Sam Feist is the vice president of Washington, D.C-based programming and director of political content for CNN. He's in town today as one of the inductees into the Student Media Hall of Fame. Staff Reporter Justin Tardiff got a chance to talk with Feist and ask him a few questions.
Vanderbilt Hustler: What made you decide to come to Vanderbilt?
Sam Feist: I grew up in Tennessee and moved to Connecticut when I was 12. I realized that I wanted to go to school in the South, and Vanderbilt was always a draw in that respect. It immediately moved to the top of my list of colleges. Connecticut was great, the Northeast was great, but my grandparents still lived here, and my father had gone to Vanderbilt, so I had all of those connections. It was kind of like a magnet. I wanted to make my way back to Tennessee.
VH: You served a variety of roles when working with The Hustler and what has become VTV during your tenure here. Do you believe working in a variety of different roles helped to prepare you for the real-world media environment?
Basic journalism skills and a natural curiosity are important for any type of journalism, and now, in the modern media age, journalism at its core is news and information, and the platforms are less important than ever before. It’s all about the information. I may work on a project that may live on CNN.com, may make its way onto CNN television and will go out of CNN as a wire story and show up in a newspaper. So I don’t think of myself as a print journalist or a TV journalist. I’m a journalist.
VH: What changes do you see happening to the arena of political news in the next 10 years?
SF: Well, I think that there are good trends and bad trends. A trend that makes me uncomfortable is the polarization of news outlets. We see news outlets that seem to have ideological leanings. Of the three cable networks, there is one that tends to lean more to the right, one that tends to lean more to the left, which leaves CNN as the outlet that’s as close to the middle as possible. And I wish it weren’t that way. I really believe that journalists have a responsibility to seek the truth and report the truth as objectively as humanly possible and it is our job to not take sides. I see, unfortunately, some journalists taking sides, and that’s not a good development.
However, I think that the Internet has led to the democratization of news; there’s a lot more information out there. Citizen journalists are contributing information that the mainstream media is picking up on and reporting on. There’s never been more information available at people’s fingertips. What that means for political journalists is that the news brands that people trust the most will become the news organizations that become the most successful, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there right now. You never know if an e-mail that comes to your e-mail box is true or made up. So people need to know that they can turn to some source of news, whether it’s a newspaper, a magazine or a television network and actually find out what’s really going on. That’s a positive development, in that the Internet is actually giving people a reason to turn to traditional news sources. And I think that’s a good thing.
