Daniel Henninger on Journalism and the End of ‘Wonder Land’
27:06 Share

Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile with a message for everyone paying big wireless way too much. Please, for the love of everything good in this world, stop. With Mint, you can get premium wireless for just $15 a month. Of course, if you enjoy overpaying, no judgments, but that's weird. Okay, one judgment. Anyway, give it a try at mintmobile.com slash switch. Upfront payment of $45 for three-month plan, equivalent to $15 per month required. Intro rate first three months only, then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See full terms at mintmobile.com.

From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch. The Wall Street Journal columnist Dan Henninger is stepping down from his weekly Wonderland column for the journal after more than 23 years Dan has worked at the journal. For more than 50 years in a variety of jobs, going back to the 1970s, arts editor, ran the editorials, features editor, running the op-eds.

Deputy Editorial Page Editor and columnist. He's learned a few things along the way about his craft and about America. And that's our subject for today's Potomac Watch Podcast. Welcome. I'm Paul Gigot, Editor of the Editorial Pages and Dan's colleague for lo these many years. Welcome, Dan. Good to be with you. Thanks for doing this. So you announced last Thursday it was your last column. What kind of reception did you get? The reception has been pretty remarkable, Paul, I have to say.

mainly from the Wall Street Journal's readership. I put a little email address at the end of my column every week. It's not my personal email address. It's a folder inside the Wall Street Journal. And I have received hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails from readers, and many of whom I haven't read through all of them yet. I intend to try to respond to all of them. I really do. It's hard to respond to hundreds of emails like that. Yeah. But it's

It's been so gratifying. And any number of them have been reading the column since the beginning, and they've been reading it every week. And one of my biggest thoughts on making this decision is that I have been so lucky, really, and honored to have spent all this time at The Wall Street Journal in no small part. Yes, it's a great platform, but the readership is so extraordinary. They're so committed. They're so smart.

And I've always been acutely aware of that, as I've written for the Wall Street Journal, that you're writing for a very special readership. And boy, has that come home to me in the last several days. Yeah. It always is striking to me, too, how engaged and smart the readership is. I think I told you I was leaving my apartment building to go to work the next day, and one of the guys who's a neighbor goes, "Heninger! Oh, no!"

Well, since I started appearing on Fox, I got a little bit more familiar and I was walking down 57th Street several years ago and a guy leaned out of a postal service truck, said, "Hey, Henninger, love your column."

The post office guys are reading it. That's pretty good. So I wrote a column, weekly column for 13 years in Washington before I got this job. And it really is a little tyranny. I'm in the deadlines. You finish one, you kind of put it for the evening in the can, and then immediately you're thinking about the next one. What lessons have you learned about writing a column from your tenure? Well, that's true that it is always on your mind. I guess one of the biggest

Lessons I've learned has a lot to do with the transition and the nature of our business. I started writing that column, yes indeed, back after September 11th, and there wasn't much social media or any at that time. We weren't as digitalized as we were back then. Everything was mostly in the newspaper.

And you, at that point, were able to write about almost anything you wanted to. I got a nice note from a friend who said his favorite column was the one I did on New York Yankees' Derek Jeter's final day because he was a big Yankees fan. You wouldn't typically write something like that anymore because of social media, because people are so plugged into the news. Your readers want

to read about what's on their minds. And what's on their minds is what is at the top of the news. And so I found myself more over the years being inclined back towards what the hottest news stories were and trying to make sense of them because that's where the reader's minds were at, not on other subjects. Sure, you could go off in another direction occasionally, but by and large, you had to really stick with the news because that's where

people's thinking was. Well, that's in some ways a loss. And I'd say that because it means the opportunity to step back, back,

is less frequent because the reader does expect that instant return on, I wonder what Henninger thinks about this today. I wonder what my favorite columnists think about this. It means that it's more difficult to do that piece that looks around the corner at anticipating events or tries to set them back or looks off the news and focuses on something. Like you did a piece, more than one piece, I think, on the charter schools, the Crystal Ray schools.

It's the sort of thing that wasn't on the news at the time.

but it was valuable and helped a good cause. Yeah, it did. And one should still be able to do that sort of thing. School choice, the scholarship programs is something the editorial page elevated many, many years ago. It's been very gratifying to see its growth. But on your point about stepping back, I think this is really an interesting subject, Paul. Since the advent of social media and in our business, that mainly meant growth.

Twitter. Virtually all journalists ended up on Twitter. And because of that, that they would be feeding comments into Twitter all the time, and because of the way the news evolved, as I was just describing it, people, I think, in our business spent less time thinking about and reflecting about the meaning of what all these events were. You had to react so fast, you had to get an opinion out.

And I do think politics in general has suffered because of that, because everyone is sort of outputting an instant reaction.

And one of the benefits of writing a weekly column like I did was I would typically put three days into producing it. And I'd spend, I mean, my column appeared on Thursday in the paper, Wednesday evening on the website. I would spend most of Wednesday thinking about what I was going to say, collecting some facts around it, see if the facts fit the opinion I was trying to produce. Always helpful. Always helpful. But not always the case anymore, right? Right.

And so there's just the intensity of opinion now. And so much of our business is primarily opinion, I think has caused a lot of confusion out there among the public. So I kind of felt my job was to try to help people understand what was going on. All right, we're going to take a break. And when we come back, we'll talk about some other changes that have developed in the media over the course of Dan Henninger's

career when we come back. Oh, it's such a clutch off-season pickup, Dave. I was worried we'd bring back the same team. I meant those blackout motorized shades. Blinds.com made it crazy affordable to replace our old blinds. Hard to install? No, it's easy. I installed these and then got some from my mom. She talked to a design consultant for free and scheduled a professional measure and install. Hall of Fame son. They're the number one online retailer of custom window coverings in the world. Blinds.com is the GOAT.

Shop blinds.com right now and get up to 45% off select styles. Rules and restrictions may apply. Welcome back. I'm Paul as you go here on Potomac Watch, our daily podcast with Dan Henninger, columnist extraordinaire. There's an interesting issue just in terms of how we do our jobs. Paradoxically, the intensity of the news cycle and the shortness of the news cycle means that you have to actually do an enormous amount of work along the way

to be current on many subjects so that when the moment hits, you actually know something that you can strike and hit, whether it be a tax bill, whether it be a foreign event, something in the Middle East, whether it be a plane crash, that you have enough knowledge about things that you can apply it on short notice.

and actually add value to your pieces, not just a thumbs up or down opinion piece, but something that adds analytical and informational value. Yeah. And that certainly is one of the attributes and pleasures of the business you and I have been in for a long time. We cover a lot of ground. Right. And if you're going to do it in a meaningful, useful way, you have to be

pretty deeply grounded in all those subjects. That isn't to say we're an absolute expert on them. But at the editorial page, I mean, this started when both of us arrived at the editorial page. Bob Bartley was the editor then. And Bob emphasized the importance of fact-based editorials. That required doing some backgrounding and calling people up and finding out what was going on. So it was a two-way street. Yes, you, on your own

enjoyed learning about all these subjects, but we also enjoyed talking to people who knew a lot about them. During the Cold War era, when we were sort of in a nuclear standoff with the Soviet Union, one of the great specialists in America on this subject was a great strategic thinker, Albert Wohlstetter. And I used to have the longest, most interesting conversations with Albert Wohlstetter about things like nuclear weapons.

and strategic thinking. And it was just simply priceless. - No, absolutely. I mean, Albert and Roberta were terrific and there was no short conversation with Albert, I have to say. - Never. - But, and Freddie Clay, again, and you know, I've had so many people over the years who have been helpful to me on so many subjects, and I know you do.

Because we're not expert, we're generalists. But on the other hand, you have to have enough knowledge to be able to have people coming back to your work so that they say, oh, I'm getting something out of it. I want to talk to you about another development that's happened in our business over time, which I think is inescapably true. And that is just partisanship. I mean, you have, I think the mainstream press, so-called mainstream press, the Times, the Post, most of it,

most of the media, frankly, very few exceptions. It became adjuncts in many ways of the Democratic Party.

They fed that narrative and they created a bubble that a lot of the democratic politicians operate in. And on the right, you've seen that kind of form around Trump to some extent on the right where neither side wants to say a discouraging word about the home team ever, even if they're running off the rails, right? I mean, spending and inflation with Biden, some of the transgender stuff with Biden,

Nobody wanted to say, actually, maybe this is a bad idea on the left. And I think that Trump Republicans, I mean, it's too early to say, but Trump Republicans could run into the same problem if Trump makes mistakes and nobody is willing to criticize them. So I find myself now in a position where, for example, we've criticized some of the Trump decisions here early in his presidency. People on the right aren't agreeing with us on that. You know, they're just

staying silent. Paul, I have a view on how we got to this point, and it mainly pertains to our business, journalism and reporting, because I think I watched it happen. Years ago, as you mentioned, I at one point was the features editor of the Wall Street Journal, and that means I was in charge of all the signed articles on the page. That would have been back in the late 1980s or so.

And one of the things I was asked to do was to visit the Wall Street Journal's news bureaus around the country and see whether any of the reporters in those bureaus would be interested in writing articles for the editorial page. And I did indeed do that. I went to

Washington, Dallas, Chicago, and talk to them. And the reaction generally of the reporters back then was interesting. Most of them would say, you're asking me to do analysis and I just can't do

do that. My job is to report facts. That's all I'm good at. And I just cannot think of a way that I would do analysis. There were a handful that did do that sort of thing. And they did write occasionally for the editorial page. Long about then, the New York Times on its front page is usually just

normally has straight reporting, they put a little bug inside the top of the columns that said news analysis. Remember that? I do. And that's when reporters started to do analysis of the news. And I'm always reminded of the ones who told me they couldn't do it because it is difficult.

Chasing facts, being a reporter is hard work, beating information out of people. Then being asked to analyze it, that was something else again. But over time, almost all reporters were expected to and indeed did do analysis. So the reporting, the stories became more about interpretation as they were about the facts.

And as that developed over time, as our politics got more polarized, you found a lot of reporters at liberal newspapers like the Washington Post and the Chicago Sun-Times, San Francisco Chronicle, writing more and more from a

definitely consciously liberal perspective. They became highly politicized. Readers noticed that. Not all readers appreciated that. And I think it happened concurrently with the decline of readership at a lot of these newspapers. But the polarization only got more intense. The media contributed to it. I think it has brought us to the point you're describing right now, where either side just doesn't want to hear it.

from the other side. And that includes people in conservative media and progressive and liberal media. When that time started doing that analysis, those pieces, they would have every day a kind of analytical piece about the big story that tried to

say, this is what it really means, big picture. And apart from the difficulty of separating analysis from opinion in so many cases, I remember there was one writer, I won't say his name, but we called him the human hydrofoil because he skimmed over the surface of things in every one of those pieces. You know, it was just sort of a big picture take that it told you what he thought, but not a lot else about the event. We're going to take another break. And when we come back, we'll talk about some of the changes in American culture in

and in the world over the course of Dan Henninger's career when we come back. Don't forget, you can reach the latest episode of Potomac Watch anytime. Just ask your smart speaker. Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. That is Play the Opinion Potomac Watch podcast. From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Potomac Watch.

Welcome back. I'm Paul as you go with Dan Henninger. So let's turn to some of the changes you've observed, not in our business, but in American politics and society. Your column consciously called Wonderland because I think you saw the American

seen as a kind of place of wonder. And you also wanted to write about culture as much as you wanted to write about politics. What are some, a couple of the themes, for better or worse, that you think have emerged over all this time? Well, let me start with the very beginning when I joined the editorial page, when Bob Barley hired me. The assignment that

and I only had dipped my foot in the 1970s. It was 1979. Sorry, I joined in 1980. So- I know, we've been together a long time. He said, "You know," and Bob, as we know, very astute, he said, "There's a lot going on in American culture right now." And

It's things that we can't really write editorialize about all the time. What I'd like you to do is go out there into the country and write about some of these cultural issues and we'll put them on the editorial page. Well, I had to pinch myself. I'm actually going to write signed articles about the culture on the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal. Pretty good gig. Pretty good gig. So he was right that the culture was changing and people were becoming more inter-directed, I guess you would say.

I've always regarded myself as a traditionalist. I would go so far as to call myself a radical traditionalist, which is to say change must happen, but I think it has to come out of a foundation of traditions, whether religious or political, cultural. And what I observed over the years is that where our generation, older generations, were by and large more outer-directed

Over that period, people, I think in large part because of social media became much more self-directed, became more involved in their own emotions, their own thinking, rather than looking out into the world. And that I believe has had a deleterious effect

on the stability of the culture. My readers really enjoyed it when I would write about those subjects. And that was because I think they were so confused about what was happening to the culture because it seemed so disorganized. That has continued to this day. Parents

struggle very hard to try to keep their kids off screens because they think it has a damaging effect on the way they think about the world. So I never lacked for subjects in that area. School choice, a perfect example. The public schools in our lifetime, traditionally over the course of the 20th century, you'd send your kid to that school for six hours a day and they learn some of the fundamental traditions.

Teachers stopped doing that at some point. And so young kids had no way to access it unless they were getting it at home. And that was why the school choice phenomenon, charter schools arose because

Parents knew they needed an alternative to what was going on in the public schools. The ability to be able to write about that for the editorial page and in my column was just invaluable because those were big, significant changes. Well, and there's been such a coarsening of the culture over those years. And you see it much of what we watch online.

is sort of unbelievable because would never have happened 30 years ago, what you see on television or what you see in the larger culture. And there's also just been a kind of breaking up into different factions. I mean, there are places of tradition, Hollywood and some other places or different pockets where it's a totally different lifestyle. You know, anything goes, that sort of thing. In many ways, I mean, individual freedom to indulge in that has been extended, but there have been real costs in terms of, I think,

standards, law and order standards. In many ways, we're paying the price for that sort of thing. Crime, breakdown, educational attainment. I mean, these latest NAEP results, the National Report Card, are horrendously bad and do not bode well for the United States of America. You can go to good schools. You go to Nutririn outside of Chicago. You can go to your average good school in suburban New York or someplace, Menlo Park, and you'll be fine.

But even in those schools, if you're at the bottom 25%, you're probably not doing very well. Yeah. Well, that brings up a subject.

maybe for another time, but arguably the most famous piece I ever wrote for the Wall Street Journal was the editorial, No Guardrails, which appeared in 1993. And one of the main points made in that editorial was exactly as you're suggesting, there are a lot of people out there in the culture who are self-integrated, they're smart, they can kind of deal with all the twists and turns, that sort of things you've been describing.

But even that, there are a lot of marginal people who are not so good at taking care of themselves in a world that is changing all the time. It is throwing a lot of violent images at them constantly. And they're the ones that need help. And they're the ones kind of been abandoned by this intense culture. And they're the ones who needed the guardrails. They were taken down.

We know the examples all the time, Paul. I mean, one of the most troubling phenomenons of our time are the mass shootings in schools. That didn't used to happen, but now it does. And these are a lot of troubled people who need help, don't get it, but the culture just keeps leaning on them. Exactly. And it's very hard for them to cope alone so often as they indulge their internal demons

on social media, which can exacerbate all of that. Well, it's a complicated subject, obviously, not just one conversation. I want to talk to you about one other thing that's happened over the course of your career, and that is the shape of the world. You and I both lived through the Cold War, which dominated American foreign policy for so long. And then suddenly, in an instant, the Berlin Wall fell in 89. The Warsaw Pact imploded. The Soviet Union disintegrated.

And we had the decade or so of the post-Cold War dividend, you know, polar world with American dominance. We're not there anymore. Now we have adversaries on the march, Russia, China, Iran, terrorism and so on. What do you think of the shape of the world now? How dangerous a state is it? I think it's in a significantly dangerous state.

Ironically, for many of the same reasons that we worried back during the Cold War, and that is nuclear weapons capability of these countries. It doesn't get talked about very much, but China, for instance, has got an extraordinary number of nuclear warheads. We know that Russia, Russia always has. That was one of the issues involved with Ukraine getting its independence. It agreed to give up its nuclear warheads. North Korea, the idea...

that Kim Jong-un has the ability to send intercontinental ballistic missiles to the United States, possibly with a nuclear warhead, and Iran, of course, being on the brink. This is an integrated world. There is no way around it. Our adversaries are pushing outward, as I like to say sometimes. It's a centrifugal world. It just inevitably is always spinning outwards, and it's going to be difficult, I think,

for the United States, there is that feeling inside essentially conservative politics, the United States should turn inward and we should just take care of ourselves. It's understandable in some ways because it's not clear what we should do about all this. But I think the United States is unavoidably going to be pulled in disputes. It doesn't mean we have to go in there and solve them. But if we're going to protect ourselves, we have to be acutely aware of the

the realities of what's going on in terms of national security terms, the military capabilities of our adversaries, and we're going to have to be able to react to that. But to do that, we're

We're going to need an informed public because you need public support to be able to do that sort of thing as we generally did during the Cold War. And it remains to be seen whether President Trump is going to try to coalesce public support around those realities or whether he does indeed intend the United States to pull back. But this is a significant tension that's going to have to be resolved.

Well, and as these adversaries have been on the march, American defenses have weakened. We have defense spending as a share of gross domestic product, 3% or so, a little above now, and headed towards well under 3%, which

In historically comparative terms, it only happened in 2000 right after the Cold War, or a decade after the Cold War, and then in the 1930s. And that is not sufficient to meet the threats we face. You also have the homeland in a much more precarious position because of not just nuclear weapons, but the delivery mechanisms to be able to hit the United States.

maybe with 10, 15 minutes notice through hypersonic missiles and cruise missiles launched offshore and then the cyber and eventually AI in space. So it's a very precarious world. Last word, Dan. You mentioned NAEP, the academic scores. The United States is going to have to absolutely focus laser-like

on the quality of its education. Because if we're going to keep up with countries like China or even in North Korea, somehow they are able to produce these missiles and these nuclear weapons. The United States, both to stay strong domestically and militarily, is going to have to have a very well-educated population. And that is a vulnerability that we can take care of ourselves. Right. Right. And that is going to have to be addressed over the next five to 10 years.

All right. We shall leave it there today. Dan Henninger, thanks for your extraordinary career. He'll be continuing to appear in our pages from time to time when the spirit moves, both in print and occasionally on our weekend television show. So thank you, Dan. And we shall see you around, I hope, often. Oh, yeah. I'll be here. All right. I'll be back. Thanks for listening. We're here every day on Potomac Watch.