interviews
Dean Barnett
Detail:
An interview with Dean Barnett. Staff writer for 'The Weekly Standard' and occassional fill-in host for Hugh Hewitt's radio program.
People probably best know you nationally as Hugh Hewitt’s number
#1 fill-in host and a staff writer for Weekly Standard. How do you know
Hugh and come to be his pinch hitter. What’s your news background?
Hugh and I became acquainted via email when I was blogging
on my own site and was contributing stuff the Weekly Standard. I eventually
became Hugh’s co-blogger at HughHewitt.com
I tell ya, I didn’t listen to much talk radio. I started to listen
to Hugh’s show after I became his co-blogger. I found it very entertaining,
I heard him have guest hosts and I said “hey I’d like to try
my hand at that?”. So I pinged him with an email and said “I’d
like to give it a shot”. He said “sure”. So I gave it
a shot, that’s how it happened.
So no news or journalistic background?
No I’m just a guy. I’ve been writing for about
4 and a half years now. I was a businessman before that. But I’m
just a guy.
You and Hugh position yourself as Center Right would that be fair to say?
He calls himself center-right I just call myself right.
On the radio you have a segment where you invite liberal blogger Glenn Greenwald to talk about the news of the day. You usually underscore the segment with a comment on showing civility despite the partisanship. Could you talk about that?
I live in Boston which is a very liberal city. I’m
pretty much a lifelong Bostonian which means that my politics is out of
step with most of my neighbors, most of my friends and whatnot. I get
along with people who’s politics I don’t like and don’t
like my politics. So I don’t see why that can’t be the same
on the Radio. Glen Greenwald and I don’t agree with a lot politically.
But I think he’s a good guy. I enjoy talking to him, I think he’s
a pretty thoughtful guy. There’s no reason why we have to dislike
each other even though we don’t particularly care about each other’s
politics.
I’m not exactly sure how it started. It may have started when I
invited him onto the show out of the clear blue sky. I’m not sure
if we had exchanged any emails before then. Relatively speaking I like
his blog. He’s obviously a very thoughtful, a very honest and smart
guy.
I have no problem inviting guests on the show I disagree with.
To me it seems that pundits in real life are civil and professional with each other but they play up the conflict for TV. Do you think that is a fair assessment of pundits in general.
I don’t. There are people who are doing this, you
especially see it in the blogosphere who really, really dislike everybody
on the opposite side. Who really dislike anyone who disagrees with them
and they just assume that people who disagree with them are vile, despicable,
evil and all that other stuff. I think my opinion might be the minority
one, I think it’s also more common [to be civil] on the right. Right
wing pundits are more inclined to not dismiss everyone they don’t
like as evil or despicable. When you read the right wing blogs, you see
them saying some hard stuff about Barack Obama. But you don’t see
“he’s evil, despicable, dishonorable, a liar” all that
stuff. Where that’s all you’ll see about John McCain on the
left wing blogs.
Where it gets funny is the audience at home and the bloggers get caught up in the fights and really believe there is an unreasonable and irrational opposition. Demonizing the other side. Then there’s also this weird dynamic, where some pundits really believe their personas (this happens with wrestlers also) which confuses reality even more. Is that a fair reading?
There’s definitely something to your analogy, I had Jonathan Last on the air, we had a long segment on this. We both love wrestling. There’s definitely something to that. But where the wrestling analogy falls down a bit and I know that I write something and the left wing blogosphere have a fit over it and they’ll say the most vile things about me. I’ll find it funny and there’s other people who feel that way too. But there’s other people who are more sensitive to that kind of criticism and I know you wrote something about me liking being the heel, doing the heel turn. Why would I care what a stranger in Galveston writes about me. It’s not something that would ruin my day but most people tend to be sensitive about it.
There’s a lot of genuineness to it, at last years
Blog Expo there was a panel that had me on it Hugh Hewitt, John Hideraker
of Powerline, Jerome Armstrong (MyDD), Jeralyn Merrit (TalkLeft) Joe Sudbay
from AmericaBlog on the left. Markos Moulitsas was in the crowd. I tell
ya (chuckles) it got pretty animated in there. Voices were being raised,
it was something. It wasn’t a shtick. It wasn’t an act. It
was sort of like if you went to a wrestling locker room and they were
still fighting.
>> continue to Part 2 of transcript
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