LU Moment: An Interview with John Dickerson | S2 Ep.8

Full Transcript:Shelly Vitanza: Welcome to the LU moment. Thanks for listening. I'm Shelly Vitanza, the Director of Public Affairs at Lamar University. Each week we showcase the great events, activities, programs, projects, and people at Lamar University. Every couple of years, Lamar University hosts the Judge Joe J. Fisher Distinguished Lecture Series. And this year on Monday, March 9th 7:30 PM we are welcoming reporter correspondent and news anchor John Dickerson as the 13th speaker in this series.Shelly Vitanza: Currently a correspondent for 60 minutes, Dickerson joined CBS news in April 2009 as an analyst and contributor. His previous positions include cohost of CBS This Morning, Chief Washington Correspondent, and anchor of Face the Nation and moderator of the two CBS News Presidential Debates during the 2016 presidential campaign. He's also a New York times bestselling author and his latest book, The Hardest Job, is due out June 9th, 2020 by Random House.The Dickersonian WayShelly Vitanza:Mr. Dickerson is joining us by phone. Welcome sir.John Dickerson: Well thank you so much for having me.Shelly Vitanza: Hey, have you ever been to Southeast Texas?John Dickerson: I have. I covered the Nick Lampson race in 1996, which I believe is in that district.Shelly Vitanza: Absolutely.John Dickerson: Yeah, so yeah, so I think that was the Congressman Brooks was retiring and that was the first race to fill his seat if I'm not mistaken.Shelly Vitanza: That's exactly right. Yeah. Two legacies here in Southeast Texas. So you're familiar. Well, we're glad to have you back and I'm excited to welcome you for the day. Reading about you, you're famous for your Dickersonian style, basically embarrassing or catching politicians flat-footed. And so the industry has called it the Dickersonian style. But you've also said that you try to be restrained and mindful of every person's humanity and of the overwhelming challenge of pride. So there are times, I guess that you step back and you don't push hard. Can you give us some examples of that and talk about that?John Dickerson: Well in politics, particularly today, where there is so much questioning of other people's motives, where partisanship and which team a person's person happens to be on in terms of their political party affiliation tends to stop us from listening to what they have to say. And that's really the way a lot of political conversations take place and it's ruining our public discourse. And so nobody has ever had a conversation really that's been of much profit where they prejudged what somebody had to say. And so I try to give people as much of a chance as possible to explain what they have to say and make their case for what they believe. Because my job is to try to put information out there for people. And the best way to do that is to give people a chance to talk.John Dickerson: And now it also means though that you have a responsibility to frame and ask questions in a way that elicits some information. And then the responsibility is on the lawmaker or the person you're interviewing to participate in good faith as well, which is to give you an answer and not just a response to a question they've been asked. And hopefully if we do that, we might stumble on a better sense of what's happening in our world.Shelly Vitanza: And not shut down and really listen to them. And you seem to be able to anticipate the line of talk that it's just interesting to me and watching some of your interviews that you always are kind of ready for the next line of questioning. I don't know how much time you put into preparing, but it just must be an inordinate amount of time.John Dickerson: It does. Yes. There's a lot of time and a lot of effort that goes into thinking through what somebody is likely to say. Thinking through how to ask a question in a way that illuminates what they're going to say. Sometimes, even For updates on the latest news and events at Lamar University, visit lamar.edu/news.