I meet Ari Berman at his parents’ home in Fairfield. When I request a lunch interview, it is his suggestion to meet there. A journalism major who earned his degree from Northwestern University, for the past year Berman has helmed “The Daily Outrage,” a political weblog for The Nation, one of the country’s leading progressive publications.
He is between jobs, on break, in the process of moving from New YorkCity to Washington, DC. He’s been enlisted by the magazine as a contributing writer to do more in-depth reporting from the nation’s capitol, something he is looking forward to.
We eat homemade sushi on the back porch on a beautiful September afternoon. He is dressed casually in T-shirt and jeans and eats like hetalks, quickly and with precision.
Berman’s insightful political coverage for The Nation, “connecting the dots,” as he calls it, belies someone only 23 years old, especially for a VIEWS-paper (as compared to a NEWS paper, to borrow publisher Victor Navasky’s description), a journal whose “primary function is to interpret and advocate, to discuss and to argue and to debate.”
This is clearly a young man with a lot of forward motion.
I meet Ari Berman at his parents’ home in Fairfield. When I request a lunch interview, it is his suggestion to meet there. A journalism major who earned his degree from Northwestern University, for the past year Berman has helmed “The Daily Outrage,” a political weblog for The Nation, one of the country’s leading progressive publications.
He is between jobs, on break, in the process of moving from New York City to Washington, DC. He’s been enlisted by the magazine as a contributing writer to do more in-depth reporting from the nation’s capitol, something he is looking forward to.
We eat homemade sushi on the back porch on a beautiful September afternoon. He is dressed casually in T-shirt and jeans and eats like he talks, quickly and with precision.
Berman’s insightful political coverage for The Nation, “connecting the dots,” as he calls it, belies someone only 23 years old, especially for a VIEWS-paper (as compared to a NEWSpaper, to borrow publisher Victor Navasky’s description), a journal whose “primary function is to interpret and advocate, to discuss and to argue and to debate.”
This is clearly a young man with a lot of forward motion.
You’re from Fairfield, right?
Ari Berman: I was born in New York City but I came here when I was six months old.
What attracted you to journalism?
I guess I was always curious and a bit of an instigator. I was always independent and knew that I could write. So it was just like a perfect match, in the sense that I felt with journalism you can write about anything you’re interested in.
You started writing in high school?
I have to think back. I think the first thing I wrote was for The Source. It was about a whitewater rafting trip in Maine that I went on. I was also writing about music for an online music magazine. For a while I was really into music, like hip-hop and stuff, and I would go to concerts and interview people. I actually think to this day the most famous people I’ve ever interviewed are Method Man and Redman [laughs]. . . .
Anyway, I wanted to start a school newspaper, partly because we didn’t have one, and partly because I wanted to go into journalism school at Northwestern and realized I needed to do something to try and get in. So I went up to this journalism course at University of Iowa. It was just a crash course on creating a newspaper. You had a week. I didn’t know anything but they taught me the software. . . . At the end of it—I had worked so hard and I was sort of distraught—I won an award for best newspaper. I’m like, wow, [I] could do this. . . . [laughs] The good thing about journalism school is they throw you right in your first few days.
So right from the get-go you were doing journalism?
No. My first internship was at an environmental group, Natural Resources Defense Council in DC. . . . That was cool because Democrats were still in control of the Senate and the environmental movement was pretty successful at blocking a lot of stuff. I came back and took a few magazine writing courses I really liked. Then I was clear that I wanted to do some sort of journalism.
Any other travels?
I went to Switzerland. . . . It was a field studies program where we studied international organizations. I studied the UN, basically. It was after 9/11 and I thought the best thing for me to do would be to go abroad and learn how everything else works. . . . I got really interested in foreign policy and then I came back, and through school—everyone in journalism school interns, it’s a setup program—I interned at Editor & Publisher, the trade for the newspaper industry.
They were doing this really amazing stuff. Editor Greg Mitchell, sort of an old-school leftie, was doing a lot of media coverage on Iraq. I had been abroad and reading The Guardian and watching BBC, so I knew what the alternative was. I came back and I was stunned. I was literally floored that this debate was not going on. I mean, it seemed so clear in Europe that [invading Iraq] was a f—d-up thing to do; so opposite here. So Greg and I and one other reporter just started writing about this stuff all the time. We did newspaper roundups and we checked how many editorial pages were against the war—none.
But it was still sort of small scale. But the Internet has changed the way people view news. No one read E & P in print except for people in the newspaper industry. A lot of people read it online. Send it to commondreams.org or put it on truthout.com and it’s all over.
So then I got an email one day. I had met Victor Navasky, the publisher of The Nation, at a party sponsored by Week magazine. . . . I didn’t know what to say when I met Victor and Victor’s like, “I’ve been reading your work.” And I’m like all, “Thank you,” and really meekish. And then I did a piece—remember the last press conference before we went to war where Bush called on everyone?
Stepford media.
It was screened and the last question was like [chuckling], “Mr. President, can you tell us the role prayer plays in your life?” So I go in the next day and Greg’s like, “Did you watch the press conference?” I’m like, “Yeah, I couldn’t believe it.” He’s like, “Do a thing called ‘Questions We Wished They’d Asked.’ ” So I did a thing called “Thirteen Questions We Wished They’d Asked.”
It was such a little thing but it got a lot of attention, and Katrina vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation, emailed me. “Hi Ari. Saw your very good questions. Wondering if you might want to write something for The Nation?” And I said, “Yeah, Katrina, I’d love to write for The Nation—but I’d also like to intern there” [laughing]. It’s a competitive intern program and I’d wanted to do it for a long time and obviously this was my in. So I interned there and I got a really good opportunity to write. I wrote this piece about Richard Perle.
The former chair of the influential pro-war Defense Policy Board. Beautiful piece.
Thank you. I did a story about how he took money from foreign broadcasters…. using his government status to sort of charge money. It was just a small thing but Perle is just the shadiest guy ever. And I wrote a piece I was particularly proud of about the Washington Post’s pre-war coverage—how they buried all their best reporting and put them on like page A29—and then I went back and finished school.
I had to figure out what I was going to do. . . . I was applying for this fellowship at the American Prospect in DC and needed my editor to write a recommendation for me at The Nation. I dropped a hint like I’d come back there if it was possible. She sent me an email a month [later and] matched the offer, essentially. I came back with the understanding I was going to write this blog called “The Daily Outrage.”
Was that something created for you?
No, this other guy, Matt Bivens, who was a Nation writer, started doing it and then went to med school. So they needed someone and I did it for a year. . . . [Now I’m going] to Washington [to] write longer stories and do more on-the-ground reporting, which is what I’ve always wanted to do anyway—be a reporter.
Will you give a brief history for people who may not be familiar with The Nation?
Well, first I would encourage everyone to buy Victor Navasky’s memoir, A Matter of Opinion. It’s a really great read and it gives the whole history. The first convention he ever covered was 1956, Adlai Stevenson. If ever I want to pick someone’s brain, he’s a pretty good person. The Nation was started in 1865 by E. L. Godkin, who was an abolitionist, and Frederick Olmstead, who built Central Park. It became a place where lots of different abolitionists such as Frederick Douglas were published, and then it formed into a radical magazine, one that fused radical and liberal ideas.
First it was corporate power in the 1910s and 20s, and then it was just this crazy cold-war mind-state. If The Nation became known for anything, for better or worse, it was the fact that it fought McCarthy very fiercely, much more than anyone else. Then it was obviously tough on Reagan and went through a number of incarnations.
The Bush presidency didn’t rescue The Nation but it put it much more on the map. Circulation started skyrocketing and the kind of independent alternative analysis that The Nation’s done forever was really in demand amongst a certain group of people—especially after 9/11 when you couldn’t raise certain questions. I gained a lot of respect for it, and if you go back and look at everything we’ve written about the war, it’s very clear that The Nation was right. . . .
Any thoughts on why the media has become so gun-shy?
It’s a really difficult question to answer. People say a lot of people in the media are liberal, and on certain issues—maybe gay rights—a lot of the people in the media are liberal. But publishers, the people who have the say at the end of the day, are overwhelmingly conservative. And what they’re conservative about is the bottom line. And the bottom line is not investigative journalism. The bottom line is not liberal news. They have to worry about pissing off advertisers. They have to worry about pissing off the government. You know, it’s tough, if a New York Times or a Washington Post reporter does something the White House doesn’t like, they’re just going to take away their access. And they did that to Rick Lyman [of the New York Times], who wasn’t allowed to travel on a plane with Dick Cheney.
So what’s going to happen is they’re just going . . . to replace him with someone who’s obviously more willing. And in journalism, there are a lot of rank opportunists who want to be in front of the cameras. I mean, it’s gotten to be, people get hired on CNN for how they look, not for how they report—and that’s every news station. So obviously what you’re having is the Miss America contest playing out on CNN every single time they go to an anchor, which is fine—it’s nice to look at—but it’s not real journalism.
The same thing happens with the White House press corps. I think a lot of them are well-intentioned but they’re worried about their sources. It’s a very small club. They all know each other. They’re all friends with all the people and they worry about going too far…. That’s what happens when you’re in the establishment media, while alternative media don’t have enough resources to get in. They suffer often from their own failings, which are a narrow mindset and an inability to tell a story that a lot of people can relate to….
The right-wing media is incredibly well organized; they have a ton of funding and they’re great at putting pressure on people. For example, look at the reporting on Israel. The Israeli lobby has just been incredibly good at making the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict fairly one-sided in this country. I think it’s one-sided against Israel in Europe, by the way, but it’s one-sided against the Palestinians in this country. An equal balance has not been struck. The best coverage of Israel, funnily enough, is in Israel, by Left Israeli papers.… I think the L.A. Times, the New York Times, they’re good but they’re usually just reporting the news. The majority of the time they suffer from an establishment bias, more than a liberal or a conservative bias.
That’s the good thing about the blogs. They are really good at providing an alternative news source, every day pointing out hypocrisy, pointing out a different take on the news and culling from a lot of different sources. So if you read the good blogs at least—and stories from the New York Times, the Washington Post, also stories from The Nation and better progressive publications and Mother Jones, and then there are also stories from abroad. [Ari recommends these blogs: thecarpetbagger report.com, warandpiece.com, and www.dailykos.com.]
So what is it like—just on a more homey level—coming from here and heading into the fray now?
Well, growing up in Fairfield’s interesting because there is an innate skepticism towards power—in the government sense—that there isn’t in a lot of places. Because of the NLP [Natural Law Party] and other things here, you’re taught to be suspicious of the two-party system and you’re taught to be suspicious of Democrats and Republicans and the promises they make and the way they run Washington. That always made me curious about what else was out there. That was really helpful and the upbringing I had, I thought, was in a way somewhat anti-establishment.
There’s more to this world than making money; there’s more to this world than just working at a corporation. I always wanted to do something where I could express myself and make a difference. I think that you have a freedom in journalism, even in political journalism, that you just don’t have working for a politician or something. Maybe in five years or so, I’ll work in politics. I’m only 23, I can do whatever I want pretty much, but now, I think, writing is just so much more interesting because there’s such a dearth of really good opposition independent journalism.
Washington’s going to be a much bigger challenge than New York was. I also find it to be a ton of opportunity and a lot going on there that needs to be reported on. I’d like to give people the sense of how Washington works by describing how it doesn’t work. We elect people to go do a job and they are not doing that job. No one elected people to go put a last-minute tax break for Haliburton in the energy bill. I think there’s a sense that stuff isn’t working but I think it needs to be flushed out a little more. Also, I never really considered myself an activist so it’s hard for me to say what people should do. That’s why my [final] blog was a little bit of a switch for me [suggesting people get involved in local politics, etc]. I don’t really like sentimentality or inspiration, whatever.
Are some investigative journalists too sentimental?
I think that some journalists are probably too sentimental, too tied to their sources or too tied to authority. I was talking to another friend of mine who does some investigative reporting, and what ties investigative journalism together is an innate skepticism toward authority and somewhat of an anti-establishment mindset, so it doesn’t really matter what you’re doing, someone tells you something and you don’t necessarily think that it’s true. I think skepticism is healthy and good and there certainly could be more of it in the media today.
Do you have any advice for inspiring investigative journalists?
Well, I don’t consider myself an investigative journalist. The Perle piece is the only investigative piece I’ve done. I would like to do more of that. I don’t know how you describe what I do. I think a lot of it is just connecting the dots, providing a narrative that other people don’t provide. It’s almost like I’m an explanatory journalist, taking what’s out there and explaining it to people.
That’s the gap that’s missing. “Explanatory journalism”—I like that phrase. What a wonderful way to end this interview because I think one of the biggest problems is that it all seems too much to understand and people just shut off. So I really encourage you in your work. I think it’s really needed.
Thanks. The one good thing about growing up in Fairfield is, a lot of people are doing some crazy, wacked-out stuff, but a lot of people are just following their own path and not really conforming to everything else. I get really frustrated with people in my generation that I know are smart and committed and somewhat idealistic who just decide to take that corporate job [rather than] work at a non-profit. People that immediately want to start a business and make a lot of money and don’t want to volunteer their time. You can’t fault anyone for making their decisions. Everyone makes their decisions for different reasons, but I just think there are a lot of opportunities out there for my generation to make a difference and I think it would be sad if people wouldn’t take that opportunity.
What about a possible draft?
I don’t think there’s going to be a draft unless there’s another terrorist attack. I do think—and this is something where I disagree with some people on the Left—there should be some sort of mandatory national service in this country—not necessarily military, but you should either rebuild an inner city, or work in a nursing home, or go help build wind generators, or something. We really do have a deficit of shared sacrifice. People like me, who grew up privileged, can think about this stuff because we don’t have to think about money. But if everyone could do it and not have to worry about the money, I think that’d be amazing.