The Daily Orange spoke with Dan Balz, the chief correspondent at The Washington Post, when he visited Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications on Tuesday.

The Daily Orange: As a now-very accomplished and recognized journalist, when was the point in your career when you felt you were qualified to garner public respect for your opinion?

Dan Balz: That’s a hard question to answer, in part because I think of myself as a reporter first. I’ve never thought of myself as an opinion writer, or as a person who was trying to tell people what to think. I think what’s happened is that I’ve been at The Washington Post for a long time, and I’ve been doing the same thing for a long time. And if you do that and you build up trusts and relationships and all of that, you are able to write about American politics with a greater sense of history and knowledge and some authority; the fact that people pay attention to it, to me, is icing on the cake. I got into this business to report about things, and I prefer to let my writing and reporting to speak for itself.

The D.O.: What initially got you interested in reporting on politics?

D.B.: My first goal was to be a Washington reporter, and I kind of stumbled into political reporting. I had wonderful mentors at the Post, such as David Broder. When I started at the Post I was an editor, and I continued on to be a political editor; that was when I kind of realized I wanted to go into political reporting. I bounced between reporting and editing for the first 10 years I was at the Post, and then in ‘89 I started full-time reporting.

The D.O.: And you’ve written a couple books in the process. Are you planning to write another about this campaign?

D.B.: I don’t know. I’ve been thinking pretty hard about it actually, but I haven’t decided yet. Part of the problem is that we have a sprawling canvas right now. It’s a very unusual campaign. We’ve never had a campaign in the modern era where you’ve had three non-politicians at the top of the polls. Well, what is that telling us? Is it just a summertime phenomenon that will give way to the normal course of events or is it a permanent shake-up in the Republican Party? It sure does make it fascinating and fun to cover. It keeps us humble.

The D.O.: In your articles for the Post, you seem to appeal to both sides. Is it hard to maintain your voice while also taking an unbiased approach to your reporting?

D.B.: No, it isn’t for me. It’s the way I grew up doing journalism, which was to be non-partisan. I’ve always found interesting things to write about on both sides. I think the internal stories of each political party over the last quarter century are interesting in and of themselves. And I’ve wanted to cover them from a perspective of trying to understand each of their dynamics and kind of how they come together in the general elections. This country is changing constantly and part of political reporting is looking at what the reasons are for what we are seeing. People are putting forth their hopes and dreams and that’s part of who we are as Americans and that’s part of what makes political reporting, to me, interesting. Obviously the horse race, and the battles back and forth, and the personalities are interesting but there’s more to it than that.

The D.O.: How do you think social media is affecting the 2016 presidential campaign?

D.B.: Unlike any we’ve seen before. Every campaign cycle, there’s some new element of technology that affects it. Now, social media is a critically important component of what campaigns do for this reason: Everybody’s trying to find an audience, and social media is a crucial way of finding an audience, whether it’s for our journalism or if it’s for the community a candidate’s trying to create.

The D.O.: Do you feel that social media enhances your journalism?

D.B.: In short, yes. I do a bit of tweeting — others are better at tweeting. But we the political team at the Post collectively use Twitter to spread our work. Somebody will send an email at any part of the day asking to give them a little “tweet love” for some story, and we’ll all tweet it out to our followers. It’s just part of our daily work now. I decided I would try to figure out Snapchat because I wanted to think about one element of social media that I wanted to concentrate on the campaign trail. Snapchat is an alternate way of telling a story and allowed me to take others to places that you otherwise wouldn’t get to. I’m seeing a lot of events at a different angle because press often has different access that other people don’t have. I have the opportunity to show a much wider audience what it really looks like. So that’s what I’ve been trying to do with Snapchat — plus it’s fun.

The D.O.: With all of these emerging media platforms in today’s modern world, where do you see the future of political journalism?

D.B.: I don’t see a future that in terms of content is dramatically different than what we have today. However, the digital age ushered in possibilities that we didn’t think about. I don’t know where it will go. In a good sense it allows for storytelling from lots of different people. There’s a democratization that goes on with the spread of digital content and journalism. And I think that’s good. The one concern I have is that it can feed superficiality, and it can lead to everybody writing about the same thing at the same moment — we can miss something we should be covering instead. But I’m still very optimistic about it.

The D.O.: Is there something you particularly like about the way The Washington Post runs or reports?

D.B.: The great thing about The Washington Post is that it has always had a combination of courage, tough-mindedness, great reporting, extremely good writing and collegiality — I mean, it’s a delightful place to work. That sounds a little odd because it’s a big, competitive newsroom; it’s not meant for everybody — not everyone thrives in that environment. But the political team at the Post, as long as I’ve been there, has been a collegial operation.

The D.O.: After years of political reporting and candidate analysis, is it hard to keep faith in the workings of Washington, despite scandal and broken promises to constituents?

D.B.: In journalism, you’re taught to be skeptical; you’re not necessarily taught to be cynical. I think if you get cynical about the political process, it’s harder to report on it. There are times when I’m pessimistic about the near-term, but that doesn’t make me any less interested in learning about it and understanding it to explain it to people.

Published on September 29, 2015 at 11:39 pm

Contact Grace: gkjankow@syr.edu