BRIAN LAMB: What this – let me stop for a second and ask you about this.
David Brinkley, Dan Rather, John Chancellor, Jane Pauley, Barbara Walters and Nina Totenberg and others, are they all objective?
BRIT HUME: None of us is objective. You can’t be objective. But what you can try to be is fair.
I mean, David Brinkley, as I recall, is one of the first people I ever heard say that. You can’t be objective. You’re a sentient, thinking, human being. You’re going to have views in reaction to things.
But I’ll say this about it. I believe that fairness begins with an awareness that no, you’re not objective. And it is your professional duty and responsibility to be aware of that. And to carry that with you into the work that you do so that you can be fair. So, you could screen out.
You can be – you can think if you go to a hearing and you think that the politician whose running the hearing is obstreperous personality, whether it’s Phil Graham or Barney Frank, that you think, I got to be careful here, because I don’t particularly cotton to this person. I need to make sure that I play this straight. That I’m fair. I think that’s where it begins. I’ve always thought that. And it’s not that hard to do.
I mean, think of the people in the professions that we – other professions that we – in the practice of law. Lawyers represent clients they disagree with. They even represent viewpoints they disagree with. They do it all the time. And they do a good job of it, because they’re professionally trained to do it.
We as journalists are or should be professionally trained to do that as well. To go out and assess a story based on its news value and to order it and prioritize what we see in such a way as to reflect news values and report it that way.
BRIAN LAMB: Did Roger Ailes ever say to you in a conversation, we’re going to use this fair and balanced slogan and it’s going to drive them crazy?
BRIT HUME: He said, it was going to drive them crazy. He said, he knew it was going to drive them crazy.
BRIAN LAMB: But let me show you.
BRIT HUME: It does drive them crazy.
Now look, Brian, the examples I cited to you earlier – the earlier example of that story is a meaningful example is the kind of thing that where we see opportunity where others see nothing.
Now, can anyone, Geneva Overholser or anyone else seriously argue to me than when a report comes out from an administration that a year ago said that progress – satisfactory progress was being made on half of these political benchmarks, which had been so much at the center of the debate. And a year later comes along and reports more than twice as much. That that isn’t news. Of course, it’s news by any reasonable, fair-minded standard.
Our colleagues neglect such stories with some regularity, providing us a competitive opportunity. We pickup on stories like this.
~~~
Brit will be missed.
FNC isn’t perfect, but where would we be if we learned news the way we did BEFORE FNC?
BRIAN LAMB: Did Roger Ailes ever say to you in a conversation, we’re going to use this fair and balanced slogan and it’s going to drive them crazy?
BRIT HUME: He said, it was going to drive them crazy. He said, he knew it was going to drive them crazy.
They bent too far back with their ‘fair and balanced’
I used to read all of Jack Anderson's columns. I guess I was Brit Hume fan even then, although I didn't know it.