Telling the truth
Former Obama speechwriter decries attacks on free press
The former speechwriter for Hillary Clinton and Michelle Obama said the relationship between a government’s administration and the media, whether it’s in the United States or in Canada, is “critically important”.
“A free press is the heart of a functioning democracy, and attacks on a free press are absolutely unacceptable,” former Washington speechwriter Sarah Hurwitz told The Guardian prior to a speech she gave at the Canadian Public Relations Society’s national conference at the Delta Prince Edward on Monday.
Hurwitz started her career writing for the Obamas after writing Hillary Clinton’s concession speech in 2008, thus suspending Clinton’s campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination — the speech that mentions the “18 million cracks” in the glass ceiling, referring to the 18 million votes Clinton received.
Soon after, Hurwitz began working for Barrack Obama’s presidential campaign team.
When she started working at the White House, Hurwitz said the idea of “fake news” wasn’t nearly as prevalent as it is now, though there was “probably some element of that”.
She said there will always be an “ideologically-motivated press” saying the main stream is lying, which she said was “very discouraging” and “unfair”.
“I don’t think it was as big an issue in the eight years in the Obama White House,” she said.
“This is really something that’s happened since the 2016 campaign — at least it’s gotten a lot worse since then.”
Hurwitz said when she worked for the Obama administration, each word of a speech she wrote was checked thoroughly for accuracy.
“We had an elaborate factchecking apparatus in the White House where every speech that anyone wrote went through a massive fact-checking process where every line was scrubbed — I mean every line,” she said.
“It was very important to us to always tell the American people the truth.”
The messages coming out of Washington today, however, are what Hurwitz called “discouraging”.
“I find the language to be the opposite of going high,” she said. “It’s a lot of language that stirs up fear or anxiety and division.”
Hurwitz, who gave a speech entitled “Communicating with Authenticity” to conference delegates on Monday, is currently taking a break from the political realm and working on her book about Judaism.