‘We must be family’

Leonard Pitts, this year’s Pulitzer Prize winning commentary writer, Monday kicked off VCU’s Mass Communications Week with a passionate speech about the current political climate, the role of the media in today’s society and the nature of conflict in democracy.

With different sides of the political spectrum labeling him as a conservative or a liberal, Pitts said he always refuses to take a side.

“I would prefer to think of myself as the columnist that writes for ‘the rest of us,’ by which I mean the people who are not so far gone at either political extreme that they cannot think, reason and climb toward common ground. In other words for the majority.”

A critic of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq, he reminded everyone that he also has had harsh words for some Democrats.

“A few years ago, when I was metaphorically beating the stuffing out of Bill Clinton on a regular basis, I got e-mails that blasted me for being too conservative. These days when I take that same rhetorical two-by-four to George W. Bush, I get e-mails taking me to task for my liberalism.

“I have at one time or another earned the wrath of the nation of Islam, the Sons of Confederate Veterans, the National Organization for Women and the National Rifle Association. I tell you all of that with a certain amount of pride. The highest compliment that anybody has ever paid me is when they say, ‘I could not predict what you were going to say.’ I love (it) when they agree with me, but that’s even better when they say, ‘I couldn’t predict what you were going to say, you made me think.'”

The audience consisting of students, faculty, media professionals and other members of the Richmond community asked questions on topics ranging from past commentaries, the separation of church and state, predictions for the future of American politics, the Patriot Act and its impact on civil liberties plus the words people use to describe their own ideologies.

Discussing the stark division the country experiences right now, the columnist referenced an e-mail that he received from a 33-year-old man who wrote that the nation is so angry, so sharply divided that he would not be surprised if the United States were split into two or more countries in his lifetime.

Although Pitts said he did not particularly agree with the man’s prediction, he also could not ignore that this was a possibility however small. Thus, he responded by writing a column titled “Maybe this is how America ends.”

Saying the media are responsible for much of the bitterness in American politics, Pitts said there seems to be an unspoken agreement in the business that news is what happens at the extremes.

“Which is why it has become commonplace for people who do what I do for a living,” he said, “to think of and to present the nation as balkanized, polarized, divided along the fault lines of politics, race and culture.

“And as a result this is increasingly the way the nation has come to think of itself. Obviously there is truth to that image. I’m not saying that there is not, but what I am saying is that is not the whole picture and that if you dig a little bit deeper something much more complex emerges.”

In the picture the media paint, he said, people are liberal or conservative and with just that much to go on you can predict the way people will feel about any issue.

“The people in that picture do not much resemble the overwhelming majority of the people that I see when I travel this country. Those people are more like the ones that I see when I scan the Gallup polls,” he told the 200 member audience. “They agree on more things than you’d think and when they disagree it’s not this hateful, sharp, polarized, ‘angry at the world’ thing that you see in the news.

“Those people somehow manage to work together. They go to school together. They walk the streets together. And somehow most days they manage to get along without killing each other.”

Citing Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore as some of the pundits he identified as fueling the extreme division in the country.

“I thought (Fahrenheit 9/11) made some excellent points. I also thought the movie undermined its own credibility with charges like the claim that President Bush invaded Afghanistan basically because he wanted to allow his cronies to build an oil pipeline,” Pitts said. “For me, once you lose your credibility – once I understand that you will say anything to win the argument – you begin to lose the ability to sway me. I wanted to like that movie more than I did.”

While speaking of the need for the media’s failure to portray the more moderate portion of the population, he began to address the objectivity issue.

“We in the news media are privileged,” the columnist said. “We frame the world every day. We look at everything that’s happening in our town, in our state, in our nation, in our world. We filter it for our audiences. We distill it into a sheet of paper that lands in their rosebushes, occasionally in their driveways.

“And that privilege comes with certain responsibilities, the highest of which is simply this: To be fair. Not objective. Objectivity is an impossibility. But fair. Fairness is a standard that we can and should strive for.”

The Miami Herald journalist then provided an example of the picture the media often ignore.

“Of all of the wholesome tributes that were made when Ronald Reagan died earlier this year, there was one that really stuck out for me,” he said. “It spoke of how at the end of a day that Reagan had spent trying to further his conservative agenda and House Speaker Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neil had spent trying frustrate that same agenda, the two men would get together at the White House and talk over drinks.

“I like that picture. It strikes me as a hopeful picture, but it is a picture you will seldom see in our ‘take-no-prisoners’ media. And see I’m not sure if that’s because the picture no longer exists or because no one cares to see it anymore.”

As the crowd intently listened to Pitts, who recently published the book, “Becoming a Dad: Black Men and the Journey to Fatherhood,” he talked of the country and its people being able to change the picture the media have painted of them.

“At the end of the day we are still one nation. We are black children in Harlem. We are Muslims in Atlanta. We are Cuban immigrants in Miami. We are farmers in Nebraska. We are cops in San Diego. We are students in Richmond.

“We are right, left and every gradation in between. We are one nation.”

He closed his speech with the following statement:

“It is inevitable that we as a people will disagree. It is necessary that we will disagree. It is probably even good that we will disagree.

“I disagree with my son sometimes. I disagree with my sisters. And I know this will shock you, but I also disagree with my wife – but we are family. The same goes for the American people, and we in the news media can serve no higher purpose than to remind us all of that sometimes.

“We will disagree, we will fight but we must be family bound by common fears, common desires and common heritage. One thinks again of Ronald Reagan and ‘Tip’ O’Neil getting together after a day of fighting political war. They understood that at the end of the day, this is our country and we all have to find a way to live together in it.

“They got this. Why can’t we?”