Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Mary Jordan joined the Club for a discussion on November 15.
Jordan was born and raised on Cleveland’s West Side, her parents having immigrated from Ireland where her father had been a farmer and shopkeeper in County Mayo. She said she first began reporting at age 16 when she worked at NBN radio, a small station that broadcast Hungarian, Polish, Irish and more than a dozen ethnic hours and that was a popular stop for mayoral candidates.
While still in high school she won a trip to Washington and went by herself on a bus. “Here I was from the West Side of Cleveland walking the corridors of Capitol Hill. I thought it was the most thrilling, fascinating thing.”
“So I have been about this for a long time,” she continued, switching to the present election season, “but never have I seen the kind of rigidity of electoral candidate selection that I recently saw in Georgia when I was there interviewing a group favoring Hershel Walker for the U. S. Senate.” She said members of the group resoundingly put party over character in their selection.
“It’s a very difficult time for politics,” she said. “CNN reporters in Arizona were assigned body guards because Steve Bannon urged supporters to ‘go after them.’ It’s such a different environment than when I first came to Washington.”
Asked about bias in the media, she replied that she believed that elements of media have contributed to the harsh division among the electorate. “It was a mistake that the Fairness Doctrine [in broadcast news programs] ended with the introduction of cable news shows. Fox News Channel swiftly took advantage. Laws never caught up with the expanding media and then fell further behind when social media spread. People are listening to false information and retaining it. At least there are now efforts to get people out of their bubbles and start watching more than just a single news outlet. One of these efforts was funded by Frank McCourt at Georgetown University.” She noted another called Unite, which was started by Tim Shriver and works to bring factions together.
“Extremists have given both parties bad names,” she continued. “People have grown sick of the political parties and more have turned to calling themselves independents.” She added that compared to other countries, U. S. elections are vastly longer and churn through vastly more money. “But I see two good trends,” she said, “One is that more people are aware that false information is out there, and two, that more young people are voting.”
She remarked that her husband Kevin Sullivan had recently returned from covering the Ukraine war for the Post and reported that there was no electricity at night. “You’d think that under these conditions, there would be looting, but Kevin saw none. Rather he saw Ukrainians fierce in their dedication to one another and their unity in a devotion to expelling the Russians.”
She talked about her experience in Mexican prisons, relating that inmates have to pay rent. “This results in the very rich ones – drug lords, say -- having excellent food and living conditions while someone who might have stolen a loaf of bread for their impoverished family might sleep under a blanket in a courtyard. “The system is grossly unequal,” she said.
Of the horrific decade-long kidnapping of three girls in Cleveland early in the century, Jordan said she was keeping up with the victims, with whom she helped write a book (the proceeds of which helped the women start over in Cleveland, a city they love.)
Having run the London bureau for the Post, she met members of the royal family on numerous occasions. She described Princess Diana as “luminous in person, much better than she appeared in media pictures.”
Wrapping up, the four-time book author said has recently expanded into podcasts.