cycles of spin examines how congressional leaders craft their messages and how journalists respond the book was a massive undertaking patrick sellers analyzed more than 20 000 public statements by members of congress and more than one million news stories from a dozen national news outlets and from top local newspapers in 43 states he uses this and other evidence to tease out the complex relationship between issue selection and position taking in congress media coverage of these developments and citizens response to the coverage cycles of spin is by far the most comprehensive and sophisticated study ever done of strategic communication in congress the book is must reading for anyone interested in understanding the complex relationship between journalists and politicians patrick sellers please come forward to accept the goldsmith prize for cycles of spin hey it's all yours it's now my honor to introduce each of the six finalists for the goldsmith prize for investigative reporting which i shall do in alphabetical order by news organization this year's competition was extremely competitive i'm glad to say in these difficult times for journalism one might fear that the quality and ambition of investigative reporting would be in decline but that was definitely not the case in this year's entries in addition to mike greenfield the judges for this year's competition were sandy rowe the distinguished former editor of the portland oregonian and past chairman of the pulitzer prize board and presently a fellow at the shorenstein center nico mele a leading expert in the area of social media founder of echo ditto a web consulting firm and a member of the kennedy school faculty mark greenblatt a goldsmith finalist last year and a prize-winning reporter for khou-tv in houston and anthony williams the william h bloomberg lecturer at the kennedy school and former mayor of washington d.c in january after long deliberation the judges select the six finalists and also the winner we announce the finalists at once because part of the purpose of the goldsmith prize is to call attention to the kind of investigative reporting that all the finalists are exemplary at and to inspire others to do the same we announce the finalists early so they can publicize it so the word can get around and people can recognize that there's a lot of very very fine work being done but we don't announce the winner until tonight so it is with great pleasure that i describe the six finals each of which in its own way was regarded as extraordinary the first goldsmith finalist is the las vegas son for do no harm hospital care in las vegas by marshall allen and alex richards the series do no harm began with the realization that people in las vegas with some frequency went to the city's hospitals and bad things happen that were not from the diseases that sent them there these things included preventable injuries infections caught while in the hospital surgical mishaps including deaths and they found that government regulators and hospital administrators and doctors the people who should know were not able to measure the risk that one took simply by checking into a hospital it turned out that at some hospitals that risk was very high indeed in the course of its investigation the sun discovered thousands of cases of preventable harm including 365 deaths in nevada the paper by dogged reporting and sophisticated analysis accomplished what the government could not achieve in eight years identifying and publicly reporting the preventable infections and injuries in las vegas hospitals as you might expect these revelations were not welcome by the hospitals many of them stonewalled but the sun pressed on and slowly the truth began to emerge and the hospital walls began to crack eventually 2.9 million records were crunched but the stories were not just statistics they were human ones with human faces and they were stories that came with an elaborate and ambitious online component it is important that you know that the las vegas sun is not published like any other daily that i know of it is essentially a news rich eight-page publication inserted every day into its arch-rival the las vegas review journal this was the scheme that allowed the sun's owner brian greenspun who is with us tonight to keep it alive as a second newspaper in town and another part of that scheme was to create a web presence that was hyperlocal and also hyper sophisticated which was used to help add muzzle velocity to the sun's hospital reporting an array of web elements not only made the information easily accessible but invited more and more citizens to engage the issue to tell their own stories and to push the city's hospitals to come clean and improve the impact was profound both from people who had been harmed by hospitals and from hospitals who were pushed and prodded into becoming transparent in a way they never had may i ask marshall allen and alex richards and also the publisher and owner of the las vegas son brian greenspun to rise and be saluted for do no harm bell california is one of those independent municipalities within los angeles county like beverly hills only bell's population of about 37 000 is mostly poor and latino it is located between downtown l.a and long beach and few and flew comfortably under the radar of anyone's notice until jeff gottlieb and reuben vivas of the los angeles times got a tip that the city's leaders were collecting exorbitant salaries so they went to bell city hall and asked to see the city administrator who refused to come out of his office then they asked to see employment contracts and minutes of council meetings and were told that it would take time so they called and called again and began to get the idea that they like other such people who had made such inquiries were being stalled and deceived but they pressed on and when they got the information they understood why the city administrator had been so reluctant he was being paid nearly eight hundred thousand dollars a year his assistant nearly four hundred thousand the chief of police was getting close to half a million and all the city council members which was a part-time job paying a few hundred dollars a month in cities of comparable size were on the gravy train for a hundred thousand dollars a year public fury brought the resignations of the top administrator his assistant and the police chief but that was just part of the story in subsequent stories the la times staff revealed that bell had one of the highest property taxes in the country that the city made income by aggressively impounding cars and squeezing merchants for arbitrary fees and the victims were mostly poor latinos who were often undocumented and afraid to protest throughout the investigation the city stubbornly withheld documents and prohibit employees from talking but as the times investigation ground on the results were sweeping the la county district attorney's office began its own investigation which resulted in the administrator's arrest along with seven other current and former city officials the state comptroller's office ordered cities and counties to post official salaries on the internet and found that bell had overcharged residents 5.6 million dollars in property taxes sewer fees and business licenses perhaps most important the stories about bell have inspired watchdog groups and newspapers across the country to begin asking the hard questions about how much public officials are paid oh and in a bow to popular culture bell has become the answer on jeopardy for the name of the city that is a byword for brazen municipal venality please join me in recognizing the outstanding work of jeff gottlieb ruben vives and the los angeles times staff laura sullivan's three-part series on the nation's bail bond system on npr began this way more than half a million inmates are sitting in u.s jails right now not necessarily because they're dangerous not because the judge thinks they're flight risks not even because they are guilty they haven't even been tried yet they're sitting in jail for a basic financial reason they can't make bail sometimes as little as fifty dollars some will wait behind bars for as long as a year before their cases may get to court and the cost to tax players taxpayers to house these folks most of whom are non-violent men and women charged with small crimes nine billion dollars laura sullivan spent a lot of time digging into the realities of the bail bond system and what she found was not a slip shot in shady enterprise in which people without means fell through the cracks but a powerful industry that protected its own interests at the expense of defendants their victims and taxpayers she told the story of leslie chu a texas handyman who can't read or write and usually slept in the back of his battered old station wagon one chilly december night when the station wagon was cold he stole four 30 dollar blankets from a grocery store and promptly got arrested as he was walking out of the store when laura interviewed him he'd been in the lubbock county jail for 185 days more than six months he hadn't been convicted of a crime he hadn't even been tried but he can't make bail he would have required a cash deposit of 3 500 and a 350 dollar bail bondsman's fee if he had the money he could walk out the door but as he said it was like a million dollars to me the point of laura sullivan series that is that in the united states if you commit a crime and have money you get out of jail quickly you almost immediately can go back to your job your family pay your bills work fight your case and according to national studies you face far fewer consequences for your crimes than people without money that's the fairness issue but then there's the taxpayer issue the nine billion dollars spent to keep people like leslie chu locked up because he can't make bail also locked up in the lubbock jail with chew is doug curington who stole a television from walmart he's been in jail when she's talked with laura talked to him 75 days and an estimated cost to taxpayers of 2 850 dollars it would have cost him 150 to get out on bail both chew and curington have lost their jobs while they've been sitting in jail 20 years ago nationally and in lubbock it wasn't this way most defendants were released on their own recognizance trusted to show back up and the vast majority did show up but the bail bonds interests have done all they can to prevent such programs and to thwart other efforts to secure release of prisoners without the bail bond in the bail bond fees that are their rice bowl it turns out that two-thirds two-thirds of the people in the nation's jails are non-violent offenders who are there for only one reason they can't afford bail the series prompted a huge outpouring from npr listeners many asking how to send money to the people in sullivan's stories and some even including cash with their letters this is old school journalism wrote one listener passionate clear moving the fourth estate as it was meant to be you made me cry with frustration recognition and relief that somebody is finally telling a national audience what we economically exploited folks have silently witnessed for years please join me in saluting laura sullivan of npr for of npr for behind the bail bond system when the american economy melted down explanations for what had caused it were initially along the lines of a hundred year old hundred year flood an unforeseeable disaster that took nearly everyone by surprise from homeowners to politicians to bankers propublica npr's planet money and chicago public radio's this american life jointly set out to investigate that theory and the reporting assignment went to jesse eisinger and jake bernstein of propublica the first story in the series was published in april and detailed how in the run-up to the crisis the hedge fund magnatar with the help of major banks drove the creation of 40 billion dollars worth of complex securities and then bet against many of them as part of a strategy to profit from the declining housing market they created them sold them to suckers and then made big financial bets that their value would collapse magnatar made hundreds of millions of dollars when these securities did what they appeared to have been built to do they tanked it took isinger and bernstein months of canvassing hundreds of people to penetrate the magnetar veil and to find the small handful of people who had first-hand knowledge and were willing to discuss what they knew as one banker said when confronted with what he had done i deserved to be fired for this when the story hit the impact was immediate the sec sued goldman sachs for securities fraud in a similar case a week later lawsuits were filed the case was cited on the senate floor and the wheels of financial reform such as they could be turned began to turn another story in august scrutinized the banks themselves and it too got the attention of regulators and in a final piece in the series which is a case study of merrill lynch it had merrill lynch had to be sold because of defiance of inter internal risk controls in stockpiling tens of billions of dollars in unhinged hedged on hedged hugely risky securities when those securities collapsed so did merrill lynch and it was sold to bank of america throughout propublica worked with its radio partners at planet money where a 40-minute radio segment was produced that tied together this complex story and made it accessible then this american life his ira glass as you probably know is the person behind that and ira glass became involved and recognized that the magnatar story had eerie parallels with the plot to the musical satire the producers in which producers find a play that they think is certain to fail and sell it again and again and again the gullible investors he commissioned a pair of showtune composers to write and perform bet against the american dream which caught the attention of among others frank rich our goldsmith career winner who will speak later tonight a huge effort was made to simplify without distorting and among the storytelling devices was an easy to follow comic strip and a brief but chillingly hilarious music video that generated more than a million views on youtube the goal was to find out what had happened and then make what happened something that people without a finance background could understand mission accomplished please join me in saluting jesse eisinger and jake bernstein of propublica adam davidson of npr's planet money and ira glass and alec bloomberg of chicago public radios this american life california seems to be an especially ripe place for doing the kind of investigations the goldsmith prize seeks to recognize the corruption of bell was corruption of a mammoth scale at a local level karen dessave the san jose mercury news tackled something much different and truly profoundly disturbing her investigation grew out of the insight a newcomer to covering the state legislature in sacramento had noticed and been appalled by that it was commonplace for lobbyists not only to push their favorite legislation but to actually write the bills and then present them in committee in other words there seemed to be a virtual takeover of the legislative process by lobbyists that went well beyond undue influence to put a factual stamp on what she perceived karen methodically scrutinized every one of the 9 000 bills introduced in the california legislature in the two recent legislative legislative sessions she determined that 37 percent of them of all the legislation fell into the unique to california category known as sponsored bills these are bills not simply pushed by special interests they are actually written by them lobbyists find legislators to carry their handiwork showering the politicians with contributions and gifts and in many cases the lobbyists present the bills to the committees themselves and they line up votes with remarkable success more than half the bills signed into law over the two sessions she examined were the handiwork of those outside sponsors it was one of the most original exhaustive and important examinations ever done by the mercury news and it documented in unassailable fashion how completely private interest sponsors had taken advantage of largely inexperienced legislators to push their own desires at the expense of the public interest the inexperienced point was something else that karen explored how much did california's term limits laws matter did term limits mean that there is always a healthy crop of new and inexperienced legislators ripe for the plum plucking she did an analysis of a legislative session 16 years earlier before term limits and she found that the term limits rules had in fact increased the power of outside lobbyists with a marked increase in sponsored bills since term limits went into effect given california's dire financial situation the series had huge impact and was reprinted all over the state as doug heller executive director of the california organization consumer watchdog said her reporting had framed an issue that had been grossly unattended and grossly ignored la weekly compared her to diana goddess of the hunt everybody else covering sacramento for the past decade was just a bit of sleep almost all of the time they said the series prompted widespread public response and there are stirrings of reform and even for changing term limit rules and as everyone acknowledged karen desan the san francisco mercury news had done a great service to california please join me in recognizing karen desal of the san jose mercury news for how our laws are really made ah for their report top secret america dana priest and bill arkin of the washington post spent two years plumbing something that was almost impossible to plumb and was intended to remain that way they found a vast top-secret enterprise a mosaic of people and technology hidden in plain sight so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine they found a world so unwieldy and so secretive that no one knows how much money it costs how many people it employs how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work they found an alternative geography of the united states unknown in all its dimensions even to its creators and administrators what they found was that in the decade after 9 11 a nexus had formed that was a new version of the military-industrial complex that president dwight d eisenhower had warned about half a century earlier this time it was an enormous ecosystem of military intelligence and corporate interests spawned to keep americans safe but remaining astonishingly unaccountable from their reporting which was handicapped because much of what they saw was highly classified priest and arkhan discovered that more than 850 000 people in this country now have top secret clearances to work on counterterrorism and homeland security issues for nearly 1300 government organizations and almost 2 000 private companies in in more than 10 000 locations this massive expansion costs on the order of 75 billion a year relies heavily on corporate private contractors and has almost no checks on redundancy or measures of effectiveness to find out what was underway required building a database from the ground up priest and arkan dug through public records many of them classified a dungeon dozen digital journalists worked on the project for months creating videos and interactive vehicles that would make the reporting accessible reaction to the project was unprecedented at the post top secret america's content on the website got three million page views in three days newspapers around the world reprinted the stories on their front pages congress got involved the stories were used to question the incoming director of the office of national intelligence which had discouraged the post from publishing the information in the first place secretary of defense robert gates launched an effort to evaluate and downsize the pentagon's huge but redundant programs the cia is in the process of transferring many contractor jobs back to federal employees the senate intelligence committee has taken up several of the themes launching their own inquiries which continue most important top secret america made transparent information that prior to the series was not understood or known not by the government and not by the public please join me in saluting dana priest and bill arkin and the washington post for top secret america we now come to the moment when we announce the winner of this year's goldsmith prize for investigative reporting i think you will agree that every one of the finalists would be a most worthy winner and i ask all the finalists to stand once again so that we may applaud their work and encourage them to keep at it it is my pleasure and honor now to award this year's goldsmith prize for investigative reporting to marshall allen alex richards and the las vegas son for do no harm hospital care in las vegas [Applause] this is [Applause] [Laughter] okay as most of you who gathered here tonight know last week frank rich announced he was leaving the new york times after more than 30 years as one of the paper's most prized assets like many of you i suspect for years i have had a standing appointment with frank every sunday morning on the times editorial page so this news hit me hard as a times veteran who loves the paper i was also aware that his departure would be akin to tom brady leaving the patriots frank has been for decades one of the times is franchise players but as i thought about it i began to see that this was very much in the tradition of the way frank rich's restless mind and appetite for new challenges works he is hungry still wants to do more and different still and he has done something quite similar before in 1994 at the peak of his fame as the times chief theater critic he decided to change his perceived power to open or close broadway shows for the power to torment presidents of the united states in an op-ed column at the time it seemed unthinkable that he would make such a move after all he had built his career around cultural coverage he had been a film and television critic at time magazine and before that a film critic at the new york post his magna laude ba from harvard was in american history and literature but his passion since childhood in washington dc was for the arts something he wrote about movingly in his memoir ghost light he told in that book how as a child of divorce he had found a refuge in theater particularly broadway's golden age after being enchanted by bells are ringing when he was seven he wrote that i was now destined to trace my childhood almost exclusively through an accelerating progression of plays good and bad that would captivate and kidnap me and 38 years later he becomes chief theater critic of the new york times by that time his taste was sharp and refined and his powers of analysis and his pure writing talent were at flood tide he became arguably the most powerful and feared theater critic the times had ever had perhaps the most powerful and feared critic period he could be that enchanted seven-year-old again when he saw something that stirred his passionate love for theater something that was never in doubt and when he found something mediocre or worse he could be merciless the butcher of broadway he was called that when he had unleashed that frank rich judgment in a brutal negative but even his critics acknowledged albeit grudgingly that he was almost always right it was this frank rich who had won over his critics and also won the utter loyalty of his admirers who shocked everyone in 1994 and announced he was going to leave theater and write about politics for five years his column was on the op-ed page and then he became the first times columnist to write a regular double length column something unprecedented but necessary to keep him at the times he had grown confined with the single column space he wanted room he wanted change last week when i read about his decision i felt that same restlessness at work frank rich's extra-long sunday column has been the scourge of presidents be they democrat or republican it has week after week enraged some readers thrilled many more and been appointment journalism he made his critiques based on fact and his columns were usually unusually i would say rich in reporting he was incisive penetrating sometimes mean sometimes almost sentimental always irresistible frank has announced that in june he will join new york magazine as an essayist writing monthly on politics and culture you will serve as an editor-in-law at large editing a special monthly section anchored by his essay you will also be a commentator on newyorkmag.com engaging in regular dialogues on the news of the week he will be reuniting with adam moss new york magazine's editor-in-chief and one of the most imaginative and ambitious editors in the nation and an old friend and colleague of frank's from the new york times this is a very big day for new york adam wrote in his gleeful announcement of frank's decision frank rich is a giant a powerhouse critic of politics and culture a rigorous thinker a glorious stylist a skeptic and optimist at the same time there is no one like him in american journalism tonight we are awarding frank rich the goldsmith career award for excellence in journalism we had thought it was to celebrate his career at the times and it is but it is also to mark the raised curtain of yet another career another chapter and one that will no doubt be just as tumultuous and exciting and important our career winner frank rich i'm gonna take a picture thank you it's nice to be at the set of the social network um i am greatly honored to receive the goldsmith career award tonight and it's particularly delightful to be here with my friend and former times colleague alex jones and to be celebrating at the shorenstein center excuse me i am sorry i never knew the much admired and much missed joan schorenstein but i did know her father walter and know how much he cherished his role in furthering this center's invaluable contributions to america's national dialogue about the news media politics and so much more my own career in journalism began not too many blocks away at the height of the harvard turmoil of the late 1960s and early 70s i was on the crimson and wrote for and edited its editorial page the first professional journalists i ever met were neiman fellows of that time the times reporter tony lucas and larry l king a stalwart of harper's magazine in the era of its legendary editor willie morris it was a terrible time for america but an exciting one for journalism the country seemed to be collapsing under the weight of the vietnam war the summer after my freshman year brought the assassinations of dr martin luther king jr and robert kennedy as well as the riots of chicago universities like this one were buckling in the political fallout college papers across the country could grab their own parts of the national story and did the differences in procedure if not substance between journalism then and now are of course astounding the crimson for instance still had hot type with a typesetter or two working into the night after which we'd read proofs before giving the signal to start the clanky rolling of the press in the bowels of our plimpton street office i don't think it occurred to any of us that there would ever be newsrooms without typewriters and the accurate smell of ink and clouds of smoke smoke i might add in the case of a college paper in the 1960s when not necessarily from cigarettes we also strongly believe that journalism was an honorable calling a crucial pillar of our democracy watergate and woodward and bernstein had not quite yet arrived but just in our own backyard and the confrontations between demonstrators and the police in harvard yard and the student strike that followed we had history in the making to cover we investigated the fissures and failures in university governance that were exposed by the ensuing chaos and the reforms that followed my harvard commencement week coincided with the times's publication of the pentagon papers the times brave stand in punishing and publishing the secret history of the vietnam war and defiance of the nixon administration's efforts to shut it down was a beacon for us as were other glorious examples of american journalistic history from the muckrakers the progressive era to the courageous reporters and editors of the civil rights era a number of my fellow crimson editors went into the profession me included without for a second questioning either the profession's merits or its prospects for survival or its ability to provide us with a decent if hardly extravagant living one of my friends on the crimson was the dazzling mike kinsley and his career is as good an indicator as any of the dizzying changes that have occurred since after school mike went into print journalism notably at the new republic and harper's before branching out into a career in television punditry at cnn's crossfire but by the mid-1990s he was getting restless and to the surprise of almost everyone announced that he was decamping from washington d.c to the other washington seattle to start an online magazine publication web zine no one knew what to call it then at microsoft it was soon named slate few in the business his friends included knew what to make of it and some felt threatened when mike wrote an op-ed piece on another subject for the times after moving west in 1996 the paper's editorial page editor who will remain nameless refused to let him mention slate's web address in his italic author's identification the times didn't want to give this internet fad too much credibility mike rightly pulled the piece perhaps the most amusing fallout from mike's move to seattle was that newsweek put him on the cover posing with a big flopping fish at pike street market newsweek of course was owned by the washington post company now slate is owned by the washington post company and a few months ago the post sold off a decimated and unprofitable newsweek for a dollar the times got over its web phobia fairly quickly and now has a website as dynamic as the paper itself at its best which to my mind is as good as newspapers get but the times a unique institution in america is one of the lucky survivors of what has been a tumultuous era of change and even it is still wrestling with how it can make newspapering a profitable business as paper itself inevitably slides away in the digital age that question how do you make money when information yearns to be free hovers over an entire industry including television journalism and even the web itself already the casualties have been many whether you look at the network news operations or at most american newspapers beyond the times in the wall street journal or at news magazines like newsweek and time where i worked in the last gasp of the pre-time warner era the near extinction of foreign and even domestic bureaus is shocking without on the news grant on the news without on the ground news gathering how can there be journalism no matter what the delivery system whether a full-fledged publication online or off or a broadcast or webcast or twitter feed or facebook page or whatever without the often slow and costly process of investigative journalism how will we ever know what is really happening in our government or in corporate america or even in our local civic institutions these are some these are business riddles that some very smart people are trying to crack i have some confidence that they will succeed even as papers as we know them change beyond recognition and network television news as we know it fades with its rapidly aging audience but the answers will not come overnight there will be much trial and error and some journalistic institutions will suffer as many already have yet it's the history of modern communications that the most apocalyptic predictions of doom a feature of every period of traumatic technological change don't come true television was supposed to kill radio and for that matter the theater and movies when it transformed american life in previously unthinkable ways in the late 1940s and early 1950s but the other media did survive smaller in some instances but often smarter indeed npr sparked in part by its innovative journalism is one of the greatest success stories of recent years reaching new peaks and listenership even in the post-television internet age assuming that there is a market for news that is accurate and comprehensive and i believe strongly there is one the news business will eventually flourish no doubt in business models we can't quite imagine yet does anyone remember how people laughed when there was first talk of pay tv in the 1970s free television had been an inalienable american right since the birth of the tube no one would have believed that in a relatively short period of time most americans would be paying for television sometimes even voluntarily when it came to premium or specialized programming as to the content of journalism as opposed to the economics there is much to be excited about for all the gloom that's endemic to newsrooms especially these days in this regard let me speak for a second about the times which i can do perhaps more objectively than ever since i am moving on from the paper next week in almost every way i can think of the times that is being produced today even with all the various economic exigencies of recent years is superior to the one my friends and i were devouring in the crimson newsroom four decades ago that was a two section paper with sporadic in-depth investigative work bare bones business and sports coverage and almost no coverage of the culture of american life as opposed to its official business the lively writing the so-called new journalism that was then flourishing at harpers clay felker's new york harold hayes esquire john wender's rolling stone and before that in the recently defunct new york herald tribune had barely begun to filter into the times gray pages the kind of vivid reporting both in depth and then the quality of the writing that the times has brought most recently to its coverage of the roiling revolutions of the middle east simply didn't exist back then on a regular basis in the times or any other american newspaper looking beyond the times it's not hard to find countless other examples of journalistic enterprise some of which again build upon and surpass those of the pre-digital era certainly all the nominees tonight are perfect examples of this and other examples turn up in odd and and very disparate places whether it be an online scrappy online news operation like talking points memo or two relatively new organizations bloomberg news and huffington post that are bulking up rapidly or even at the new york review of books an establishment print institution born during the strike that downsized the new york newspaper industry for keeps in the 1960s the variety of voices today in all these places is more diverse than could have been imagined even a couple of decades ago yes this is also the age of fox news but the fox news audience is a self-selective and self-contained constituency that tunes in because it knows it will get the entertainment product it wants partisan cheerleading sponsored by a major political donor with many of his party's own leaders and potential national candidates on the payroll as so-called news personalities few sentient viewers will wander into his programming by accident and be brainwashed into believing they are watching real news fox viewers are there by choice precisely because it reaffirms their own reality and won't challenge it if fox affects other news organizations only to the extent they allow themselves to be goaded into sinking to its level when they do so they should be held accountable no less than fox this isn't to say that even our most responsible news institutions old or young are infallible the failure to vet the propaganda campaign that took america into war in iraq is a black mark on the nation's journalistic history including at the times but the times and some of the others who made similar mistakes learned from this failure owning up to the errors and making significant institutional and personnel changes to try to fix what was clearly broken the greater transparency that has spread since that fiasco whether in the form of public editors at news organizations or more importantly in the broader array of checks and balances that online scrutiny brings not just to news organizations but all other institutions in the wiki era all of this is a major change for the better it's hard not it's hard to believe that not long ago most news outlets didn't even have a daily listing of corrections what also gives me hope is simply the sheer number of smart brave and determined young people who want to go into journalism not a week goes by when i don't hear from or meet college students or recent graduates who are just as story-eyed as my cohort was back in my crimson days they have swallowed the same kool-aid we once did and refused to listen to their elders bleak prognostications about journalism's future they do however want to rethink journalism for a new age as well they should indeed among the reasons i chose new york magazine for my post op-ed journalistic home with its innovative translation of its print vitality to the web so much so that the times was moved to hire its web designer to take over nytimes.com next month of course back when i was in the crimson we were determined to reinvent journalism too and indeed my first real job in the profession was to join with some alumni from various college papers to create an iconoclastic muckraking weekly newspaper in richmond virginia the richmond mercury only lasted a few years but it did at least a few things that that stodgy old confederate capital hadn't seen before and it shook up or at least jostled some of the city's entrenched power structure right this minute there are experiments like ours going on everywhere you look whether in so-called traditional media or in new media none of us could have remotely imagined back then but with the same underlying aim of holding the powerful accountable and of exposing stories that might otherwise never be told as i happily and proudly accept the goldsmith award tonight i do so with the absolute certainty that many more accomplished journalists will be accepting this honor in the year to come thank you [Laughter] frank has agreed to ask to answer questions there are microphones here and up here and so forth if you would line up at the microphone and uh identify yourself and please make it a question and not a a a statement or or a sermon especially and i'm going to take the liberty of asking the first one which i would suspect is on just about everybody's mind you had in your platform of the on the op-ed page in the sunday new york times perhaps as powerful a voice and place to express your views politically as is imaginable and you've decided now to give that up to go to new york magazine how did you what did you see what do you see that you're heading toward frank that persuaded you to make a choice that you have made well some of it you described in in in your introductory your lovely introductory remarks first of all i've never been interested in the so-called power a lot of which is i think exaggerated in any of the jobs i've had in journalism but uh i do bump up against the forum and want to keep having creative experiences as a journalist and a writer and i could have kept on being drama critic uh until i retired and i could have done the same in this job i actually did this one to my amazement 17 years three years longer than i was drama critic but i felt uh i wanted to leave it when when i was proud of it and i wanted to write about the same things um longer deeper i hope better fresher and without the gong of a deadline essentially every five business days hitting me in in the neck and so i've i've been thinking about it for a couple of years and about a year ago i started talking to friends of mine in in the journalism business as well as friends and and editors of the times about uh what i wanted to do next and uh in the end the choice was pretty clear to me adam moss uh who took over new york magazine relatively recently six years ago and sort of restored it to the clay felker legacy and is now going be beyond it was one of the two most creative editors i've ever worked with in journalism the other is one we both worked for at the times arthur gelb who hired me at the times and adam had an instrumental role actually in inventing what became my op-ed column to begin with i was chafing at the bit drama critic i started trying out columns including at the times magazine where he was the editor and in fact completely reinvented that magazine it's now being reinvented again several years after he left and he always had he had ideas that pushed me and i i wanted to be pushed again i wanted to my passions haven't changed politics and culture and i'll write about many of the same subjects i hope add some more to the mix but i really wanted to write more and and less less preoccupied with sort of the bottom line opinion which is sort of the way i felt when i left theater criticism it's not interesting to me as a writer to uh not like the bush administration or not like the musicals of andrew lloyd webber as the case may be in my odd career um what because those opinions opinions are cheap anyone can have those opinions and they can be right or wrong and can be debated what interests me is is indeed constructing an essay and trying to learn something and trying to convey a bigger argument and connect the dots in general of politics and culture a big lesson for me was last summer bob silvers another great editor who has edited the new york review of books since its beginning asked me to write a piece about obama it was a peg two of john john alter's book i had no time to do it uh the job is so relentless but i sort of eked it out over four or five weekends it was a 4 000 word piece my column the times is 1500 words and there was nothing in that piece that i i couldn't have written in the op-ed column for the times but just to having the room to really develop an argument better not be glib which column writing no matter in a newspaper forces you to do because of the deadline and the controlled space i found kind of exhilarating and it convinced me i was already on this path that it was time for me to uh hang this up all while i still enjoyed it and while there was still time to have another act hi i'm joel ingardio i'm a mid-career student at the kennedy school president obama has said that his views on gay marriage are evolving but he's not there yet i'm curious how you got there i mean what is the evolutionary process that an intelligent liberal straight man like yourself must go through before accepting that gay relationships are equal to your own well it's a very apropos question because it again involves involves two things first of all it involves the theater um when the aids epidemic hit um and was invisible and people were dying uh hidden the word aids actually for too long time could not even be mentioned in the new york times uh while i was there you couldn't use the word gay for many it was shocking one place where it started to surface all a bit clandestinely was the new york theater while i was covering it people started dying mysteriously in fact the first person i knew of died of aids i'm not even sure it was called that it was a classmate of mine from harvard not from the crimson who i knew casually was a press agent in the broadway theater but then artists started dying and i thought here's a whole sort of civil rights issue i grew up in washington d.c race and all those issues were very familiar to me this was very unfamiliar and as a kid i'd worked in the theater i'd been a ticket taker for a broadway tryout house in washington i realized that there were gay people all around me some of whom actually i put in my memoir ghost light who were like parental figures to me in real but who never told me who they were it wasn't even talked about when i was an undergraduate at harvard i never knew anyone who was openly gay obviously there were gay people here um adam moss of all people played a crucial role in this adam i never heard of him it was before he came to the times was a young editor at esquire during one of his good periods and he called me up out of the blue and said i want you to write a piece about how what straight culture makes of gay people this was right after rock hudson died it was as the aids crisis was really exploding i didn't want to write the piece it was a long 10 000 word piece i was covering you know one bad play after another and you know had to get keep my attention on moose murders and things like that um but uh he was insistent he was a kid he was in his 20s i didn't even i'd never heard of i literally didn't know him from adam um i also didn't know that he was gay which he happened to he did not tell me that uh until after i had turned in a first draft for the piece and uh so it had a big influence on me and also and i so i it captured me as a subject and has ever since and indeed it was that piece published several years before i left the drama critics job is exactly what started me on the path of realizing the cultural stuff i was writing about had larger political intersections with the news and other things and so so that's so it's sort of all come from full circle the gay marriage piece or same-sex marriage piece of it is a relatively from my point of view minor it's a big political fight but it's a minor aspect if you believe in fully cl equality for for gay people then of course they should be uh have the same rights of marriage that uh i think what you hear from obama and many politicians whom i suspect are much more sympathetic to this point of view than they want to let on is a kind of political dance you know during the the 2008 campaign uh john edwards doesn't remember him he was he was um i'm sure he had many great appearances here but he he uh he was against same-sex marriage and some other gay rights issue and elizabeth edwards went on television said well i'm further along than my husband is and our children are further along and obama's sort of doing that that stance but i think it's all kind of a charade and i think it's happening you know it's not going to happen overnight but it's happening pretty fast i've and i feel very uh excited about it and invested in it both as an american and as someone who's devoted a lot of time to covering it and is necessary it will continue to vote energy to cover it mr rich about a year ago you did a column in which you tried to link the tea party demonstrators on capitol hill with the perpetrators of crystal knocked now some may think perpetrators of what perpetrators have crystal knacked oh some may think you went too far but i encourage you to keep up the rhetoric spare no expense you can link them with holocaust and genocide people on the right but it only serves to discredit you and i find it amusing the same goes for your attempts to smear republicans and tea party demonstrators with the stench of racism i'd like to ask you this question i have a question can you imagine what rhetoric you have engaged in had tea party people engaged in the kind of mob mobocracy attitudes and and displays that we've seen in madison lately what what what rhetoric would you have spared any rhetoric in characterizing and denouncing and smearing tea party people who demonstrated thank you for your question right um i you know that's first of all i don't think that the rhetoric that's been going on in madison yes they're they've hitler is all the rage now there's no question about it and we've thanked particularly glenn beck i think who has done more to resurrect hitler as a sort of joke trope than anyone since mel brooks but uh the mat you know the madison demonstrations on both sides both the tea partiers and the labor people are rowdy they're not that rowdy and they're not as rowdy as what happened here for instance in 1960s and the rhetoric is a pretty standard issue on both sides frank if i may before we before we end i want to ask you as a political uh pundit commentator and uh prognosticator if you will at least put on that hat for a moment when you look ahead at 2012 obama will be the nominee for the democratic party who do you think is apt to be the the candidate for the republicans and how do you see the the election shaping um i'm i'm very very uh loath to predict so i'm gonna do this and and i really it always comes back to haunt you and i think but to answer the second question first republicans obviously do not have a candidate so we do not know who the candidate is the the establishment front-runner mitt romney has one problem people just don't like him uh and they uh uh and they and and he you just remind me when john connolly ran for president and spent all that money and was on the cover of time to the former governor of texas and then got like one one delegate you know people just and so he he's clearly the establishment candidate of the republican party but he has a lot of problems because of his version of shall we say obamacare up here and everything else and then you know huckabee i think is leading the polls has anyone is the financial base of the republican party going to invest much of which is on wall street invest in mike huckabee i wonder um anyway i just i think that's a problem and i think what's going on is conservative commentators and conservative establishment is realizing they've got a problem so every that they don't really have any they don't have a horse now one could emerge you know and as we know from jimmy carter or even barack obama uh people can emerge much somewhat later than this but there's there's clearly no front runner um and it's i think it's probably obama's toulouse but you know anything can happen in politics in a week as i'm sure is is on the walls here somewhere so uh uh it's it's full what part of the fun of it is not knowing what's going to happen that's why it's fun to write about good luck thank you very much i have i got a note that told me that uh stephen drummond who is here who is the producer of the npr segment that laura sullivan did was here i was not aware that he was here and i didn't call his name but any of you who know anything about radio know that the producer is an extremely important person so steven stand up [Applause] i also want to publicly before we break i want to thank especially allison comer who organizes this event for the shorenstein center along with all the staff at the shorenstein center this is a big day and they've done a great job thank you tomorrow at 10 o'clock on the fifth floor of the belfor belford over here the bell hall we will have a a survey of investigative reporting featuring all of the finalists that you've met here tonight at least in a tangential kind of way they will be there to talk about the the state and future of investigative reporting it's always a fascinating event i thank you all i congratulate all the finalists and the winners we're very glad to have you and we're very proud of this event i hope you are going to be here next year to join us for more thank you very much good night foreign you

Channel: Harvard Kennedy School's Institute of Politics

Views: 127

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Keywords: Endowed Lecture, Goldsmith Awards, Media & Journalism

Id: BN1EU5J7qPc

Length: 93min 6sec (5586 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 22 2021