How One Historian Deals with Reporters Who Have a Question to Ask
As a historian for the U.S. Senate since 1976, I have dealt almost every workday, and on a few weekends, with journalists from newspapers, magazines, networks, and the Internet. The Senate historians are professional and nonpartisan, taking no sides on political issues. The reporters we deal with are usually in search of a precedent, a quote, or a statistic. They turn to us to get prompt, reliable, factual information, along with some historical context for fast-breaking contemporary events. We provide the facts and let others provide the spin.
Historians complain that the news media seems little interested in history, and that when it does focus on the past it too often gets things wrong. But working with reporters, makes one more aware of the pressures under which they operate. Pressing deadlines make them grasp for the most readily available information, ask probing and sometimes leading questions, become impatient with overly-qualified responses, and depend more on oral than written sources.
The hardest lesson for historians to learn from working with the press is that a source has little control over how reporters, or their editors, will use what you tell them. Most of the reporters with whom I have dealt are sharp, diligent, and fair. They treat their sources decently because they want to keep on using them. But a few are trying to make a point and are simply looking for an “expert” they can quote to support it, twisting your words to suit their purposes. Sometimes you will find your remarks condensed to the point of banality. Other times the reporters–not unlike students taking lecture notes–will jumble what they hear. As a result, many staff members on Capitol Hill have decided that the solution to this problem is never to talk to the press, at least not on the record. Since the Senate Historical Office’s mission is to “promote the history of the Senate,” we have always tried to respond to media inquires to the best of our abilities. Feeling the need to stand behind the information that we provide, I have never requested that any of my remarks be “off the record,” although sometimes on more sensitive subjects I have been greatly relieved when reporters chose not to quote me directly.
After thirty years of operation, we have compiled a large data bank of information that we can call upon instantly on demand. This was not always the case, since we began by compiling data as the requests came in. In 1981, when Senator Harrison Williams was indicted as part of the FBI’s Abscam sting, a New York Times reporter called the Historical Office from the federal courthouse in Brooklyn, wanting to know how many other senators had ever been indicted. In those dark days before Google, we searched the stacks of the Senate Library and uncovered a senator who had been indicted back at the turn of the century. No sooner had we called the Times reporter with that news than someone else on the staff found another indicted senator in that same era. After we called that one in, we stumbled upon yet another. The next day’s Times reported Senator Williams’s indictment, added a little box that the Senate Historical Office had “ransacked this place” in the hunt and found “one, then two, and–at last word–three Senators in history had been convicted while in office.”2 Subsequent research turned up a few more. There had been seven indicted senators before Harrison Williams, and two more since him. If that should ever happen again, however, we’re ready with an accurate statistic and a brief explanation of each case, including which ones were convicted and acquitted.
In hunting down information in response to specific questions we created lists that we compiled in loose-leaf binder and called “fact books.” There are now a dozen fact books in our front office, filled with statistics on everything from how many Supreme Court nominations have been rejected to how many doctors have served in the U.S. Senate. We regularly update these lists as new events occur. Much of the Senate’s work is cyclical, involving periodic fights over budgets, nominations, and treaties, with the ever present threat of filibusters and other delaying tactics. With each new cycle, reporters tend to ask the same questions, especially if those reporters weren’t around to cover the previous cycle. When that happens, we are ready with the statistics collected the last time around.
It is not unusual for many reporters to ask the same questions. Although highly competitive, they tend to operate in packs. When big news breaks, we are often inundated with phone calls urgently seeking the same information. Reporters are impressed when you can provide the appropriate answer without hesitation, not appreciating that they were probably not the first to ask. Some questions are more singular, but they may relate to odd facts you’ve absorbed in the past. Once when I rattled off some particularly obscure information–about women who had married more than one U.S. Senator–Ken Rudin, the political correspondent for National Public Radio, recorded in his web column that my answer was either “amazingly impressive” or “just plain scary.”3
Over time, the Senate Historical Office has gained the confidence of journalists as a source of quick, accurate, nonpartisan information. We are not in a position to defend or attack any individual or policy. At the same time, we try to steer reporters away from misguided assumptions and misleading arguments about the Senate as an institution. Sometimes this involves convincing a reporter that an unusual event is not necessarily unprecedented. With a two hundred year old institution, very little is unprecedented. To the contrary, the Senate as an institution generally operates on precedent. Having the constitutional power to set its own rules, the Senate does essentially what it wishes, but it is easier to justify an action if there is precedent for it, or inaction if a precedent is lacking. Being a form of history, precedents give particular weight to historical information.
Like other visitors to the Senate galleries, reporters are surprised and amused by the excessively polite parliamentary language, which along with the nineteenth-century desks, spittoons and snuffboxes give the Senate a quaint and curious appearance. As reporters struggle with concepts of filibusters and cloture, holds, seniority, and unanimous consent agreements, they tend to write much of it off as antediluvian, and wonder why the procedures haven’t been modernized. We point to many reforms, changes in both the Constitution and the rules, but point out that traditions survive when they serve a purpose. When a reporter calls with a question about a current clash between Democrats and Republicans, we can provide background information going back to the Federalists and the Anti-Federalists. Some reporters grow impatient with too much background, others recognize its worth. Once when I was quoted on the front page of the Washington Post, I thanked the reporter for putting me there. “Oh, no,” he replied, “you put me there.” He explained that the historical information gave his story more depth and captured his editor’s eye, winning him coveted space “above the fold” on page one.
Although both historians and journalists conduct interviews, journalists are far more dependent on oral rather than written sources. One of President Jimmy Carter’s many headaches was a threatened airline strike. A reporter called to ask whether there had ever been a national transportation strike, and I recounted the story of the Pullman railroad strike of 1894. I recommended a book about that strike by historian Stanley Buder, but when I read the article that appeared I found that reporter had interviewed Buder rather than read his book. Reporters rarely have time to read a lengthy book when writing on deadline. Nor do they get much opportunity to specialize. They are expected to be generalists who can tackle whatever their editors assign to them. That’s why many of them have come to count on historians, especially public historians, as ready and reliable sources.
Veteran reporters are usually able and serious about their work. Younger reporters by definition lack the same experience, and many are learning their craft by trial and error–and you may be the error. Some recent journalists seem never to have taken a college course in history or political science. During President Clinton’s impeachment, for instance, a reporter called me to ask breathlessly: “Who was Andrew Johnson and why was he impeached?” You wind up offering a History 101 lecture, and hope that they are taking good notes.
Like politicians, historians who deal with reporters should be wary of answering questions that begin with “wouldn’t you say?” That phrase usually indicates the reporter is trolling for an someone to confirm something the reporter has already written. By answering yes, you will be cited as supporting a larger argument that you might not necessarily make. It is always advisable to rephrase your response into something that reflects exactly what you think, rather than what the reporter wants to hear. That often means qualifying an assertion, or pointing out that there are multiple ways of examining the issue. Some reporters resent having their stories complicated this way, but others will embrace new ideas that might provide an interesting twist to an otherwise predictable story.
Another pitfall for historians as sources is the chance of moving from source to subject. In the Senate Historical Office, this has been less a problem with the regular Washington press corps, whose members take pains to protect valued sources, than from reporters who passing through town and have no need to cultivate long-term sources. Senator Fred Thompson conducted a highly publicized investigation into fund-raising during the 1996 presidential campaign, and was holding the hearings on the same floor as the Historical Office. A young Los Angeles Times reporter stopped by the office during a break in the hearings to collect some background on congressional investigations. Apparently, I gave him more than he wanted. His eyes glazed over, he stopped taking notes, and he then asked whether I had attended any of the hearings. No, I said, I had been too busy, that I could watch the hearings at night on C-SPAN, and that up until then they had been rather technical in nature. When the article appeared in the Los Angeles Times, the opening paragraph described me as a congressional investigation wonk, who knew the nuances of every investigation back to Teapot Dome, but who couldn’t be bothered to walk across the hall and listen to the current hearings because they were so overly technical. Fortunately, the LA Times buried the article on page A6, but the Phoenix Republic, reprinted it on the front page under the headline: “Expert: Hearings a Bore.” Thankfully, the chairman never complained and I never saw that reporter again (although I still deal regularly, and much more harmoniously, with other correspondents from the Los Angeles Times).4
The moral of the story is that you can help the reporter to get it right, but you’re not going to write the story. Broadcasters are just as unpredictable. Sometimes they will give you adequate time to talk and explain yourselves, but mostly they will cut the interview down to sound bites. The Historical Office continues to help all network journalists who contact us, but we devote far more attention to those who will make the greatest use of the material, particularly C-SPAN and National Public Radio. Appearances on other networks can consume large portions of your workday for what will amount to little more than a few fleeting moments on the air. Despite the size of their audience, this is usually not worth the extensive effort required.
Dealing with reporters has given me greater respect for their product as a historical source. In a series of debriefing interviews that we conducted with key Senate staff members following President Bill Clinton’s impeachment trial, the staff unanimously gave good reviews to the working journalists who covered the trial for accurate reporting. However, they dismissed most of the “talking heads,” the experts from think tanks and law schools who spoke so authoritatively but still managed to get so much wrong.
Unlike formal history, the reporters’ first rough draft was written as the events unfolded, without the benefit of hindsight. No article will tell the whole story, but each provides a snapshot of the story at a particular moment in time. An accumulation of articles will provide the larger picture. Reporters themselves often feel frustrated by the day-to-day fragmentation of a story and will seek to pull their thoughts together in a book. It seems ironic that historians who fill their footnotes with newspaper citations generally ignore the memoirs and other books written by the same journalists. For some reason, we are willing to trust journalists to report the news, but not to interpret it.
In writing a history of the Washington press corps, I amassed a small library of journalists’ memoirs and other studies, filled with first-hand observations of every period in American history by authors who were trained observers. I found the memoirs of a reporter who accompanied Abraham Lincoln nightly to the War Department to read telegraphic dispatches from the battlefield, and who recorded Lincoln’s reaction to the often bad news. Reporters who took leaves of absence from their papers to work for the political parties during election years offered backroom glimpses of Mark Hanna’s tactics for winning the Republican nomination in1896 for Ohio Governor William McKinley. There are a score of memoirs by reporters who were caught up in the Bonus Riots in 1932, and even more who offered useful insights about the New Deal, both for and against. Other accounts revealed that a number of journalists worked sub rosa for Senator Joe McCarthy, writing his speeches and suggesting subjects for investigation. A privately printed memoir told the story of an American reporter who was hired as the Washington correspondent for the Soviet news agency TASS, covered every secretary of state from William Jennings Bryan to Dean Acheson, and became the dean of the State Department press corps during the early years of the Cold War. There are telling memoirs by African-American journalists who had to cope with working in segregated Washington, and by women journalists who had to overcome the “old boys’ club” nature of government, politics, and journalism.
I was surprised at how infrequently these journalists’ books were mentioned in other historians’ footnotes. It could be that historians are just not aware of these journalists, many of whom lacked bylines and remain relatively obscure. Or it might reflect historians’ skepticism of journalistic accuracy. Lincoln’s biographers, for instance, have long dismissed the idea that President Abraham Lincoln met with a congressional committee to defend his wife’s expenditures of public funds at the White House. A presidential appearance before a congressional committee was a significant issue for the Historical Office. The chief source of the story was the memoirs of the Boston Journal correspondent Benjamin Perley Poore, who certainly liked a good story and may have embellished them as he retold them. But Poore had a professional reputation to uphold and his contemporaries in the press would have called him to task for fabrication. Instead of rejecting his story as myth, we hunted for corroborating evidence and eventually found an article in the New York Herald, dated February 13, 1862 that stated: “President Lincoln today voluntarily appeared before the House Judiciary Committee. . . .”5
The novelist David Lodge has defined history as the verdict “of those who weren’t there on those who were.” Historians also seem reluctant to accept verdicts rendered by those who were there. Like any other source, journalists’ memoirs require verification to establish their credibility. The search for verification can often direct researchers’ attention to supporting materials that might otherwise have been neglected. As distant observers of the past events, historians stand to learn much from those who were trying to analyze those same events soon after they occurred. Historians need to make ourselves professionally available to those writing the first draft of history, and then we need to take what they produce more seriously.6
1. Washington Post, June 13, 1948.
2. New York Times, May 3, 1981.
3. Ken Rudin, “Political Junkie,” August 11, 2004, NPR.org,
4. Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1997.
5. Benjamin Perley Poore, Perley’s Reminiscences of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis ( Philadelphia, 1886), vol. 2: 143-43; David Herbert Donald, Lincoln (New York: 1995), 649; the author to David Donald, January 29, 1996, David Donald to the author, April 15, 1996.
6. David Lodge, Out of the Shelter (New York, 1989), 185.