- Pritzker Fellows
- Former Fellows
- Jeff Greenfield
Jeff Greenfield
Award-Winning Political Journalist for CBS News, CNN, ABC News, PBS, The Daily Beast & POLITICO
Spring 2016 Pritzker Fellow
Seminar Series: “From Hamilton’s Pen to Trump’s Tweets: A Brief History of Political Media"
Biography
Jeff Greenfield, a veteran political, media and culture reporter and analyst, has spent more than 30 years on network and cable television, while also working as a print journalist and best-selling author. Among other roles for CBS, CNN, ABC and PBS, he served as its lead analyst for primaries, conventions, presidential debates and election nights, as well as presidential funerals and Supreme Court confirmation hearings. Greenfield also has reported on the media, culture and trends. He is currently a columnist for The Daily Beast and POLITICO and a contributing correspondent for PBS’ “News Hour Weekend.
Though the five-time Emmy winner’s reporting has taken him to locales around the world from South Africa, to Japan, to Europe, he is principally known for his coverage of domestic politics and media. He has served as a floor reporter or anchor booth analyst for every national convention since 1988. He has twice been named to TV Guide's All-Star team as best political commentator and was cited by the Washington Journalism Review as "the best in the business" for his media analysis.
Before spending nearly a decade at CNN (1998-2007), Greenfield was a political and media analyst for ABC News (1983-97), appearing primarily on Nightline and delivering weekly commentaries for World News Sunday. Previously, he was the media commentator for CBS News (1979-83). Greenfield also has appeared on William F. Buckley's Firing Line and PBS' We Interrupt This Week. He was the anchor of PBS' CEO Exchange, a limited-run series, for five seasons.
Greenfield, a native of New York City, graduated with honors from the University of Wisconsin, where he was Editor-in-Chief of The Daily Cardinal. He is an honors graduate of Yale Law School, where he was a Note and Comment Editor of the Yale Law Journal.
Following law school, Greenfield worked as a speechwriter in the Senate ODIC and 1968 Presidential campaign of Robert Kennedy. He then worked as Chief Speechwriter for New York City Mayor John Lindsay. Greenfield spent seven years with famed political consultant David Garth, and wrote books and magazine articles as well — his work has appeared in magazines ranging from The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s, and Esquire to The National Lampoon.
For fifteen years, he was a syndicated columnist whose Universal Press Syndicate Columns appeared in more than 150 newspapers. He has also served as columnist for TIME Magazine, Yahoo! News, and — currently — for POLITICO, The Daily Beast, and the New York Observer.
Greenfield has authored or co-authored 14 books, including national bestselling novel The People’s Choice, The Real Campaign and Oh, Waiter! One Order of Crow!, an insider account of the contested 2000 presidential election. His book “Then Everything Changed: Stunning Alternate Histories of American Politics — JFK, RFK, Carter, Ford, Reagan,” was released to gin March 2011. A follow-up e-book, “43*: When Gore Beat Bush — A Political Fable,” in September 2012, and his latest, “If Kennedy Lived: The First and Second Terms of President John F. Kennedy: An Alternate History,” was published in 2013.
Greenfield lives with his wife, Dena Sklar, in Santa Barbara, California and New York City. He has two grown children and five grandchildren.
Seminars
“From Hamilton’s Pen to Trump’s Tweets: A Brief History of Political Media"
How have American presidents, presidential candidates, and prominent political players used the media to advance their prospects? How has the changing nature of the media changed - and not changed - what major political players say and do, and how they say and do it? Those are the questions veteran political reporter Jeff Greenfield will address in this eight-week seminar.
From the start of the Republic, political players have tuned to whatever tools were at their disposal to argue on their behalf, and to disparage their opponents. Newspapers, books, pamphlet, posters, cartoons, songs and symbols were significant weapons in the political wars, long before radio, television, the Internet and social media arrived. All of them have been deployed by those seeking political power.
This seminar series will reach back 200 years to the fight between Federalists and Democrat-Republicans (sorry, no tickets to “Hamilton” available), and proceed up to the use of data analytics in today’s campaigns. We’ll see how symbolic “messaging” developed early on and examine the way those symbols were used to communicate messages about leadership, about ties to the American heartland, about appealing personality traits. We’ll see how much modern media has changed those messages - and how much the messages remain consistent throughout the decades. This is true whether we’re looking at William Henry Harrison’s Log Cabin campaign theme, FDR’s radio chats, Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech, Reagan’s classically American rhetoric, or Obama’s confident references to contemporary music.
Each week, we’ll establish links between what we’ve been looking at in the past and examples from the 2016 presidential campaign. We’ll track events in real time as the end of 2016 nominating process nears.
Twitter and Snapchat are among the media channels driving voter engagement in 2016. But the roots of mass media engagement run deep. We’ll look at FDR’s masterful understanding of audio as an intimate medium; how movies were used (including the infamous “fake newsreels” that doomed Upton Sinclair’s 1934 California campaign for governor); and we’ll explore why Richard Nixon’s “Checkers” speech - widely scorned by the elite - was in fact the first genuinely brilliant understanding of how TV would change political discourse.
We’ll examine their evolution from high drama TV fare to the battleground of the 1968 convention to the staged infomercial of today. We’ll also look at how conventions demonstrate that the oldest of all methods of political communication - the speech - still has enormous power. We will reach back to consider William Jennings Bryan’s “Cross of Gold” speech in 1896 and FDR’s 1924 nominating speech for Al Smith, which returned him post-polio to the political stage. Reagan’s 1976 “concession” speech, along with Obama’s speech in 2004 that put him on the road to the presidency, also will be fodder for seminar discussion. We may be able to investigate whether 2016 will see every journalist’s favorite fantasy: the “contested” or “brokered” convention.
They've been some of the most dramatic, jaw-dropping moments of the 2016 campaign: Megyn Kelly confronting Donald Trump on his misogyny, Trump boasting of the size of his ... fingers ... and Sanders and Clinton challenging each other's right to lead the Democratic party. Presidential debates have been front and center this cycle; but for most of our politics they didn't even exist. We'll look at some of the most memorable moments from JFK-Nixon to Obama-Romney. And we'll ask just how much difference they make and why are some moments much more significant than others.
Modern tools now enable campaigns to connect on a near one-on-one basis with voters. Using data analytics, so-called “micro-targeting” has enabled campaigns to understand where their potential supporters are, and how to persuade and motivate them, in ways unimaginable just a few decades ago. Does this reconnect individuals to politics, as operative argue? Or does it increase the power of campaigns to manipulate voters, and to reshape messages voter by voter?
What's Sanders doing on "Saturday Night Live?" What's Clinton doing on "Ellen"? What's Cruz doing on Jimmy Fallon? For that matter, what was Richard Nixon doing on "Laugh-in"? When did politicians realize that paid ads and press conferences weren't enough? From Eisenhower’s 1952 ads - the first use of “spots” - we will look at the most memorable, effective, ineffective, and creative ads. In this seminar, we’ll consider when “comparative” ads or “negative’ ads cross the line and whether a political ad can actually convey information.
Did Twitter get Donald Trump the Republican nomination? Is Facebook the source of political news for millions of Americans? There's a whole new generation of political news consumers - and a whole new generation of sources. We get debate coverage in real time, via Twitter. We're flooded with news, videos, rants, arguments via outlets that did not exist a few years earlier. We "attend" political gatherings via Snapchat. In this hothouse atmosphere, can more substantive poetical journalism - with analysis and historical context - survive, maybe even flourish? Peter Hamby will join Jeff Greenfield to dissect the state of political journalism. After the 2012 election, Hamby wrote a much-talked-about report on the impact - mostly negative - of Twitter on political coverage. Now, he's Snapchat's Head of News, giving him a unique perspective on how political journalism has and will change.
Special Guest: Peter Hamby, Head of News at Snapchat, former Political Reporter for CNN & Author of “Did Twitter Kill the Boys on the Bus?”
In this final session, we will attempt to define what has and has not changed in American political media. Are the traditional themes that have been evident in all past media still relevant in the 2016 election? Are the newest tools changing politics in ways we’re just beginning to see? Is the Trump phenomenon an indication that the old rules no longer apply?