David Sanger
The New York Times’ chief Washington correspondent on the world Obama inherited and advice to future journalists.
By Cordell Fields
February 11, 2009
New York Times reporter David Sanger (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)David Sanger is the chief Washington correspondent for the nation’s most admired (and third most circulated) newspaper, the New York Times. He joined the Times 25 years ago and has served in New York and Tokyo as well as Washington. Sanger has covered stories including the Challenger space shuttle disaster, North Korea’s nuclear ambitions, the U.S. and Japanese economies, and the presidency of George W. Bush. He has shared two Pulitzer Prizes. His first book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts and the Challenges to American Power, takes a look at the threats and opportunities that President Barack Obama and his administration will face.
Campus Progress: What are the foreign policy challenges that await President Obama?
David Sanger: What I try to argue in The Inheritance is that Iraq … had many costs: 4,000 lives, untold numbers of injured, $800 million—which seems like a lot of money until what we’re doing now in Congress—but its hidden cost was an opportunity cost and the opportunity cost was the ability to deal with some much larger threats that emerged to the United States. We couldn’t deal with … them in the last half of the Bush administration as fully as we needed to because the attention of the top leadership of the country was so wrapped up in a war that they thought was going to last six months and it actually ended up lasting something closer to five years and counting.
CP: You visited a nuclear facility in Pakistan. What did you find out?
DS: I visited the strategic plants division, which is not actually where they keep the weapons, but where the command structure is, where they control the weapons both for their use and their protection. I spent a fair bit of time talking through with them what goes into the protection of their nuclear facilities. But I emerged from that more concerned than ever that it’s the laboratories that went unprotected, not the weapons themselves. I think they do a fairly good job separating out there warheads and their delivery vehicles, the triggering devices from their warheads. I think they’ve done the physical separation. They tell me that they have built an equivalent to our system for guarding actual weapons from mistaken detonation on what’s called PAL system, Permission Action Links, they wouldn’t take our PALs, we wouldn’t have offered them and they wouldn’t [have] taken them had we offered because they think we put a secret kill switch in it. They’re probably right.
CP: Recently China became the third largest economy, surpassing Germany. India and Pakistan are rapidly growing, what does the United States need to do to keep ahead?
DS: We have 5 percent of the world’s population, we’ve got 25 percent of the world’s economy, [and] it’s probably a little less now after the shrinkage of recent times. That’s an out of balance situation, there’s no way over coming years that our percentage of the world economy isn’t going to shrink as the rest of the world, as the middle class grows in India and China as it begins to produce and consume more, that’s a huge opportunity for us because much of what they want to consume is American product. You travel on the streets of Beijing and kids who are coming by have iPods in their ear, bopping along to American music, on there way to see the latest American movie, when they line up outside the American embassy lining up there for visas to come here and study, that’s great!
Our university education is still the best in the world and I’m not as worried about out investments there. I traveled to a lot of universities speaking and I’m extraordinarily impressed with how even small and medium sized colleges have moved up to a level of facilities, faculty, competitiveness that you simply didn’t see while I was applying to college. The gap between the top tier of American universities and the next tier or two down, which used to be huge, is now pretty small. At the elementary, junior high and high school level, it’s a very different story. When I was in Detroit, we were told that something like 21 or 23 percent of the students who enter the Detroit school system graduate. [That means] 79 percent do not graduate. What does that tell about the chances they have in our global economy? We are wildly under-serving that whole generation and we are in an economy so competitive, we can’t afford a lost generation.
CP: You went to Harvard and wrote for the Crimson…
DS: I did, [it’s] the greatest journalism school in the country. Because Harvard has no journalism school, the Crimson is it! They turn out a daily newspaper, six days a week, there’s nothing like it.
CP: At the time when you were entering [journalism], it was completely different. Now obviously with slashing payrolls at newspapers and declining circulation, what is the state of journalism?
DS: The demand for what we do has never been higher. The demand for the way we do it or have done it on paper has never been lower and what worries me is whether or not the profession can survive this transition where we move from a revenue base that is provided by newspaper advertising which is still more than 80 percent for the New York Times, for example. Right now, the revenue you get from digital is not enough to pay for the kind of journalism we need to do—what the founders intended. It does not pay for the millions of dollars we spend every year to keep a bureau in Baghdad. Most newspapers have abandoned their bureaus in Baghdad.
It does not pay enough to keep a large, vibrant Washington bureau. Many newspapers this year, even as we speak, are closing their Washington bureaus and that’s astounding. We understood some when local newspapers closed their farm bureaus, but local newspapers closing their Washington bureaus? At the time where we have the biggest issues we’ve ever had, that’s astounding!
So we have to get the world to understand the difference between reporting and blogging. Reporting is about truly digging out what’s really happening. Blogging can be sitting in front of your computer telling the world what you think about what’s happening. It’s a wonderful thing that people no longer need to own a printing press to get their views out there, it is a great thing. Democratizing, the leveling to make sure we are a much more participatory democracy. But, let’s not confuse the spread of opinion with the spread of reporting.
CP: What makes a good journalist?
DS: Endless curiosity, not being satisfied with the answers that is in front of you, a willingness to dig down deep and tell a deeper story.
CP: What is your advice for aspiring journalist?
DS: First piece of advice is find a way to get out and write every day. Whether it’s on a website or it’s for a news service like Bloomberg that picks up takes huge amounts of young talent tremendously young talent, burns it out, spits it out. Whatever it is, the process of sorting out your ideas doesn’t happen unless you sit and write them.
Writing is diagnostic. I looked at chapters in The Inheritance, when they were in draft and said I didn’t write this clearly and if I didn’t write this clearly is because I don’t understand it and then you have to go back and re-report it and so my main piece of advice is find a way to do that whether that is on your school paper, on a blog on which you should be thinking more fact than opinion.
Everybody’s got an opinion, one of my favorite sayings is “Everybody is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts.” So go out and work on the facts side, it’s the harder element and there all kinds of ways to do it, there are more outlets to do it. My second piece of advice is don’t expect to go in the world of newspapers because the newspapers are not going to be around. They may be around in the electronic form, they’ll be newsgathering institutions, but go into it agnostic about the question of whether you’re writing for a newspaper, a website, [or doing your stuff on television. Whether you’re working on a new technology that will beam the information directly into somebody’s cerebral cortex, it doesn’t make any difference to think about the journalism. You’ll find the format.
Cordell Fields is an Online Communications Intern at Campus Progress.
Social Bookmarking
--------
Comments
!
What a wonderful writer! What fantastically thought provoking book— like his previous one on CIA and Iraq!!!
THIS BOOK IS WORTH FULL PRICE!!!
Doesn’t such a great mind deserves a professorial chair?
I think he does and I hope he gets it— mostly because he is so thought provoking and opens new avenues for responsible debate.
— DE Teodoru - Feb 12, 10:51 PM - #