AMHS MEMBER MIKE DeBONIS DESCRIBES LIFE AS A REPORTER FOR LEADING WASHINGTON NEWSPAPER
By Nancy DeSanti,
For our fourth program of 2018, we were pleased to welcome as our speaker, Washington Post reporter and AMHS member Mike DeBonis. His topic: “It’s Not (Usually) Fake News: How political reporters do their jobs in 2018.” As a reporter who covers congressional and national politics, Mike has had a number of front-page stories in the Washington Post and has appeared on several television news programs. Mike is well-known to many AMHS members through his family ties to our former President Omero Sabatini, and so Mike also traces his roots to the town of Secinaro in the province of L’Aquila in Abruzzo.
Before Mike’s talk, about 55 attendees enjoyed a delicious lunch catered by Fontina Grille, and we heard from Benjamin Abeles, our AMHS scholarship winner who charmed everyone with his easygoing manner and his knowledge of Italian literature. He told us about his family’s Italian immigrant generation who got up early every morning to go to work and who helped build one of the buildings of Cornell University, from which Benjamin just graduated.
After lunch, Omero gave a wonderful introduction to his nephew Mike. It turns out that Mike, who is from Indiana, decided to come to Washington and study at Georgetown University, because here was the only place he had a relative who would invite him to a delicious home-cooked meal every Sunday. So you could say it’s possible Mike would not have ended up with the career he has, and have the wonderful family he has, if not for Omero’s culinary skills.
Mike was accompanied by his wife Dena and their 15-monthold daughter Rosie, who has already come to some of our meetings. And Rosie stole the spotlight by coming down out of her highchair in the middle of her father’s talk, walking up to the podium and saying “Dada, Dada.” And Mike picked her up in his arms, and kept talking without missing a beat!!
Mike began by showing us some slides of his trip to Abruzzo with his family. We saw the beautiful scenes of Secinaro where Omero grew up and where some of their family members still live. Then he began his talk by saying, “The trends are clear. Americans trust us less,” he said of the news media, citing a recent Pew Foundation poll.
He stressed that it’s important to notice that newspapers such as the Washington Post clearly label their articles as (1) reporting, or (2) analysis, or (3) opinion. Exactly what does this mean? Mike explained that the job of the reporter is to find out and report the facts to the best of his or her ability, while the analyst takes those facts and tries to put them in context with what else is known, and the opinion writer (or editorial board) expresses, in his or her view, what it all means.
One of the themes of Mike’s talk that he kept coming back to was how to be a better news consumer. He joked that even though he would love for everyone to read just the Washington Post, it is much better to read several news sources, especially newspapers, which can do in-depth articles, unlike cable news shows which often deal in sound bites and frequently don’t have time to examine issues in detail, given the time constraints. Mike notes that as part of his job, he reads all sorts of news sites, from far right to far left, to get a feel for what sort of news stories (or not) are out there.
And he said social media has changed the way reporting is done, with many people getting their news from Facebook and social media such as Twitter, and then placing too much stock on what they read on the Internet. He said this is why it’s important to get the news from a variety of sources and to be mindful of standards for news sources, such as how do they correct errors. Mike noted that in the previous week, he received an e-mail from a reader who pointed out a mistake Mike made in an article written in January. He said he checked and he had indeed made an error so the Post ran a correction, regardless of the fact that the error was a small one on a six-month-old story.
He said this was a good example of engaging with your news source, and although Mike said there is not enough time to read all the comments readers make to the online articles, he tries to respond to at least some readers’ comments or concerns.
Regarding the upcoming congressional elections in November, Mike noted that he and his colleagues will be traveling to various congressional districts to interview candidates and voters. With 24 seats needed to flip the House to Democratic control, he predicted that the Democrats will pick up 20-30 seats, but in the Senate, because of which seats are in play, the Republicans may increase their majority.
After Mike’s talk, he took questions from members of the audience, who made thoughtful comments and asked interesting questions on such topics as Russian meddling, coverage of voters in the heartland, likely Democratic presidential candidates and authorship of presidential tweets. Before the lunch and Mike’s talk, Oscar Bartoli sang “Tu sei per me la più bella del mondo” to put everyone in a good mood.
And after the program, Oscar put on his blog an outline of Mike’s talk, which can be found at https://oscarb1.blogspot.com/2018/07/its-not-usually-fakenews.html. We thank all those who helped serve the lunch, Fontina Grille who donated the raffle prize and those who bought raffle tickets, which brought in $146 for the Society.