Journalism: The First Draft of History

Is yesterday history? What about last week? At some point, the past eventually becomes history, but where exactly do we draw the line? Join Mary, Gary, Eryn, and special guest Matthew Housiaux, Reporter on the White House and State and Local Governments at The Kiplinger Letter, as they discuss the complex relationship between history and journalism. What does "good journalism" mean, and how does a diligent approach to consuming and recording current events help future historians?

Kiplinger: https://www.kiplinger.com/

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https://billofrightsinstitute.org/podcasts/journalism-the-first-draft-of-history

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Transcript

Intro/Outro (00:06)
From the Bill of Rights Institute, Fabric of History weaves together US history founding principles and what all of this means to us today. Join us as we pull back the curtains of the past to see what's inside

Haley (00:21)
 Is yesterday history? What about last week? At some point, the past eventually becomes history. But where exactly do we draw the line? Join Mary, Gary, Eryn, and special guest Matthew Housiaux, a reporter on the White House and state and local governments at the Kiplinger Letter, as they discuss a complex relationship between history and journalism. What does good journalism mean? And how does a diligent approach to consuming and recording current events help future historians? Like many of us, Matthew was working from home during this recording, just letting you know that Thor, his Great Dane, created some background noise in an effort to participate.

Mary (01:05)
Hi, everybody. A question that comes up frequently here at BRI among members of our team and also from teachers in our network is this question of when do current events become history? And at first, I think this question seems very meta. When is history history? But it also has a lot of practical implications as well. How much space do you need from an event before you can analyze it? And if you're a witness to an event, as we all are, to current events, does our experience make our analysis too difficult or there's a lot to talk about there. So we figured if we're going to explore this boundary between current affairs and history, we need to bring in a journalist for this conversation. So I am delighted to introduce our guest. Matthew Housiaux covers the White House and state and local governments for the Kiplinger Letter. And The Kiplinger Letter is a weekly newsletter that specializes in forecasting political and economic trends. And they have been doing so since 1920, so rather historic in and of itself. So, Matthew, thank you so much for being with Gary, Eryn, and I today.

Matthew (02:20)
Thank you. I'm really excited to be here.

Mary (02:23)
So before we get into our question, I first want to ask a little bit about your history. What drew you to journalism in the first place?

Matthew (02:34)
Well, I always liked writing, and I have from a very young age, and there was a period of time where I really wanted to be a fiction writer. And when I discovered that I wasn't great at that and also some of the career challenges involved with that, I ended up going into journalism, which doesn't pay great, but obviously, it puts bread on the table.

Mary (02:57)
Well, that's an important consideration. Historians, too. You have to have bread on the table.

Matthew (03:03)
Oh, and then as far as how I got to Kiplinger, so I switched my major in college to journalism, and then I co-majored in history. After my junior year of college, I did an internship at Kiplinger and was very lucky that they asked me to come back to my current position after I graduated from college.

Mary (03:23)
That's great. And again, we're glad that you're with us today.

Gary (03:27)
So if I could jump in. So you study at both history and journalism. So already it sounds like you are seeing the connections between the two, possibly the interplay between the two. Right off the bat, I feel like we should just pose that question. Do you have a personal answer to when history begins and when current events end or is that too much for the beginning?

Matthew (03:53)
No. If you want to get really philosophical about it, in some ways it begins almost instantaneously because immediately after, especially in the journalism world, immediately after you stop covering something as a current event or something that happened, you start thinking about it in retrospect and thinking about how it fits in with a lot of other past events. So in some ways, depending on your approach, I think you could say it begins almost immediately, although most folks before they're going to reflect on a current event as history, want to gain a little bit of distance and perspective. So just as an example, I'm working on a book chapter about the Big Sioux River and the politics of it for an academic institution back in my home state of South Dakota. The Big Sea River is a major river there. And I go all the way from the beginning of South Dakota statehood, all the way to the 2020 election, which obviously is quite recent or quite near to where we are now. But there's been a few months, so I've been able to maybe get a little more perspective on it. That helps in my writing about it in that respect.

Eryn (05:16)
So I'm curious then, when if you're writing this chapter in a book and you're saying that months give you that perspective, would you say that a few months can pass and that's something that we would consider history? We'll dive into this conversation more, but I think there are just so many nuanced responses. Some say that it's an entire lifetime or generation that has to pass and other people like we're living history. So where do you think that kind of, quote-unquote timeline lies?

Matthew (05:51)
I guess I would subscribe more, too, if I understand living history in the same way you do. I think I would subscribe more to that. Essentially, there are things that are happening to us now or things that were like as a journalist that I'm covering. But the minute that I start to consider it in the broader context of history and that way it kind of becomes history because it becomes kind of part of this timeline and a chain of events that you're thinking about. I think that depends on how you are considering the event.

Gary (06:28)
Can I follow up about that context and history and talking about living through things? Because you're right, we are experiencing things every day. Are their observational skills that we can perhaps cultivate to become perhaps better observers of history as it's unfolding?

Matthew (06:50)
That's a good question. It's sort of tough for me to say, I guess for me is being able to draw analogies. And I guess maybe just like the more history you read, maybe the more tempted you are to draw comparisons between the present and the past. And I think that sort of starts that process of current events becoming history. Yeah. I think as I said before when you start thinking in that broader context. So definitely the ability, I guess, to draw analogies, I think is a really big one.

Mary (07:23)
I like the idea of making analogies. I know a lot of our listeners are teachers, but even if you aren't a teacher of history, just having certain skills in your toolbox is so critical when you're thinking about the past and also just as a citizen of the United States, to be like a critical consumer of information. So I know that there are I know for me personally, I was never a professional journalist, but I did school newspapers ever since I was little and through college. And I always personally kind of see a lot of parallels of who is it, what happened? When did this happen? Sort of the basic facts, but there's also the interpretive and the analytical piece of it as well. So maybe we can take a quick break and sort of dive into this idea of the skills and some of these habits of mind that are needed to do, quote-unquote history and to do journalism.

Mary (08:27)
Hey, Fabric of History listener. Learned anything new yet? At BRI we have a lot more to share. Check out our YouTube channel in the description, where we dissect and discuss US history and civics with experts and teachers. We update weekly and would love for you to join the conversation. And now back to our podcast.

Mary (08:48)
We started our conversation with this big question, when is history history? And we were exploring this idea that there are skills you need to do journalism well. And there's also skills you need to think about history well. And educators, we like our jargon are usually referred to as historical thinking skills. They're really just thinking skills, like analyzing evidence is a historical thinking skill or thinking about patterns of continuity of change. So you definitely need to do these things. I think when you are looking at history, but you also need to do these things when you're looking at the world around you here and the now, as they say, that's kind of the goal. Right. If you're thinking about education or especially history education to create citizens that are capable of self-governance, which is what BRI is all about, then you have to have that skill set both for the past and to consider the world around you. So I wanted to sort of move the conversation into we started with this idea of distance. Right. And is there a hard and fast amount of time that needs to break up an event before we can really analyze it.

Mary (10:11)
But are there benefits to being a part of history, of living through history? Certainly. I mean, for anything there's pros and cons. I mean, we could consider thinking about the pros and cons of distance from an event versus the pros and cons of living through an event, if that makes sense.

Matthew (10:34)
Yeah. I think the main pro of the distance is I guess it gives you more of a bird's eye view of what's happening to a certain degree and allows you to put aside certain biases or prejudices you might have had if you were living through a period of history and hopefully have a better perspective and be able to balance or to be able to more clearly see the facts as opposed to being blinded by your biases. By contrast, though, the Con with the distance and it's also a pro of being able to live through history is you understand better what the main actors, what would be driving them, how they were feeling at the time. And ideally, it's possible to have some distance as an observer of the present as well and be able to put aside some of your biases. And I think a lot of the best journalists really are very good at doing that.

Eryn (11:52)
I think it's very interesting to hear how a journalist does that. Maybe other people would argue differently, but I feel people are very emotionally invested in things that are happening, whereas I think a lot of people argue that history suggests that we should be almost dispassionate about it or not have that additional connection. And so I would love to hear more about work that you've done with recent events that you may even be personally impassioned about. But with your job as a journalist have to remove that.

Matthew (12:36)
Sure, yeah. So I do a lot of elections coverage as part of my job, and I've been at Kiplinger since 2016. So I've covered two presidential elections, the first, obviously, being the 2016 presidential election, which caught a lot of people off guard in Washington, including Kiplinger. We've been forecasting presidential elections since, I believe, 1924, and we've only gotten two wrong 1948, which was the infamous Dewey Defeats Truman.

Gary (13:12)
I know that image. Yeah.

Matthew (13:15)
Everyone knows that. The image of Truman smiling with that newspaper headline and then 2016, obviously, I'm very proud to say that we ended up doing a lot better in our 2020 election prediction. And I would like to say part of that is that we did a lot more on the ground reporting, whereas maybe in 2016, I would say I took a very much in some ways because on Kiplinger forecast, you almost think about it historically more readily because you're thinking of what will future generations think of what my predictions were at this moment, and how will they look back at this forecast, and how will it fit historically. And in some ways, I took more of a historical maybe historians mindset, and I kept more of a distance in terms of just more engaging with poll numbers and trying to be as dispassionate as possible. And maybe I will stay away from the passions that were fueling voters during that election. And that proved not to be a very good approach in the end, obviously, because we ended up getting that election wrong. Whereas in 2020, despite the pandemic, me and my colleague Sean Lengell were able to do a lot more on the ground reporting, talking to people, and really getting a better sense of how voters were feeling, on top of maybe the more hard facts about who's up in the polls, who is ahead in fundraising data, things of that sort.

Matthew (15:12)
So in some ways, it's roughly analogous, I guess, to when you're doing history and you only have access to certain statistics and things like that that give you kind of a rough sense or a very distant sense of what was happening at the time, like demographic data, census data, things like that, versus having or voting election results past election results, which I spent a lot of time with recently, versus being able to also have really good primary sources that really give you, like, diaries or things like that that give you a good sense of what folks were feeling at the time in addition to that hard data that you have, that kind of gives you the framework for thinking about an event that brings a couple of things to mind.

Mary (16:04)
For me, one thing that came to mind as you were talking is that there's this balance between being subjective and objective. Like you said, with the 2016 election, it was more dispassionate, and you were looking at the polls, and that ended up not being successful in the forecast. But for 2020, you were still looking at the data, but you were also on the ground talking to people. So I think if I had my teacher hat on, there is this balance between you have to be objective, you have to be able to talk about events and the facts, but also you have to have that human element. You have to make history come alive, like all these silly things that they sell off to teachers. But if you don't have that personal connection in some way, you often lose students or they're not interested. So it's interesting to hear you say that you had that balance when you said you did a much better job in 2020. The second thing I was wondering, can you elaborate a little bit on what you said when you said you were on the ground in 2020? What did that mean for you and your colleague in your reporting? Were you traveling around, or...?

Matthew (17:19)
Yeah. So, I mean, the main thing we actually went and spent a decent amount of time in States that we thought were going to be pivotal to decide in the election. So I spent time, for example, in North Carolina, Minnesota, Wisconsin. My colleague Sean spent even more time traveling on the road to places like Pennsylvania, Ohio, Florida. Yes, the goal was to basically just talk to as many people as possible and really get a better sense of just how voters were feeling. And I think this may be an obvious point to make, I guess. But people's political opinions are a lot more diverse than is ever reflected by polling data or in the election results, just because we have two major parties that people are voting for. But when you get right down to it and you talk to folks who might be voting Democratic, they might have a lot of views that would surprise you, and Ditto people who are voting Republican. And so all those things are really important to take into account and help inform the predictions that you're trying to make about a political outcome and about with people in history and the human element, people make history. And so in some ways, it's sort of a folly to try to boil it down to a series of facts and statistics and stuff.

Eryn (18:49)
Matt, did you ever find it difficult to be kind of reporting or gathering information, and if you're talking with people who I'm sure had a variety of different opinions and thoughts, did you ever find that difficult, or do you just feel like you're so strongly trained and kind of like what you're doing that you are able to listen to them objectively instead of subjectively?

Matthew (19:20)
That's a good question. Everybody has biases. And I think in some ways it's almost impossible to totally remove those from the way you perceive the world. But because I was so focused, especially in 2020, about making sure I got the outcome right, I think that became the overarching goal in my mind. And I think it made it a lot easier to really step out, step away from any sort of political opinions or whatever that I had, and just see people's opinions for what they were.

Eryn (19:57)
Side note, I'm just going to try and frame that type of idea in my mind in any impassioned conversation that I have now. I'm going to take a historical mindset from now on, guys. That's my goal.

Gary (20:12)
I love that phrase historical mindset, because I think that speaks to what we were talking about earlier, which is being aware of the future right there's, what's happening there's, the distant past, and you mentioned earlier, Matt, when telling a story, you may have to go pretty far back to put it into context. An election is a good example that's not out of the blue that an election happened. They happen every four years. There's a nice kind of continuity that happens there. But then to what Eryn's point is this idea of getting into the mindset to know that future generations will be looking back on whatever we're recording. There's a phrase that gets kicked around the idea of journalism and whatnot being the first draft of history. Right. That there's an awareness that you are recording things that will be part of the historical record going forward. Can you tell us more about that mindset? I know that's a big question to ask, but any sort of insights into getting into that headspace, that one is creating what we're calling a first draft of history.

Matthew (21:24)
Just as in the way you need to read a lot in order to be a good writer, I think you need to know your history really well to think in a historical way. And I guess that's maybe one reason why really good reporters ultimately end up being experts in the subjects that they cover because they're not just regurgitating certain facts that they're given. They're also doing their research, putting everything in context. Mostly it's just about casting your net far and wide to get as much knowledge as you can about whatever subject that you're covering. And then that will in turn put you on better footing in order to analyze the subject and have that historical mindset or have that objectivity and distance that you need.

Mary (22:26)
I think that makes a lot of sense, and it makes me appreciate how difficult good reporting and how your job, how difficult that is. But I think something that as you're talking, something I'm thinking about is this idea of seeking truth. I think Kiplinger, you forecast. So like you said, you make a call, Kiplinger makes a call that this person is going to win the election. So it's a little bit different than I think, like reading, I don't know, The Washington Post or The New York Times or something like that. But you want to be correct, you want to get the outcome correct. And I think historians are similar in that we're trying to understand what happened. So we are pursuing truth in some way.

Eryn (23:16)
I think also what I would add is that over time in history, as more information is released or known, our understanding of that event tends to change. Right. And so I think this idea of truth is ever-evolving.

Matthew (23:38)
Yeah, that's a really good point. And I think it works against what I had said earlier about in some ways, history begins instantaneously after an event occurs, but to a certain degree, history does begin instantaneously, but you need to wait for more information to come out and more distance to be eclipsed before it becomes good history. I guess maybe it keeps getting bolded and shaped and eventually becomes better. So maybe it's like a sculptor working with a block of marble.

Gary (24:11)
First of all, great analogy. But it's funny that really brings up in my mind a historical event that, I wonder if I could see if I can match what you're saying with this event, as you were describing that, Matt, I was thinking about the challenger disaster. I think it's on my mind because it's within some of BRI's materials. We've been talking about that with teachers lately. But that is something I do have a recollection of living through. I may be the only one on here that does. Okay.

Mary (24:43)
No, I remember it.

Gary (24:45)
And as you're saying, that was an interesting case of watching history lay out. There was something planned. Right. It was not the first space mission, something unexpected, which was terrible on that day. There was a lot of people watching. On that day it was unclear what happened until little by little, later on, you got the story. Weeks, months later, it came into focus. Then as years passed, much more of what happened came into focus. And now it is part of history in a really important way because there are so many interpretations of what occurred, not interpretations challenging what happened. What happened certainly happened. But understand that the technology of it, understanding the communications of it, understanding President Reagan's speech and its position in history now and the role and there's lots of ways of looking at that. That to me is an interesting sort of example of, I think, what you're talking about there.

Matthew (25:49)
Yeah, that's a great point. And it's sort of maybe what you described as a good example of how you have the who, what, where, when, the very basics, the DNA of history, and then how you build off of that over time as more information comes out and as you explore more perspectives of a particular event.

Mary (26:09)
I love that phrase that you use, the DNA of history. I think that is such a fabulous phrase. I would totally use that if I were still in the classroom. But I think the Challenger disaster is such a great example of how you needed that. The journalism of the time of what happened, the nuts and bolts, the DNA of history in order to, as time passed and more was known and more was released, study that event and its consequences with a historical mind. I have to say, throughout much of this conversation, I have thought about as a former history teacher, how we used to joke about how there's always more history to teach. Right. Because you're living, we're marching through time, and all these more and more things keep happening. And if we go back to the beginning of our conversation, just this idea of do you need to have that space? What is the magic amount of time between an event and it being considered history, or is it some sort of balance? And I would argue that it's definitely the balance. Like if you've lived through it, you're close to the event. You may be emotionally invested in the event, but we're human.

Mary (27:19)
And that's part of interpreting events. And perhaps with more time and more distance will be more objective, more information will be known. But I don't think the conversation shouldn't happen. So I'm showing my colors here of advocating for trying to talk about events as they happen because I don't know, I would say, isn't that the point of history? We can have a historical mind to think about the past and to think about the future and you'll only understand something the more you investigate it. So just keep asking questions, right? That's what we're all about here. We're asking questions, we're trying to find answers and our work is never done. So Matthew, thank you so much for joining us today. We really enjoyed having you here as part of our conversation and again, the Kiplinger letter will put a link to the Kiplinger website in our show notes. Be sure to check them out and we'd love to hear from you, Fabric of History listeners, if you learn something, if you have a comment, a question on anything we talked about today, you can write to us at comments@fabricofhistory.com please subscribe give us a review. We'd love to hear from you and until we meet again, keep asking those questions.

Mary (28:33)
Take care, everybody.

Intro/Outro (28:38)
The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exists in a free society. Check out our educational resources and programs on our website mybri.org, Any questions or suggestions for future episodes? We'd love to hear from you. Just email us at comments@fabricofhistory.org and don't forget to visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to stay connected and informed about future episodes. Thank you for listening.