Issue date: 5/27/08 Section: Campus

In the 10 years since graduation, David Sirota, Medill '98, has written a New York Times bestseller and worked as a nationally syndicated newspaper columnist. His next book, "The Uprising: An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington" will be released today.



The Daily: Was there anything in particular from your time at Northwestern that you feel has contributed to your success?

David Sirota: Well, I would say certainly the mechanics of writing that I learned at Northwestern were essential to writing the book. And the same thing with the mechanics of reporting, because … unlike the first book, this book is all first-hand narrative reporting. So the mechanics, the ethics of journalism that I learned at Northwestern were really very important. I would say that the thing that I didn't learn at Northwestern - and perhaps is not teachable, but I think it needs to become teachable at the journalism school - is how to responsibly do opinion journalism. And by that, I don't mean editorial writing; what I mean is Medill is very much about standard concepts of objectivity. I wasn't used to it, and I had no training in it. And as the media now becomes more and more fragmented and there are more and more voices online and opinion journalism becomes more prevalent, I think it would be really good for the journalism school to teach how to do that responsibly because it is such a blurry area.



The Daily: You are known for espousing a progressive or populist brand of politics in your writing. How have you been able to connect your politics with your writing, and what, if any, challenges have you faced in doing so?



DS: My trajectory after school was a little different. I went into Medill thinking I was going to become a journalist, and then I got very into direct politics. While I was in school, I took a semester off to work on a local congressional race in Evanston. Then I worked on Capitol Hill, and then I worked in D.C. I kind of came back to journalism. I've really come back to journalism through my column and through the book. And what I've basically found is that, if you are going to have a voice, your own voice - and I mean that in the journalistic sense: a tone, a style, a voice - you can't pretend to be objective. The reason I think readers are interested in different writers is because they are interested in that writer's point of view, that writer's perspective, that writer's voice. So, what I've tried to do is connect my political beliefs that I (have) sharpened over that time in direct politics and put them deeply into my writing and reporting without trampling the facts. We have gone through an era in this country where the facts have been completely and totally ignored in the media. We have gone through an era that is an embarrassing stain on the media, where rhetoric has substituted for fact. The best example, of course, is the Iraq war, where if you were a journalist and you questioned the assertions being made by the government, you were considered irresponsible rather than responsible. So, operating in that world as a writer right now is challenging.

Continued...

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