I read with great interest Mr. Steven Balters' op-ed "David Axelrod dodged students's tough questions" as I was the person charged with sifting through the 103 questions audience members asked him when he spoke at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I personally thought that Mr. Axelrod was forthcoming on some questions but not so on others.
I was surprised to learn that I have a new position on campus: the "Protector of the Powerful." This unpaid post apparently has something to do with a bunch of false claims Mr. Balters makes in his op-ed.
The sad thing is that these false statements could have been cured by simply picking up the phone and calling me or by shooting me an e-mail. Even worse, the false claims Mr. Balters makes take away from an excellent point that he makes in other parts of the op-ed: the questioning of whether our leaders and their spokespeople are giving us candid answers to tough questions.
Mr. Balters claims that I was "seen crossing-out and editing the questions, or simply discarding them." First of all, I rewrote hard-to-read questions in block printing so that Dean David Manderscheid, the person in charge of asking the questions, could read them. As a veteran of these kinds of events, they go smoother when the Master of Ceremonies can read the questions.
Second, I did edit out misstatements of fact in the questions. This, to me, seems like a reasonable thing for a political scientist to do. For example, one question asked whether there will be a public option in the health care bill. The original question claimed that it takes 75 votes to stop a filibuster in the senate, and given that "fact," the question-writer wanted to know if would there be a public option in the bill. Since it does not take 75 votes to stop a filibuster, I edited that part out. Was this when I was "spreading my legs" to "give it up" to "do the bidding of the powerful?" I'm curious.
Another question I chose was about gay rights. About 1/6 of the questions asked were about gay rights; I chose the broadest one. However, I edited that question as well since it claimed that the president might not have been born in the United States, when, in fact, he was. Ironically, John McCain was the candidate born outside of the 50 United States (He was born in Panama; his father, like McCain himself, was in the Navy and serving there when Senator McCain was born.)
I also object to the false claim that by examining the questions means that I was subservient to Mr. Axelrod. When we met (for about 11 seconds before the talk), I said that I'd be screening the questions. He said, "Ask anything you want." As such, I chose questions about gay rights, Afghanistan and the health care bill. The gay rights question (a question of social justice Mr. Balters falsely claims was not asked at the event) was the issue with the most inquiries, Afghanistan/Iraq was second, health care third. By choosing questions from the topics that were of most interest to the audience, was that when I "hopped into bed" with Mr. Axelrod? I did discard the question, "Thanks for coming. Can we legalize pot now?" I felt that foreign affairs, the economy, health care and gay rights were more important. I'm fine with folks who disagree.
Additionally, since many students were in the audience, I chose two questions speaking directly to student issues. One was a softball about something Mr. Axelrod learned in college that he still finds useful and the other was a tough question about why Obama isn't tapping young people's energy to deal with the major issues of the day. If Mr. Balters had taken the time to call me, I'd have mentioned how I was a source for a recent AP story about how young people are reacting to the Obama administration as compared to the Obama campaign.
I also chose questions about Iraq, the Israeli-Palestinian issue and the bailout. Time prevented those questions from being asked. As for the question about the Nobel Prize, it strikes me as reasonable and newsworthy to ask a senior adviser to the president about that on the day it happened. It did take away time from talking about other issues, and if folks want to object to that, I plead guilty.
is a member of the 
6 comments
1. What?
2. You're an idiot.Thank you for this response, Dr. Wagner. It's sad that you have to take time out of your day to acknowledge Balters' writing. I really hope the DN can internally acknowledge and adjust its journalistic standards. God knows they won't take public responsibility for them.Please, DN. Do better.
Not very subtle. And not very smart. Ailes doesn't scare easily.
The White House has declared war on Fox News. White House communications director Anita Dunn said that Fox is "opinion journalism masquerading as news." Patting rival networks on the head for their authenticity (read: docility), senior adviser David Axelrod declared Fox "not really a news station." And Chief of Staff Emanuel told (warned?) the other networks not to "be led (by) and following Fox."Meaning? If Fox runs a story critical of the administration -- from exposing White House czar Van Jones as a loony 9/11 "truther" to exhaustively examining the mathematical chicanery and hidden loopholes in proposed health care legislation -- the other news organizations should think twice before following the lead.
The signal to corporations is equally clear: You might have dealings with a federal behemoth that not only disburses more than $3 trillion every year but is extending its reach ever deeper into private industry -- finance, autos, soon health care and energy. Think twice before you run an ad on Fox.
At first, there was little reaction from other media. Then on Thursday, the administration tried to make them complicit in an actual boycott of Fox. The Treasury Department made available Ken Feinberg, the executive pay czar, for interviews with the White House "pool" news organizations -- except Fox. The other networks admirably refused, saying they would not interview Feinberg unless Fox was permitted to as well. The administration backed down.
This was an important defeat because there's a principle at stake here. While government can and should debate and criticize opposition voices, the current White House goes beyond that. It wants to delegitimize any significant dissent. The objective is no secret. White House aides openly told Politico that they're engaged in a deliberate campaign to marginalize and ostracize recalcitrants, from Fox to health insurers to the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
There's nothing illegal about such search-and-destroy tactics. Nor unconstitutional. But our politics are defined not just by limits of legality or constitutionality. We have norms, Madisonian norms.
Madison argued that the safety of a great republic, its defense against tyranny, requires the contest between factions or interests. His insight was to understand "the greater security afforded by a greater variety of parties." They would help guarantee liberty by checking and balancing and restraining each other -- and an otherwise imperious government.
Factions should compete, but also recognize the legitimacy of other factions and, indeed, their necessity for a vigorous self-regulating democracy. Seeking to deliberately undermine, delegitimize and destroy is not Madisonian. It is Nixonian.
But didn't Teddy Roosevelt try to destroy the trusts? Of course, but what he took down was monopoly power that was extinguishing smaller independent competing interests. Fox News is no monopoly. It is a singular minority in a sea of liberal media. ABC, NBC, CBS, PBS, NPR, CNN, MSNBC vs. Fox. The lineup is so unbalanced as to be comical -- and that doesn't even include the other commanding heights of the culture that are firmly, flagrantly liberal: Hollywood, the foundations, the universities, the elite newspapers.
Fox and its viewers (numbering more than CNN's and MSNBC's combined) need no defense. Defend Fox compared to whom? To CNN -- which recently unleashed its fact-checkers on a "Saturday Night Live" skit mildly critical of President Obama, but did no checking of a grotesquely racist remark CNN falsely attributed to Rush Limbaugh?
Defend Fox from whom? Fox's flagship 6 o'clock evening news out of Washington (hosted by Bret Baier, formerly by Brit Hume) is, to my mind, the best hour of news on television. (Definitive evidence: My mother watches it even on the odd night when I'm not on.) Defend Fox from the likes of Anita Dunn? She's been attacked for extolling Mao's political philosophy in a speech at a high school graduation. But the critics miss the surpassing stupidity of her larger point: She was invoking Mao as support and authority for her impassioned plea for individuality and trusting one's own choices. Mao as champion of individuality? Mao, the greatest imposer of mass uniformity in modern history, creator of a slave society of a near-billion worker bees wearing Mao suits and waving the Little Red Book?
The White House communications director cannot be trusted to address high schoolers without uttering inanities. She and her cohorts are now to instruct the country on truth and objectivity?
Nixon: I am not a crook!
Clinton: I did not have sexual relations with that woman!
and
Wagner: I am fair!
Let's all blame the media for reporting such questionable behavior!