Veteran journalist Bret Stephens and leading investor Seth Klarman ’79 don’t always agree, but for 20 years, they’ve kept on talking – and learning from each other.
A live and online audience of nearly 1,000 tapped into their ongoing conversation about media, democracy, education and the nature of debate during “On Democracy, Conservativism and Journalism,” hosted March 6 by the College of Arts and Sciences.
Stephens, opinion columnist for the New York Times and Zubrow Distinguished Visiting Journalist, fielded questions from Klarman, CEO and portfolio manager of the Baupost Group and 2026 Hatfield Fellow in Economic Education.
Stephens and Klarman agree that a free press is essential to a democratic society and so is a culture of respectful disagreement – and that both media and a culture of productive debate face major challenges in today’s polarized political climate.
“Journalism is under threat from without and within,” Stephens said. He described the threat from without as partly from technology’s transformation of journalism; in the sea change from print to digital news, many once-great newspapers have closed or declined. At the same time, the U.S. is in the second term of a president who has described media as an enemy of the American people: “Language you’d expect in an authoritarian regime,” Stephens said.
“The media is known as the fourth estate for a reason,” said Stephens. “We are an integral part of what it means to be a healthy society, a healthy democracy. Accurate information is a form of freedom. You can’t have a free society unless you have free flows of information.”
But media outlets have lost Americans’ trust from the inside, too, he added, by becoming overtly partisan and developing “lazy” reporting habits. For example, he said, media outlets assert “experts say” without names, facts or quotes. This drives skeptics into cynicism – away from trusting news media as a ballast of truth and toward “genuinely dangerous” partisan influencers.
“It seems as though there was a moment where you had a chance at both sides, you’d watch ‘Point Counterpoint.’ Now you either watch left or you watch right,” said Klarman, who delivered the Hatfield Lecture earlier in the day, a wide-ranging conversation with President Michael I. Kotlikoff that touched on leading as a role model, empowering employees, and facing the technological, economic and political uncertainties of today’s world.
Stephens said people can still find out the “true truth,” as Klarman put it, by reading a diversity of views in multiple publications, particularly those with which they don’t agree. On a university campus, curious people can learn to consume a wide variety of opinions, respect those who don’t agree with them and engage in productive debate, he said.
“Conversations are better when there’s friction,” Stephens said. “I grew up in a family that loved to argue. Dinnertime was the time to disagree about things. My parents cultivated a certain art of disagreement, but at the end of the day, we sat down at the table together and we walked away from the table as a family.”
This same dynamic animated Stephens’ popular New York Times column co-authored for years with Gail Collins, who offered a liberal point of view to his conservative one.
“You guys modeled the art of respectful disagreement,” Klarman said.
It’s human nature to see people who disagree with us as enemies, Stephens said, but “democracy at its best overcomes our natural proclivity to imagine that if we disagree with someone on a matter of opinion, we disagree with them on a matter of morals. It’s the business of a well-functioning democracy and institutions in service of democracy, as Cornell is, to teach people out of that instinct.”
Klarman brought up Stephens’ infamous first column for the New York Times in 2017, which acknowledged climate change but denied it was a “civilizational catastrophe.” Thousands of furious comments and calls for his resignation followed, but one scientist invited him to Greenland to witness the impact of accelerated glacier melt for himself.
After that trip, Stephens interviewed Klarman about risk as it relates to climate change, a conversation that further influenced Stephens’ new point of view, which he wrote about in 2022.
“What really changed wasn’t my fact set, it was my concept of risk,” he said. “Changing your mind is a healthy thing.”
