Springfield’s alternative weekly Illinois Times has published a summary by reporter David Blanchette of a wide-ranging interview with the senior U.S. Senate Democrat from Illinois. We should really be seeing this kind of summary of views of elected officials at all levels on a regular basis.
No submitting questions in advance, no take-it-or-leave-it prepared statements, no off-limit topics, and no hesitation when responding to the interviewer. It’s rare that a national political figure agrees to a no-holds-barred interview, but U.S. Senator Richard Durbin, a Springfield Democrat, thinks that’s how it should be when elected officials interact with the news media.
Rare, indeed—and actually extraordinary given that the Senator is not up for re-election this cycle.
Durbin comes across as a bit hard to pin down on some issues, like seemingly trying to having things both ways on immigration—and throwing in a bit of cringe in the process with a Mayflower reference.
To me, he’s generally right, though, on ethics for the Supreme Court, the Gaza-Israel conflict, the need for an end on Ukrainian terms of the Russian war on Ukraine. On all of these, though, being right is not sufficient: More action is still urgently needed.
His observations on the paucity of media coverage of important issues and how that looks, specifically, from his perspective seems as dead on as it is depressing:
“It’s not uncommon for me to have a press conference in Chicago and for all the TV stations to show up with cameramen but no reporters. There are no questions asked. None. I finish up my statement, they wrap up their cameras and go back to the studio,” Durbin said. “The people are being denied basic information to draw their own judgments about the conduct of elected officials, and it’s because of the big corporations gobbling up the small media outlets.”
I for one would love to see more media outlets doing more of this kind of open-ended interview—and probably in place of the round table discussions among journalists, news insiders, and pundits that seem to count these days for both coverage and analysis.
I would like to see more politicians asked more often about where they stand and see the answers reported by the media back to their audiences. I’d also like to see media push politicians to be more specific in their answers about what exactly the steps will be to get their views translated into policies and enacted.
This interview was a great step.
