Washington National Cathedral

Dean Lloyd: Good morning and welcome to the Sunday Forum, our weekly conversation at the intersection of faith and public life. This conversation today has some special guests among them and I’d like especially to welcome this large group of people wearing their white robes and their friends and companions with them. This is the Conference of North American Deans that has been gathered here for its meeting the last few days and thinking a lot about the role of religion and public life. So we look forward to drawing them into our conversation today.

We have with us someone who really needs no introduction, at least if you’re not in the Canadian cohort of the deans. But amongst those of us here in the United States, Judy Woodruff is something very close to a household name. Judy is one of the most distinguished journalists at work in the United States today, having worked over a thirty-year career at PBS, CNN, NBC, and Bloomberg News. You can see her almost nightly on the PBS NewsHour, where she is senior correspondent and co-anchor. For many years, Judy covered politics for CNN, where she’s also anchored the popular program Inside Politics for many years. She’s won just about every journalistic award there is to win, and she is now a distinguished alumna of her alma mater, Duke University, where they also know something there about basketball these days.

Judy Woodruff: Yes.

Lloyd: Yes, I know that it would please you. This past week, Judy added another well-deserved honor to her trophy case: the 2010 Edward R. Murrow Lifetime Achievement Award for Television Reporting. Judy, great to have you. [Applause]

Woodruff: Thank you very much.

Lloyd: Well, you’re just in from the road down in Florida, having a look at consternation and the body politic—having to do with taxing and spending, and spending and taxing. I want you to tell us a little bit about what you’ve been seeing down there.

Woodruff: Thank you, Dean Lloyd. First of all, let me just say what an honor it is, what a treat it is to visit my cathedral, the National Cathedral, of which we are so proud, all of us in the nation’s capitol, to call our home cathedral. And I just want to congratulate Dean Lloyd on the extraordinary work that he does, leading this extraordinary institution.

I have been on the road. I spent the better part of the last two weeks in Florida, traveling from Jacksonville to Orlando, Tampa, a little bit of time in south Florida, Miami, Fort Lauderdale, mainly in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, reporting for a series of pieces on the NewsHour that ran actually over the last week: looking at trying to get to the bottom of why people, many Americans at least, seem to be so angry at government right now.

As I’m sure all of you know from paying even a little bit of attention, there’s been a huge reaction to the… since the passage of the Health Care Reform bill into law, and on top of that, anger that has grown, frankly, since President Obama took office, the passage of the stimulus bill, trying to deal with the economy.

And what we tried to do was understand how much of that is focused just on the president, how much of that dates back to the last administration when, frankly, a number of Republicans and Conservatives will tell you they’re upset at the spending that they think got out of control under President George W. Bush; and how much of it is just directed at this administration, the stimulus, the Economic Recovery Act, and health care.

And the fact is that it’s all over the lot. And I’m going to let you ask me questions.

I will tell you that we spent a good bit of time trying to figure out the shape and the size and the reach of the Tea Party movement. And the most interesting thing we found is that there’s no one Tea Party movement. There are a number of different Tea Party organizations that got themselves sort of assembled at the request of Glenn Beck, the Fox News anchor last year, when he rose up, I guess, after the stimulus was passed, and said we've got to do something about this and people went to meetings and then they broke off and went to different meetings and you ended up with people advocating a formal Tea Party, another party to challenge Democrats and Republicans. And then you’ve got about 25 or thirty individual groups, who want to have their own tea parties. But it’s an angry group, and it’s a group that means to have some effect on the elections in November.

Lloyd: In some ways, it seems like there’s free-floating anger that seems to become attached here and there along the way. Different issues become the… Whether it’s health care or stimulus packages or spending in general, or the president, or where the president was born, or a whole set of places, it gets attached.

What do you think? Is there a coherent ideological core to this? Or are people just scared and upset about what’s happening in the economy and what’s happing in the world?

Woodruff: I think there is an ideological core, and I think it’s built on by this anger and, frankly, fear or fright that has grown out of the economy.

Everybody knows the recession is a lot worse than anybody anticipated or anybody predicted. Nobody wanted to believe it was going to go on this long. You and I were just talking about the effects we see here in Washington, which is normally a city that is insulated from an economic downturn. But this time, we’re seeing real effects here; so, you know, we can only imagine if it’s bad here, we know it’s bad everywhere else.

What people are feeling is just this sort of fear that they can’t get their arms around, and it is on top of—and I think the New York Times/CBS poll this week pinned it down pretty well—they are mainly people who would be identified normally as conservative Republicans. They identify pretty much down the line with what the Republican Party believes. But there is this significant minority of them who don’t want to be identified with any party, who say, “The parties have let us down. Democrats do a lot of spending. Republicans have disappointed us with spending. We don’t want to be associated with any of those folks. We need to go off on our own and run as a third party.”

I think that remains to be seen, because there are a lot of people in the movement who argue that that’s the path to helping the Democrats. That if you break off, if you do what Ross Perot did when he ran back in 1992, you in essence are splitting the conservative vote, and you’re going to give the election to the very people you don’t want to give it to. So that’s a fight that is yet to be fought inside this movement.

Lloyd: One of the things that I gather what you were doing in your reporting from Florida is also showing a number of ways that government spending is doing positive things that people want to have going on there. Does that figure at all into this rage movement, or is it something that people are slow to notice?

Woodruff: I don’t think people realize the role of government in their lives. I mean, I think what a lot of these folks are angry about right now is the money that they believe has been wasted on the stimulus. They’re saying, “Wait a minute. You spent $700 billion on a stimulus and we still have a ten percent unemployment rate? We’ve still lost… What is it?… 8.5 million jobs in this country. Things aren’t better, so therefore the money was wasted.” And you can go down the list and argue what was wasted and what was spent well.

Clearly, some of that money has had a good effect. It’s prevented things from getting worse than they would have been. But more broadly speaking, your question is about the role of government. We just looked at the state of Florida because we thought, “Let’s just take one of the fifty states and see what government money does.”

A hundred and fifty billion dollars went to Florida last year, most of it for all the things that you know about: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, veterans benefits, benefits to people who worked in government. A lot of it goes in invisible ways to state and city governments to allow them, for example, to run the school system, to pay for teachers. Some of that recovery money allowed the school board around Tampa—and this is true all over the country, not just in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area—To keep teachers on the payroll who otherwise would have had to have been laid off.

But just beyond that, there are families. We interviewed a family, and there are millions more like them, who get meals delivered to their home. This is a couple. They were 76 and 77 years old. The husband is increasingly disabled, bedridden, has to be turned every so number of hours. His wife is legally blind. She can no longer care for him. And in order for them not to have to go into a nursing home, the government pays for this program that has somebody come to their house twice a day to bring meals, to turn him over in bed, and it’s extraordinary. The wife, of course, had tears in her eyes as we talked to her about what this meant.

This is a side of government that people don’t see.

You know, they see politicians arguing at committee hearings in Washington or standing up on the floor of the House or the Senate, arguing and saying we need to spend more money for this or that. And they see big buildings in Washington but they don’t realize where the money goes.

There’s no question there’s waste, fraud, and abuse in government spending. But even if you were to squeeze all of that out, you still would not be able to address the massive debt problem that we have. You didn’t ask me about that, but that’s another part of what’s causing these folks to be angry.

Lloyd: They’re frightened by the debt.

Woodruff: They’re frightened by the debt. It’s the biggest it’s ever been. We are about at the point where the country owes more in interest on the debt than we are taking in, in revenue. It’s extraordinary. And so, if we look at the federal budget and you say, okay, let’s start cutting, half of it is Medicare and Medicaid, all these things that are so-called entitlements that you have to pay out. Another big chunk is the interest on the debt, which you have to pay. By the time you get down… and you leave out defense spending, which you could cut, but it’s pretty much sacrosanct right now, at a time when we’ve got two wars underway and we’re worried about global terrorism. So that leaves a sixth of our federal budget that’s truly available for cutting.

What is that down to? That’s money to keep up the roads and highways in this country; we know how important that is. It is money that goes for education. It’s money for clean air. It is money that pays air traffic controllers, and goodness knows we need them doing their jobs and we need them well-educated. It’s money that goes into higher education to pay for… You know, all these young people in this country want to get a good education, can’t afford it. The cost of college is more than it’s ever been.

By the way, I’m sure you all noticed that when the federal government passed the health care reform bill, they tacked on this measure that would take care of changing the way we pay for college loans in this country. So that we cut out the private middleman and now Washington, the federal government, is the middleman, all in an effort to make college more affordable for more and more and more Americans.

Lloyd: I think the anxiety is rising in the room right now the more we keep having to—

Woodruff: [Laughs] We need to talk about something more cheerful.

Lloyd: [Laughs] One more dark cloud. Then we’ll see if we can make a turn. Along with this free-floating anger and this rather specific anger, we have the foundational dysfunction in American politics now: the lack willingness of any of the parties to find common ground to work with each other. In fact, it often seems like two sides shouting at each other while this anger is stewing out there.

Do you see any way forward given the political impasse we seem to be in, in terms of working together?

Woodruff: I think it’s as divided in this city as it’s ever been. I’ve been in Washington for over thirty years, and my husband and I… My husband is also a journalist with Bloomberg Television. He’s been with the Wall Street Journal for a long time.

Both of us have often commented how when we first came to town, you would go out to dinner and there would be Republicans and Democrats at dinner together. Or you would see people having breakfast together. It would be Republicans and Democrats. Ronald Regan would have Tip O’Neill to the White House for a cocktail at the end of the day. Not to say they agreed on much, but at least they were able to do business together. George H. W. Bush, “Bush 41” we call him, some of his best friends were Democrats. He’d have them over to the White House or he’d go to the Hill.

That all seemed to go away in the 90s, I think, in the Clinton administration with Newt Gingrich in charge and the Contract with America. At that point, I think that was when things started to split.

I think we now see things and it’s growing exponentially.

We’re now at the point where members of Congress don’t live in Washington. They get on an airplane and fly home on Thursday night or Friday morning. They don’t spend time here.

Congressional redistricting is done to protect and keep incumbents safe. So the system just protects and promotes this division.

I think the media, honestly, is making it worse, because we—especially the 24/7 cable, talk radio, the internet—so much of that celebrates division and celebrates anger and some of this hostile rhetoric that’s going back and forth.

So I am starting to sense, as I travel around the country a reaction to that, people saying this has just gone too far, when it takes a year and a half to address health care reform.

Now granted, a lot of people don’t think anything should have been done. But you know, Republicans will tell you, you know, we still should have been able to sit down and come to some agreement, and it shouldn’t have been a year and a half of screaming and yelling and invective. And I think the public is starting to get that.

And I’m hearing people say that question that you just asked, “What can be done about this?” But I honestly don’t think much is going to change until Washington starts to hear that message out there in the country. And I don’t think we’re hearing it much.

Lloyd: I know the world of religion and public life has not been your particular beat, but we’ve just finished having a couple of days of conversations among the deans about how religion played a role in the last eight years of the Bush administration, and what’s going on in the Obama administration. Do you see, just from your perspective, any fresh development of religion being engaged in more positive ways? Or do you think religion is on the side of the angels in a lot of this, or is it part of simply the divisiveness that we have going on right now? What do you see from your perspective, knowing that’s not been the focus of your primary work?

Woodruff: I think that so much of at least the media focus, as everybody knows, on religion and politics, has been on one side. I mean, it’s been the activism on the right of the Christian conservative movement. That has been with us for the last several decades. They’ve been the most visible. They now occupy a place of enormous influence in the Republican Party, so much so that there’s not a Republican leader I know who feels comfortable separating himself or herself from that movement. It’s a very powerful and present force in the Republican Party.

I don’t see anything like that in the Democratic Party. It’s not to say that faith is not a part of the lives of leaders in the Democratic Party. President Obama has spoken eloquently about this. Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who happens to be Catholic, has talked about the role of her faith. And other leaders in the Democratic Party. But there’s no one religious force or force of faith that is as influential on the Democratic side. And right now since our politics are so polarized, I see it as a pretty divided picture.

Clearly, there’s been an effort on the part of more moderate religious voices to put themselves forward and played a role in the election of 2008.

But at this point, I see faith so much being used as a football in our political life and that’s unfortunate.

Lloyd: One of the comments in the conversations that we had in the last couple of days was about how the primary public culture for the Democratic Party has been largely secular, in spite of the power of the civil rights movement and everything that it represented.

Woodruff: Right.

Lloyd: The Democrats have been trying to learn how to be more open and candid about their faith and not always successfully.

John Kerry had a hard time talking about it but President Obama—or campaigner Obama—did find a way to talk more convincingly than maybe any leading Democrat had for a long time about it. So they’re trying to find their way there, but that’s fairly new territory for them. And as you said, they seem not to have been able to make the same impact from a religious perspective there.

Woodruff: I think it’s been more difficult for Democrats, as you say, to find their voice. And then of course, President Obama had that very painful break with his minister, Reverend Wright, which became a big story in the course of the campaign, and then caused him… I mean, he had to publicly announce, where “now I’m going to have to search for a new church and minister.” Since his time in Washington, when he has gone to church, it’s been… I guess, was it last weekend? Again, it was a huge turnout when he went to a church in Southeast Washington, so much so that it was disruptive, they said.

But that is really just one part of the story. I think a lot of it has to do with what you just said. The Democratic Party has so many of its roots in a secular set of views, and for Democrats it’s just been harder to find a voice that is somewhere between their allegiance to labor, the African American community, to a large extent the Hispanic community, and to find a voice of faith that fits with these different constituencies in the Democratic Party.

Lloyd: Let’s give all the issues of the day a breather for a minute and talk about your own career.

Tell us a little bit about how you got started in the news business, and whether you launched into a profession that has any semblance to the one you’re in now, or whether it’s been quite a dramatic shift.

Woodruff: It’s night and day, completely different.

But I can tell you a little bit about my background first, because I think all of us in journalism are a sum total of, of course, all of our experiences. And so I grew up as an Army brat, born in Oklahoma. My father was in the Army based at Fort Sill. I was born in Tulsa, and when I was not yet five years old, my father was transferred to Germany. So we spent about three years in Germany, came back to the United States, and from then on, moved from Army base to Army base around the United States. Ended up living in Taiwan for a few years, so we were in Asia. Then we came back to the United States and ended up in Georgia when I was a teenager. So I finished high school in Augusta, Georgia, where my mother still lives.

So I had a fairly eclectic growing up time and I will tell you my faith background was that my father was raised by a Baptist mother and a Methodist father. My mother was raised in the Southern Baptist—because he grew up in North Carolina—my mother grew up in the Freewill Baptist community, and I spent a lot of time with family members who were Pentecostal. So whenever we would go back to Oklahoma to visit or to visit relatives in North Carolina, I was very much inside that influence. And lived in Augusta… You asked me about journalism, so I’m going to weave the two things together… went to college in North Carolina.

You said I graduated from Duke. I actually started at a small Baptist women’s college in Raleigh called Meredith, where they had offered me a great scholarship, and so I went there and then transferred to Duke. I Thought I was going to major in math, found out calculus wasn’t for me. Fell in love with political science. Don’t ask me exactly why, because I had never really given it a lot of thought.

Neither one of my parents had been able to go to college, and so I really was the first of my family to be able to go to college. I really didn’t have a role model for what I was going to do at the time I was growing up. In the ’60s, going to high school, there weren’t many women in Augusta, Georgia, who had careers.

But I somehow knew… Because my mother had only been able to go to school through tenth grade and she constantly said to me, “Finish your education. Finish your education. Diapers and dishes can wait.” That was the refrain from my mom and you know, I took that pretty seriously but I didn’t know what I wanted to do with it.

I just had a sense… I kept asking, “Do I want to teach? What do I see myself doing?” And it was really only after I guess, I got to Meredith, had a wonderful political science professor who encouraged me to come to Washington and get an internship from my congressman, which I did. This was the late 1960s. I worked on the Hill, and at that point, I fell in love with politics, with the whole ethos of Washington. I breathed the air of the Potomac and I went back to Duke my senior year.

By this time I had transferred, having been told by some women I had worked with on the Hill that I really should not come back to Washington right after college. Even though the women’s movement was alive and well, women didn’t have jobs of any consequence. So I went back to Duke and I said to one of my professors, “What I am I going to do? I had hoped to go back to Washington.”

He said, “Well, did you ever think about covering politics?”

I had never given it any thought. I mean, I literally had not focused on journalism. I had read newspapers and I happened to be taking a course in politics and mass communication. Long story short, due to that professor’s influence and that course, I ended up applying for a job [laughing] in Atlanta as a secretary for the news department of one of the TV stations in Atlanta.

I went on spring break and interviewed at all three stations. At that point, we just had the networks. We had three network affiliates: ABC, CBS, and NBC. I applied, was hired as the secretary for the newsroom, thinking this was going to be my foot in the door.

And I’ll tell you a story: as I was interviewed by this news director in the lobby of the ABC station in Atlanta, the news director said to me, “All right, you’re hired. We’re going to give you a chance. We’ll see how it goes.” I stood up and I said, “Thank you very much.”

I turned to walk out, and he said, “Besides, how could I not hire somebody with legs like yours?” [laughter] And then I remembered the advice I had gotten in Washington, and I thought, “Okay, that’s the world that we live in.”

I would like to tell you that I had a great comeback for this gentleman, but I didn’t. I just sort of weakly turned around and said, “Oh, okay.” I walked out the door. “Thanks.” I did go to work there a year and a half. The last six months I was there, he told me he wanted me to audition to be a weather reporter, and I said, “I’m not interested. I want to cover politics.”

He said, “Look, if you ever want to get experience on the air, you need to try for every opportunity there is. You need to get some experience under your belt.” I very reluctantly auditioned to be the weekend weather girl and was hired to do this on Sunday nights at eleven o’clock.

So it was like Cinderella. During the week, I would come in and answer the phone and clean the film, which is what we used, and write letters for the news director and basically pester all the news crews for information, because I wanted to be a reporter. Then I’d come in Sunday nights at six o’clock and madly study the weather wires, so at eleven o’clock, I could go on for five minutes and talk about the weather. I learned that if you wrote little notes to yourself on the big map, you could talk about the low coming in over the Rockies, and where the high temperature was that day in Arizona.

But you asked me about journalism. After a year and a half, I gave up on that station, was hired by a benevolent news director at the CBS station in Atlanta to be their state capital reporter. I went to work for the Georgia State Legislature.

I loved it. You can imagine what that was like. There weren’t very many women reporters then, and I was covering 205 members to the State House and 56 members of the State Senate. It was baptism by fire. I had to learn, learn fast.

After five years, I went knocking on doors in New York, applied for a job at the network, and was told by a network vice president that I needed to work on my voice. It was too southern. By this time, I had developed a serious southern accent. And he said, “So take voice lessons and come back to us in a year, and we will consider talking to you then.”

So I went back to Atlanta, went through the Yellow Pages trying to find a voice coach, found someone, lined up a voice coach, had made an appointment for an interview; and one week later, this NBC vice president called me back—this is one week later—and said, “We just fired our correspondent in the southeastern bureau in Atlanta. Could you quickly send me another audition tape? Because I think I’m going to hire you.”

So there I was. I didn’t have time to get rid of the Southern accent, but I was hired to cover the southeast. I did that for a year and a half. The fellow I’d been covering is governor of Georgia, who was running for president, Jimmy Carter, and so I had some contacts.

I’m going to stop talking so you can ask, but yes, there’s been a huge transition from film, processing film to videotape, to today, satellites, disk, digital technology. It is an enormous transition from news at six and eleven to 24/7 news that is available.

We swim in a sea of news today.

Lloyd: I want to give the audience a chance to ask questions, but let’s stay for a moment with your own faith background, starting out a Freewill Baptist, and somewhere along the way, ending up an Episcopalian.

I guess not so much tracing all of those steps, but you are an Episcopalian. It would be great to hear a few words about what role that happens to play in your life. Or does it influence the way you look at the world, the way you think about the world, the way you deal with the complexity of the world around you?

Woodruff: It’s one of those questions that we are often asked. I’m a member of the St. Columba’s parish, which is not far from here in Washington. I joined the Episcopal Church in Washington after I came here and started to get to know my husband, who had been raised as an Episcopalian. I had always admired the Episcopal Church. I had many friends who were Episcopalian. I had fallen away from the church from faith altogether as a young person in my twenties, as I think probably a lot of young people do.

But there came a point in my life when it was time to settle down, and think about getting married, and having a family, and that’s when I got serious about my faith again. I would say it suffuses everything that I do.

I look at my faith as a… I used this word one time… as a struggle. It’s a constant struggle to figure out how to blend what I believe with… not so much with my daily life, because I’m comfortable with that, but in the work that I do, I am confronted all the time with some ugly things.

Politics is a big part of it, but the stories that we cover are often human tragedy: people letting other people down in a big way, criminal behavior, and even in politics, some actions that just leave one aghast at the decisions that people make. That’s what we focus on in the news.

We don’t go spend a lot of time going around covering the good things that happen as much as a lot of us would like to. So it is a struggle to figure out how do you make sure that your values—in my case as a Christian, as an Episcopalian—remain embedded in the fabric of the reporting and the work that I do.

And it really does come back to basics. It’s trying to be true, first of all, to who I am, honest, as honest as I can be in what I do, in my work but also holding people accountable. I frankly think that the values that we uphold as Christians… And I have many friends who are Jewish, who are Muslim, and they would embrace their values in the same way… Those core values are the same things that we celebrate in the best of public life and the best of human behavior.

So in a way there is really no inconsistency there. It’s just that as a reporter, I’m not supposed to be imposing my values on others. So almost every day I’m asking myself as I’m reporting this story, “How do I hold others accountable without judging them?” because I’m not supposed to be judging them. So again, it comes down to just being as honest and focused and direct as I can, and keeping in mind that we’re all placed here on Earth to do work in the name of someone who is much greater than we are. And I believe there’s a way to do that, and I believe that individuals find a lot of different ways to do it. And so for me, it’s a matter of respecting that, but it’s not easy. It’s not easy.

Lloyd: Do you find it also provides moral clarity and moral accountability? Do you find something sustaining in it as well? Is faith something that helps to carry you through some of this?

Woodruff: Yes, sustaining, but I won’t lie. I’m not going to sit here and tell you that there aren’t times when I just think, “Where is God? How can this be?”

I mean, 9/11. I was on the air for CNN from about 9:30, ten o’clock that morning until 6:30 that night. How can you look at something like that? The loss of life… You know things that have happened in my personal life as it’s happened in the personal life of all of us… There are plenty of times when our faith is questioned.

Ultimately though, it does sustain me. It sustains me in ways that surprise me. I will think sometimes that I am so far away from anything that has to do with my faith and I will see a glimmer.

I mean, even this story in Florida that I was covering this past week. When we met this family who were sustained by this government program, and we talked to the wife. And as I said, she had tears in hers eyes about what government was able to do.

And you say, “Well, wait a minute! Well, you can do a story about the government? And you remember your faith?”

Absolutely, because that’s at the core of what I believe and what all of us believe.

Lloyd: Let’s go to questions from the audience. Deryl?

Deryl Davis: A couple of questions to start with. And I’ll ask audience members, if you would pass questions that you may have to the front, of course. Now, first question is in the course of your reporting career, can you point to one or two stories that had the most impact upon you? Or that perhaps when you had reported the story, turned out to have unusual importance in the end?

Woodruff: That’s a wonderful question. I have to go back to 9/11 as one example of that, because it required being on camera at frequent intervals through the day at a time when I, and I know all my colleagues, were feeling enormous personal pain. Pain as an American citizen, pain as a human being, worried about my family at one point. My children were in school just a few miles from where I was. But I don’t see how you could go through something like that and not come out of it changed in some way, and I think all of us were. So that’s clearly one.

This is kind of going in another direction… I’ve been affected by a number of the people I’ve covered.

One of them, of all people, is a president who was widely seen as a political failure, and that’s Jimmy Carter. I first knew him as a candidate for governor in Georgia. I watched him get elected. I watched him become a very divisive figure in Georgia politics, even among the Democrats. I watched him run for president, wowing people at first, and then in office disappointing a lot of people.

And then I’ve gone on to watch the extraordinary things that he’s done since then, working all over the world… The eradication of the Guinea worm on the African continent, the work he’s done to bring peace to so many parts of the world. It’s caused me to think about… As much as we revere our presidents, as crucial obviously and as critical as they are to who we are as a country and what we are able to do as a people, often it’s what people do out of office that can make an enormous difference.

Jimmy Carter had a huge influence as president because of what he did at Camp David and the Camp David Peace Accords, and the everlasting effect that’s had in the Middle East and the struggles they continue to have to this day as they worked toward trying to find a peaceful solution.

But then I look at all the other things he’s done. And he’s written about his own faith; and I think we need to be much more broad. And I often think that we in the media place so much attention on that one individual, and I guess, you know, we have to do that because it’s easier to point a camera at the White House and point a camera to one person.

But the fact is, there are a lot of people in a lot of places who are doing important things that affect all of our lives and I wish we in the media could find a way to reflect that as well.

Davis: I have a question here for young journalists or aspiring journalists.

Woodruff: I want a cheerful question, by the way! [laughter]

Davis: This one could be! How are the challenges facing an aspiring young journalist today different from those you faced, and what is your advice to such journalists starting out?

Woodruff: For young journalists starting out, the main difference is you’ve got to be able to do everything.

When I was coming along, I was told, “Learn how to write, be a good writer,” so you could write for television—but write, period. And of course, you’ve got to learn how to handle yourself on television.

Today, journalists have to be able to operate a camera, operate the sound, and edit the disc, because that’s what it is now. They can learn Final Cut Pro, which is the latest version of editing, and be able to blog, to Tweet, to use Facebook.

And the good thing is a lot of them are perfectly comfortable doing that because they’ve grown up multi-media talent, so they’re not… it’s not something as strange to them as it is for some of us who are struggling to learn how to Tweet when we didn’t grow up Tweeting.

That is the main difference, that journalists today have got to be able to do it all because journalism…

You didn’t ask me this, but journalism has taken a big hit. We were already under siege since for the last ten, fifteen, twenty years and this recession has just made it worse. Newspapers are closing down all over the country. Journalists are losing their jobs. We are turning to the Internet to save us, but still there is not a successful business model that’s going to save us.

I tell young journalists when I speak around the country… I say, “Please, come up with a business model that’s going to pay your salary and allow you to do the kind of work you want to do.”

And that’s the toughest thing of all: how do we keep it going? Not everybody can go on reporting if there’s not a way to put bread on the table for their family, and that’s what we’re dealing with now

Davis: Here are a couple of questions I’ll put together from a fellow Duke Blue Devil, asking first of all, did your experience as a student at Duke and in Duke Chapel perhaps, sermons by Harvey Cox and others who would have been there, coming through… Did any of these things inspire you in your profession? And the second question, here together, is about the use of accents in the news and is there a change in terms of… Is every journalist expected to have a kind of—

Woodruff: Midwestern, perfect—

Davis: Midwestern accent.

Woodruff: Perfect. What is it? Tom Brokaw had the South Dakota accent. He often said that that was the middle of the country, the perfect accent. Well, on Duke first, I would love to tell you that I went to chapel every Sunday and every Wednesday…

Lloyd: Stop right there.

Woodruff: Listened to every sermon… But that was during, shall we say, the lost part of my life when it comes to my faith. I did go to church occasionally, but I don’t want to embroider here.

I will just say, on the accent, that I think more accents are accepted today than they used to be. I still have people say to me when I’m with people who have a Southern accent, “Where are you from, anyway?” And I’ll say, “Tulsa.” [laughs] There’s a little bit of Oklahoma.

I’d like to think we have a more open mind when it comes to an accent.

Davis: This questioner is someone who has an adult child, who has spina bifida, who is asking you about how you’ve handled that experience, particularly with your demanding career, and what challenges you’ve faced and how you’ve found ways to overcome it.

Woodruff: That is a huge part of our personal lives and as a family. Our son Jeffrey, our first of our three children, who is now 28, was born with spina bifida. It was something that my husband and I didn’t even know what it was in 1981, when Jeffrey was born.

We had a very quick course, shall we say, in learning about this most devastating birth defect. It’s actually the most commonly occurring disabling birth defect; and even then, we didn’t know about it. It was life changing.

I think it’s life changing for anyone to have… I mean, the dream of every couple who has a first child is that child is going to be perfect in every way. And when you learn that there is something that’s different, you readjust your horizon, and you readjust your thinking, really, truly, for the rest of your life.

On so many levels, we were and are incredibly blessed to have a child like Jeff, who for the first sixteen years of his life, had a mild form of spina bifida… He was just heroic in his ability to carry on, stayed at grade level at school, was a great skier, swimmer, and bicycle rider. And then he was, at age sixteen, he was injured during surgery. There was an accident which left him profoundly disabled. He’s now in a wheelchair and significantly disabled. He actually just finished college, was able to finish college last December after eight and a half years. So we’re going to be celebrating that very soon.

All I can say is that it has changed my husband and me as people. It has opened us up to an incredible tragedy, which also became an opportunity, I think, to be much more sensitive to people who don’t have all the things that we take for granted: the ability to walk, to think, to operate as we do.

I’m much more open to the world of disabilities today. It’s something that I try to follow as best I can as a journalist.

I think if I ever leave journalism, my goal would be to work in the field of advocating for people with disabilities.

I’ll just say this: you can imagine we went through a time when we questioned our faith, because of what had happened to Jeff. But we went on to understand that many things happen that are away from God’s hand, that we have been given a gift through Jeff, in that we are now able to be much more aware of suffering and much more sensitive to what many people are dealing with that we would have never, ever been sensitive to before.

I’d like to think that I was a sensitive person before what had happened to my own son. But the truth is, when you’re touched in your own family, it changes you and makes you more aware.

So ultimately, we are blessed and Jeffrey Hunt’s a hero. He really is.

Lloyd: One more question, Deryl.

Davis: This question is about the Tea Party again, asking if there is anger directed at any particular groups when persons connected to the Tea Party movement may say, “We’re taking back our country!” Who are they taking it from?

Woodruff: [laughs] They want to take it back from President Obama and the Democrats. I have to use a line I heard the other day: “It’s made the Democrats as nervous as John Edwards at a DNA paternity test.” [laugher] Sorry! [laughs]

Lloyd: On that inspiring note… [laughter]

Woodruff: [laughs] They want to overturn anybody in power, and they want to get rid of the Republicans, who they think don’t agree with them.

And that’s why they’re saying this fall they have a litmus test of points that they’re going to hold Republicans to. But again, I get back to your first question, Dean Lloyd, and say that there’s still a division among these folks. They’re not all together in terms of who they support and who they oppose. That’s why these next six, or seven, or eight months, as we get closer to November, is going to be so interesting to watch, to see how they come together.

Lloyd: This has been a wonderful conversation, Judy. I want to invite you all who are in the neighborhood to come back next week, when we have yet to have a conversation with Brian McLaren, maybe the most visionary person thinking about the future of mainline and broader Christianity in America going forward.

We hope you’ll linger meanwhile today for our 11:15 service as we’ll have our gathering of worship and celebration. By all means, we hope you’ll stay for that, but please join me in thanking Judy Woodruff for this wonderful conversation. [applause]

Woodruff: Thank you very much. Thank you. [applause]