Are we more divided than ever? Or are we just exercising our democracy more robustly and publicly? In the broadcast of a recent public forum, two leading voices in public broadcasting tackle the questions.
What happens when you put two preeminent journalists from the world of public media on the same stage and ask them to jump into America’s great political divide?
We found out when we invited Judy Woodruff, PBS News senior correspondent and former NewsHour anchor; and Steve Inskeep, host of NPR’s long-running flagship “Morning Edition” morning broadcast, to do just that.
Woodruff and Inskeep have reported extensively on the growing political and social divisions in the United States. After 10 years on the anchor desk, Woodruff recently embarked on a new series, “America at a Crossroads” that examines the fault lines crisscrossing the nation’s political landscape. Inskeep’s latest non-fiction book, “Differ We Must: How Lincoln Succeeded In a Divided America,” is a deep look at how the country’s most admired president used the sharp ideological divisions of his time to navigate a young nation’s most dangerous crisis.
I mediated the conversation and opened it to questions from a late-summer audience of some 100 community members, journalists, and students in Doyle Forman Hall at American University’s School of Communication in Washington, D.C.
A bit of the way into the discussion, Woodruff said, “We now assume that people in the other party believe that whole set of views that we think they have, and we think they’re not just wrong, but we think they’re bad people.”
Americans “are never going to agree on everything; they’re not even going to agree on most things,” Inskeep said, and getting everyone to agree is not the point. “The narrower function of a democracy,” he said, “is not to get everybody to agree but to get everybody on the same page for a few basic things, to mediate our differences through this constitutional system that we have that is designed to manage disagreement.”
“[Woodruff] astutely put her finger on one thing that makes that super hard,” he said, “each of us teaching each other that everyone on the other side is 100 percent bad.”
I'll let you watch for yourself.