Media, Politics, and the Next President
On the night of New York state’s pivotal primary, Groton School welcomed a panel of accomplished journalists to discuss campaign coverage and the media.
Speaking at the spring Circle Talk were CBS News Washington Bureau Chief Christopher Isham, BBC international correspondent Kim Ghattas, and Boston Globe columnist Joan Vennochi. Moderating the panel were the student heads of Groton’s Young Republicans and Young Democrats clubs, Adam Hauke ’16 and JP Neenan ’16.
“What makes this campaign unusual is the high energy of two insurgent candidates,” said Isham, referring to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders. “Two candidates opposed to the establishment—both have tapped into a great deal of frustration in America.”
Vennochi said that economic insecurity, general uncertainty, and the Obama years of Congressional gridlock have helped drive Trump and Sanders’ popularity. Wars haven’t curtailed terrorism or improved American prosperity, and Congress has been ineffective, she pointed out, making voters uneasy. “Instead of feeling secure, they feel less secure than ever,” Vennochi said.
The unease buoying two non-mainstream candidates stems from a global phenomenon, Ghattas observed. “The world in general is going through a period of great tumult, of great uncertainty,” she said. A Beirut native, Ghattas is reporting on a U.S. presidential campaign for the first time, although she covered Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State and wrote a book about her—The Secretary: A Journey with Hillary Clinton from Beirut to the Heart of American Power.
Some campaign tactics have taken her aback. “It has struck me to see the demagogic language,” said Ghattas, who also was surprised to hear candidates speak about God, which she said she would expect more in Middle East politics.
Ghattas also criticized the media for succumbing to the entertainment value of this campaign. “I do feel that we haven’t all done the right things when it comes to covering this election and covering the issues,” she said, noting that there has been a lot of punditry, but not a lot of substance.
While the campaign has been uniquely entertaining, Isham said the lack of substance has been frustrating. Despite intense citizen interest in this campaign, he said, “on policy levels there are a lot of details missing.”
A student’s question about whether the GOP could change convention rules to preempt Trump led Isham to explain what might happen if Trump doesn’t secure 1,237 delegates to secure the nomination on the first ballot at the convention. “Once you get into those subsequent ballots, that’s when it gets interesting,” he said. “The horse trading starts.”
The GOP has been stumbling in attempts to thwart a candidate they don’t claim as their own. “There obviously is a lot of discussion among party insiders—concern that they don’t believe Donald Trump is a Republican,” Isham said. “They don’t know what he is, but they don’t think he’s a Republican.”
The speakers agreed that of the many stabs against Clinton, the most serious involves her use of a private email server for official (and potentially classified) work. “Clinton does best when she’s out of politics,” Ghattas observed. “When she’s outside the fray of politics, she seems to perform quite well. She left the State Department with a 70 percent approval rating.”
The panelists also agreed that Sanders, if elected, would have little chance of having his policies enacted. “But anyone elected will have hard time getting anything achieved because the country is so polarized,” said Ghattas.
The evening began with the journalists explaining why they entered the field. Ghattas, who grew up during Beirut’s civil war, said she always wondered why Lebanon didn’t receive more help from the outside world. “I wanted to make sense of what was going on around me,” she said. Isham said he fell into the field “by luck,” while Vennochi said she was “fixated on becoming a journalist” but isn’t sure why, then speculated that career options for women at the time centered on teaching and nursing. “I didn’t really like kids that much, and I didn’t like blood,” deadpanned the Pulitzer Prize winner, who started at the Boston Globe as a researcher for the famed Spotlight team.
The event was Groton School’s Ridenhour Lecture, created in honor of investigative journalist Ron Ridenhour, who helped expose the My Lai Massacre. The endowed lecture series is intended to honor and highlight the critical role of the news media in a free society.
After the panel, about fifty students gathered at the Headmaster’s House for the chance to speak informally to the journalists and learn more about media, politics, and the unconventional 2016 election.
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