Ellen Goodman talks on personal politics at Stanford
Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Ellen Goodman once overheard a conversation her young daughter was having with a friend.
"What does your mom do?" asked the friend.
"She's a columnist," Goodman's daughter responded.
There was silence. "What's that?" her friend finally asked.
"Well," said Goodman's daughter, "my mother gets paid for telling people what she thinks."
For 20 years now, that's exactly what Goodman's been doing. And the Boston Globe columnist, now syndicated in more than 400 newspapers, was at it again last Thursday when she delivered the eighth annual John S. Knight Distinguished Lecture at Stanford.
Goodman, who received a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1980, is a native of Massachusetts and a 1963 graduate of Radcliffe College. She has written six books and thousands of columns exploring just about every major issue of our time.
While Goodman has spent the winter quarter as Stanford's Lorry Lokey Visiting Professor, her accent betrayed her: she's Boston through and through. She will return to the Globe in March.
The issue Thursday evening was "Politics: Up Close and Too Personal," a lecture in which Goodman analyzed disturbing trends in political coverage that have made the president's underwear front page news.
"Political reporting has become more a matter of psychology than of policy," Goodman said. "It's sexier, in every sense of the word, to cover character than to cover politics."
Goodman traced the trend to a generation of female journalists who entered the work force in the late 1960s and insisted upon breaking the "gentleman's agreement" among male journalists that had allowed things like President John F. Kennedy's rampant infidelities to go unreported. At the time, said Goodman, the feminist phrase "The personal is political" became a mantra for her and other women journalists. They pushed to get breast cancer and other "women's issues" onto the front pages of the newspaper, along with relevant stories about the personal lives and choices of the nation's political leaders.
"I believed you couldn't exclude the personal man or woman from the political," said Goodman. "Well, be careful what you wish for."
In 1984, Goodman said, the "gentleman's agreement" splintered completely with the Gary Hart debacle. For the first time, adultery became a national issue. What followed, however, was a trend toward less meaningful coverage of trivial personal details.
"In no way should we go back," insisted Goodman, "but we have come full circle."
The difference in good political reporting and bad, said Goodman, is the difference between former Sen. Bob Packwood's abuse of power and titillating but unnecessary reports of trouble in the Clintons' marriage.
"Susan B. Anthony, a good friend of the Stanfords, felt that private life was not as important as long as the public was well-served," said Goodman. "I suspect Bob Packwood would have tested Miss Anthony sorely."
Goodman urged the establishment of guidelines for personal coverage, beginning with whether or not personal information has any bearing on public performance.
"We need to be somewhat less hasty and more layered in our analysis," said Goodman. "We need to encourage people to make judgments as porcupines make love: very, very carefully."
Some political figures, like Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank, have been fortunate to survive attacks because they are considered as whole people, said Goodman. Others, like Zoe Baird or Lani Guinier, have been ruined by shoddy political coverage.
Political coverage in the 1996 election is not shaping up to be any more impressive, said Goodman. She bemoaned the fact that shows like "Crossfire" allow no considered thought or middle ground, instead becoming "high decibel, dysfunctional politics" in which "the shtick trumps the insight."
--Dee-Ann Durbin
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