The purpose of journalism: An interview with William Kristol

Miller: As founder and editor first of the Weekly Standard and now The Bulwark, you've never hesitated to share your position on a given topic. How did you develop this approach to journalism?

Kristol: I came to journalism from government and from politics. So I never claimed to be a journalist. I worked with many journalists. I edited them. And I certainly committed to journalistic principles of truth and the facts. But I also think you can present the facts and then present your opinion about them, or your interpretation of them, and do justice to the facts nonetheless. So that's what we tried to do at the Weekly Standard, I think most successfully. That's what we've tried to do at The Bulwark. I think there's room for just straight impartial journalism, if you want to use that term. But there's also room, I think, for good journalism that's informed by a point of view or by an interpretation.

Would you call that advocacy journalism?

It can be advocacy journalism, if you have editorials. At The Weekly Standard, we had editorials, and at The Bulwark, I sometimes write in a more editorial voice about why something should happen. But a lot of it is what I'd call interpretive journalism, or journalism that has a sort of point of view about many topics, whether it's foreign policy or economics or whatever. And again, I think the key there is to be fact-based, and to also acknowledge facts and arguments that cut against you. That's one thing we tried hard to do at The Weekly Standard and do try to do with The Bulwark. When we make an argument, we acknowledge or at least link to some of the counter arguments. So people understand that there's a reason why other people might not agree with us.

What is the core purpose of journalism, in your view?

I guess I have a pretty traditional view that most serious political philosophers of democracy and free societies have had, which is that you need to have a free exchange of ideas, both for the sake of the public's understanding and being informed. But also for the sake of improving ideas - the kind of John Stuart Mill argument that liberty is a good thing in and of itself. But it also provides a way to test propositions and arguments. So I'd say a combination of informing the public but also testing the arguments in combat - intellectual combat - with other arguments. 

The headline of this year's Global Media Forum is "sharing solutions." To what extent does the media have a responsibility not only to cover challenges, but to offer solutions to them?

I would say the media, or at least some parts of the media, has a responsibility - different parts of the media do different things, obviously - to at least explain the situation, to interpret the facts and to report our reality, and therefore make it easier to arrive at shared solutions. I think the actual shared solutions more often would come from political leaders and from NGOs that are in the business of coming up with economic policies or migration policies or foreign policies. Obviously, people in the media participate in that, and contribute to that, in what they write, in what we write. So I think the media is part of a broader system that can lead to shared solutions. I think it would probably be a mistake, and claiming too much, to say the media by itself can come up with the solutions and make them happen.

One challenge you've been particularly vocal about is the fragility of democracy in the US and around the world. What is your basic argument for what people can do to defend democracy? 

Coming to Germany, it makes me think about the fact that we, in the US at least, fall into the trap too easily of a kind of American exceptionalism - that what's happened elsewhere couldn't happen in the US, or different versions of it couldn't happen in the US. That we're sort of immune from threats of autocracy and authoritarianism. And we're not. People are similar all over the world and institutions can fail all over the world. And demagogues can prevail, in many different countries. They'll do it in different ways, and it's foolish to just impose one lesson from one country on another. But there are lessons to be learned. So I actually think a broader perspective is very helpful in the US. I think it's one problem with our debate, that we haven't thought enough about lessons from history, lessons from elsewhere, similarities or dissimilarities too, to understand what's happening here. 

You're obviously still hard at work every day. But what have you learned about journalism and the journalistic process over the past, what is it, 30 years now?

Yeah, we started The Weekly Standard in 1995, so just about 30 years. I think things have changed a lot. The change isn't stopping, and there's no point wishing for it to. A lot of technological change is going to happen, and a lot of it is good. There's a little too much nostalgia and romanticization of the good old days, which weren't so great in some ways, if we think about them for a minute. We are in the world we're in in terms of technology, social media, the internet, deep fakes, whatever is possible. Artificial Intelligence: it's not going away. It can be regulated and it should be. We should have intelligent debates and discussions about it, but sometimes in my generation there's a kind of excessive nostalgia for the good old days. A lot of bad things happened in the good old days. And so I think we just need to embrace the moment, at least recognize the moment. Privately, we can not love it in some ways, but that's the moment we're living in. And so our solutions, to get back to that theme, have to be in accord with what's possible in this world. We can't simply push things away.

More information about the panel Kristol will be part of at the DW Global Media Forum 2024: dw.com/gmf

The interview was conducted by Saskia Miller, an independent journalist currently based in Berlin after more than 15 years in New York and Washington. She writes for a variety of media platforms, including The New York Times, The Atlantic, the Bloomberg CityLab Summit and the Aspen Institute.