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Journalist Howard Fineman Dies | HuffPost Latest News

Published

3 weeks ago

June 12, 2024

Howard Fineman, the longtime Washington scribe who mastered a multitude of different mediums over the course of several distinguished decades in journalism, died Tuesday evening at 75 after a two-year-long fight with pancreatic cancer. The news was announced by his wife, Amy Nathan.

Howard was likely a familiar figure to you all. Not only was he a ubiquitous presence on MSNBC and a prolific writer for Newsweek magazine during its golden age, but he also played a prominent role at HuffPost, having served as the site’s global editor for a time.

Global is a good way to describe Howard. He had a gravitational pull about him. He was a man in perpetual motion, reporting and writing and pundit-ing — seemingly unsatisfied unless he was contributing to the day’s conversation.

“I’ve gone from the manual typewriter to Twitter,” he told me of his career when we spoke for this piece. “I’ve done everything but skywriting.”

Stricken with terminal cancer, he said he’d try it in his remaining time. It was a joke, of course. But at that moment, it wasn’t hard to envision him up in the plane. There were few stories he wouldn’t chase.

I first met Howard as a researcher for his book, “The Thirteen American Arguments.” It was a lofty project, trying to distill roughly 250 years of history into an arbitrary number of neatly tailored, binary disputes. He would confide later that it was “classically overwrought.” Nonetheless, it was a best-seller.

From there, Howard played an outsized role in my professional life, helping me get into the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism (where he had also gone) and Newsweek’s internship program. He then joined me at HuffPost, where I served as politics editor at the time.

Howard Fineman (right) with Sam Stein (center) and Ryan Grim on June 11, 2014.

Despite all that overlapping history, it was in the years after we both left HuffPost that we grew closer. Bumping into him around the neighborhood or sitting over coffee, I developed an immense fondness for Howard. He was a mensch in the truest sense. He loved mentoring younger reporters, and we, in turn, grew attached to him.

I began to recognize that this person who I had, for so long, seen as an emblem of the D.C. establishment was, in fact, discomforted by it. He wanted to witness history, not be a part of it. He had gone into journalism because it let him scratch his curiosities and (like so many in the field) channel his insecurities. He had a virtuous view of the line of work. I’m not sure he could have enjoyed anything else.

“I’m not the world’s most social person by nature,” he told me. “The way I could square being an outsider and being part of the human race was by being in a newsroom.”

Howard was born on Nov. 17, 1948, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His mother was an English teacher, and his father was a shoe company manufacturer’s representative. From an early age, it was clear the career path he’d chart.

On election night in 1956, he, an 8-year-old, converted the den of his home into a makeshift newsroom where he broadcast the results to his parents and laid out piles of paper to look like the cards the networks fed into their rudimentary computers.

“It was really one of the nerdiest things you could imagine,” Howard recalled.

He attended Colgate University, where he was the editor-in-chief of The Colgate Maroon, and graduated from the Columbia Journalism School in 1973. From there, he went to The Courier-Journal in Louisville, Kentucky.

A Jewish kid from Squirrel Hill may have seemed like an odd fit for bourbon country. But the paper would be the spiritual tent pole of his career. Southern politics was unnerving — he covered a Klan rally during the day because his editor forbade him from doing so at night — but it had its undeniable charms. A “porchfront style,” as he put it, that was ripe for “storytelling.”

“In many ways, that was the best,” he said of his Louisville days. “The irony is for many reporters back then who were hungry to come to Washington they didn’t realize how lucky they were. It was wonderful, and I loved every minute of it.”

I always wondered why Howard didn’t just stay in Louisville, given the sentimentality he felt for his time there. But he flicked away such hypotheticals like pesky gnats. D.C. was his goal. He saw the city as “an imperium not unlike Rome,” where “all the vectors of power in the country intersect.” And he wanted to be at that intersection.

In 1977, he joined the Courier-Journal’s Washington bureau and, within three years, was at Newsweek. His trajectory continued from there: labor reporter, political correspondent, chief political correspondent, senior editor, and then deputy Washington bureau chief.

Howard Fineman with Arianna Huffington on Jan. 11, 2016, in New York City.

To chart that path required obvious skill, and Howard certainly had that. But it also required a bit of professional ferocity too. Colleagues described an intensity to Howard that I saw later in his career. He wanted to have the best Rolodex and the best assignments. He had a well-known competitive streak that fed his work ethic. He labored late into the night to practice for TV hits the next morning. And he litigated everything — a byproduct of the law degree he had earned taking night classes at the Brandeis School of Law at the University of Louisville.

“He was a force of nature,” recalled Jonathan Alter, his colleague for years at Newsweek. “He knew everybody in Washington. He not only knew them but had a sophisticated take on who they were and what they were doing. He was extraordinarily politically shrewd.”

But Howard also benefited from larger, tectonic changes in the media industry. News magazines were elevating their correspondents into bonafide must-reads. Broadcast news was turning to younger on-air talent. Watergate had given reporting moral virtue and real celebrity.

“I went into Columbia wanting to be Teddy White and came out wanting to be Woodward and Bernstein,” Howard told me. “They had saved, one might argue, the American constitutional government. And they became famous also, let’s say that.”

Howard continued moving with those tectonic shifts: becoming one of the most recognizable pundits on cable news and then joining the online journalism wave right as it was peaking. But he had — what seemed to me, at least — a complicated relationship with that concept of fame. I asked him once if he had been motivated by it.

“If you do that to me, I’m going to come back from the grave and kill you,” he shot back. Minutes later, he acknowledged the appeal.

For Howard, the discomfort was not in the fame he had rightfully achieved but in the suggestion that he had moved on from his Pittsburgh roots and Louisville molding for something facile.

In our talks, he repeatedly described himself as an “outsider.” It was not lost on him that Newsweek was the scrappy underdog next to the Time and that HuffPost was the renegade among its peers. He took pride in those fits. And he was critical, too, of reporters who didn’t share his conviction that the profession was not part of power but a check on it.

“In Washington,” he said, “we delude ourselves as journalists into thinking we are part of the establishment. We really, ultimately, are not.”

It was for this that I came to not just appreciate Howard but love him. He was righteous about the right things and dogged in the right ways. He had big thoughts and surprising depths. He had a value system in an industry and town where that can often get lost. Of all the pieces he wrote, the presidents he’d interviewed, and the places he’d been, it was his reflection on the shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue — where he’d been bar mitzvah-ed — that he regarded as his best work.

He never truly left that den in his home in Pittsburgh.

I will miss my friend. But, more importantly, we in political journalism will miss the example he set. Goodbye, Howard.

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World News

For sale: A piece of California’s country music history

Published

3 hours ago

July 6, 2024

Melody Gutierrez

The famed Buck Owens Crystal Palace, where music legends including Willie Nelson, Dwight Yoakam, Garth Brooks and a young Taylor Swift have played, is up for sale, with the foundation that runs the Bakersfield venue planning to list it for $7 million on Monday.

The nightclub, museum and steakhouse was owned by its namesake Buck Owens, the country music trailblazer who bucked the slick commercial melodies of Nashville for a distinctly West Coast twang. Owens opened the Crystal Palace in 1996, watching it become a premier venue for the biggest names in country music, including himself. Buck and the Buckaroos played there every Friday and Saturday night until his death in 2006.

Jim Shaw, a member of the Buckaroos and a director of the Buck Owens Private Foundation, said that after 28 years of running the famed venue, the Owens family plans to step back and find new owners amid a challenging business climate. The foundation said in a statement that “since Buck’s passing in 2006, we’ve tried to maintain the excellence that he expected, even as it became more and more difficult during these challenging times of increasing food and labor costs.”

The venue is not closing and scheduled events will continue as planned, Shaw said.

“It’s business as usual for now,” Shaw said. “Ideally, someone who wants to keep it exactly as it is will come forward.”

Owens’ youngest son, Johnny Owens, wrote on Facebook that the family’s hope “is that a buyer steps forward with a vision for the future and a reverence” for his father and the Bakersfield Sound.

The Crystal Palace, located on Buck Owens Boulevard, is a major tourism staple for Bakersfield. The 18,000-square-foot venue is next to the city’s downtown entrance.

“It’s the No. 1 tourist attraction in Bakersfield,” Shaw said. “There are people stepping forward and we are waiting to see what happens. I am getting a lot of phone calls. I’m anxious to see what happens.”

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2nd local radio host says they were given questions ahead of Biden interview

Published

7 hours ago

July 6, 2024

OLIVIA RUBIN

A second local radio host on Saturday told ABC News that he was provided a list of questions in advance of his interview with President Joe Biden this week.

“Yes, I was given some questions for Biden,” Earl Ingram of CivicMedia told ABC News. Ingram, a prominent host of a Wisconsin radio station, interviewed Biden this week in the wake of his debate performance.

Ingram said he was given five questions and ended up asking four of them.

“I didn’t get a chance to ask him all the things I wanted to ask,” he said.

Ingram is the second interviewer who now says they were provided questions by Biden aides to ask the president this week. Earlier today, another local radio host who interviewed Biden this week told CNN she was given questions to ask Biden before the interview.

PHOTO: President Joe Biden speaks to supporters during a campaign rally at Sherman Middle School, on July 5, 2024, in Madison, Wisconsin. (Scott Olson/Getty Images)

“We do not condition interviews on acceptance of these questions, and hosts are always free to ask the questions they think will best inform their listeners,” the Biden campaign told ABC News on Saturday.

Ingram told ABC he didn’t see anything necessarily wrong with the practice. “To think that I was gonna get an opportunity to ask any question to the President of the United States, I think, is a bit more than anybody should expect,” he said.

He continued that he was grateful for the opportunity to interview Biden at all.

“Certainly the fact that they gave me this opportunity … meant a lot to me,” Ingram said.

MORE: Wealthy Democratic donors sound alarm over Biden staying in race

On CNN earlier today, Andrea Lawful-Sanders, the host of WURD’s “The Source,” said Biden officials provided her with a list of eight questions ahead of their interview with Biden.

“The questions were sent to me for approval; I approved of them,” she said.

“I got several questions — eight of them,” she continued. “And the four that were chosen were the ones that I approved.”

Responding to Lawful-Sanders, Biden campaign spokesperson Lauren Hitt said in a statement that it’s not “uncommon” for interviewees to share topics they would prefer. She noted that Lawful-Sanders was “free” to ask any questions she saw fit. She also noted that it was the campaign who sent over the questions and not the White House as other reports claim.

Lawful-Sanders did note in her interview with CNN that she ultimately “approved” the questions provided.

“It’s not at all an uncommon practice for interviewees to share topics they would prefer. These questions were relevant to news of the day – the president was asked about this debate performance as well as what he’d delivered for black Americans,” the statement said.

“We do not condition interviews on acceptance of these questions, and hosts are always free to ask the questions they think will best inform their listeners. In addition to these interviews, the President also participated in a press gaggle yesterday as well as an interview with ABC. Americans have had several opportunities to see him unscripted since the debate.”

A source familiar with the Biden booking operation told ABC News that moving forward they will “refrain” from offering suggested questions to interviewers.

“While interview hosts have always been free to ask whatever questions they please, moving forward we will refrain from offering suggested questions.”

2nd local radio host says they were given questions ahead of Biden interview originally appeared on abcnews.go.com

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President George W. Bush turns 78 years old

Published

10 hours ago

July 6, 2024

Gabriele Regalbuto

George W. Bush, born on July 6, 1946, in New Haven, Connecticut, was the 43rd President of the United States.

Bush was born to parents Barbara Bush and former President George H. W. Bush. He has five siblings; Jeb Bush, Marvin Bush, Neil Bush, Dorothy Bush Koch and Pauline Robinson Bush. Pauline was diagnosed with leukemia and passed away at age three.

He was formerly the Republican Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000.

WHY FORMER PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH IS WINNING … THE POST-PRESIDENCY

Bush was first elected to the White House in November 2000, and officially began his first term as president in January 2001, after he defeated Democrat Al Gore during the presidential election. Bush was reelected to his second term as the incumbent in November 2004, when he prevailed over Democrat John Kerry, and led the United States until January 2009 before handing over his torch to former President Barack Obama.

Bush married Laura Bush on November 5, 1977, the day after her 31st birthday, in her hometown of Midland, Texas. The couple were engaged in September 1977, and married less than two months later in a Methodist church. Bush and Laura met at a barbecue, and he took her to play mini-golf on their first date.

The Bush’s share twin daughters, Barbara Pierce Bush and Jenna Bush Hager, born on November 25, 1981. Today, the couple also share four grandchildren; Mila, Poppy, Hal and Cora.

GEORGE BUSH, FORMER FIRST LADY ISSUE STATEMENT ON AFGHANISTAN WITH MESSAGE TO US TROOPS, VETERANS

During his presidency, Bush cared for his English springer spaniel, Spot Fetcher, who accompanied him to meetings in the Oval Office and on adventures throughout the White House. The dog was born to his parent’s dog, Millie.

On September 11, 2001, less than one year into Bush’s presidency, the Twin Towers in New York City were attacked by terrorists when airplanes hit both buildings, causing a collapse and thousands of lives lost. At the time, Bush was reading to elementary-aged children at a school in Sarasota, Florida. He was calmly and quietly advised of the attacks and quickly returned to Washington, where he was briefed alongside Vice President Dick Cheney.

Bush was regarded highly for his poise while learning of the attacks and for his demonstration of patriotism and leadership in the uncertain days and weeks following the hijackings of multiple planes on the day that shook America to her core.

SADDAM CAPTURED ‘LIKE A RAT’ IN RAID

On December 30, 2003, during Bush’s first term as POTUS, Saddam Hussein, the Iraqi leader and executor of the 9/11 attacks on the U.S., was captured by the American military.

In the early morning of December 30, 2006, during Bush’s presidency, Hussein was hanged and executed for his crimes against humanity. Americans across the nation celebrated the death of Hussein and applauded Bush for promising the country he would take him out and following through.

While Bush was regarded for his dealings with the terrorist attacks, the signing of No Child Left Behind Act and the Patriot Act and the creation of the United States Department of Homeland Security, many Americans were unhappy with the sanctions of interrogation techniques, the war in Iraq and taxes while he was president.

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Gabriele Regalbuto is a Senior Editor of SEO at Fox News Digital. Gabriele has a Journalism and Communications degree from West Virginia University. She has worked to produce content for newspapers, magazines, and digital platforms. At Fox, she has assisted in coverage of breaking news events including the 2024 presidential cycle, 2022 midterm elections, Queen Elizabeth II’s death, the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine.

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