Peter Hamby is currently the host of Good Luck America, a documentary-style award-winning series on Snapchat about American politics. Hamby is also a former political reporter and national political correspondent at CNN based in Washington. He is also a contributing writer for Puck News and Vanity Fair. In 2012, he won an Emmy Award for CNN’s coverage of the 2012 election, as well as an Edward R. Murrow Award for his Snapchat journalism. After the election in 2012, Hamby returned as a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. He is also the author of “Did Twitter Kill The Boys On The Bus?” which is a 2013 Harvard study that investigates how Twitter changed media coverage and politics
This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Harvard Political Review: As a news reporter, how do you maintain a level of objectivity and fairness in your news coverage?
Peter Hamby: It was drilled into me that you have to cover the news based on facts, information, and research. I think objectivity, increasingly, is a kind of a phony concept. There are no two sides to climate change. There are no two sides to democracy. Fairness is more of an intuitive approach. You have to go back to facts, reason, and argument research. Carl Bernstein said that the best obtainable version of the truth is what a journalist should be seeking. You have to do your best due diligence to gather all of the facts available to create a picture that fairly represents the situation at hand or the story you’re covering.
HPR: As the host of Good Luck America, what are the three most important topics you’ve covered throughout your series that you believe everyone should learn and explore more about?
Hamby: The three topics I enjoy covering the most because I think the audience appreciates them is economic fairness. People younger than me graduated into the recession. Income inequality has grown. Opportunities such as careers, homeownership, and even car ownership that our parents had, are increasingly difficult to have. We live in the gig economy. I try to cover economic issues that are relevant to the younger generation. That could be affordable housing, student loan relief, and pocketbook issues. The mainstream press covers the economy in terms of charts and data and trends and jobs reports. I go try my best to cover those things humanly.
I also try to cover a lot of racial justice issues, and not just in the way that we talked about it during 2020 after George Floyd, not just policing, not just identity. I want to try to cover communities that don’t traditionally get attention. A good example would be last year in Mississippi, the city of Jackson froze over. All of their infrastructures such as frozen pipes burst in a city and a state that is majority black. It called attention to the fact that the government wasn’t working for them. I find very local stories that illuminate racial disparities and where they’re coming from and what’s being done about it.
I also like to cover culture war. The right is preoccupied with the liberal media, gender, and inflammatory, provocative things. Sometimes, they have a point, they cover media bias, and that stuff should be addressed. Other times, it needs to be called out. Because I do feel like the prevailing discourse on the right is just culture war. We can’t just ignore that. As journalists, we have to cover it, explore it, and fact-check it.
HPR: Are there any particular moments that stick out to you during your time with CNN?
Hamby: I had a wonderful career at CNN, I worked there for 10 years and covered two presidential campaigns. I covered the 2008 race, covered Obama, Hillary, and Sarah Palin, which at the time, I thought was the wildest election ever. I would say the thing I’m most proud of in my career is when I left CNN to go to Snapchat. A lot of people in Washington and at CNN didn’t understand what I was doing. I cared a lot about using the internet, social media, and mobile phones for good. I wanted to figure out a way to harness those tools to bring journalism to a generation that was just not watching TV news anymore. All of a sudden, I’m reaching millions of young people and interviewing the President of the United States, it’s a huge responsibility. I’m proud of the fact that we genuinely pioneered something new.
HPR: Out of all the campaigns you have covered, which one has been your favorite or most memorable campaign?
Hamby: I would say Sarah Palin’s vice president in 2008. That was the biggest story in the world. People in England were talking about it when I went over there at some point during that campaign. She was genuinely a celebrity. But when she was picked, we didn’t know who it was going to be. No one knew what she was going to be like before social media. The press corps was all googling her.
During the two and a half months that she was the nominee, six journalists were traveling the country with her. You got this front-row seat to this wildly entertaining campaign. I wrote about this for Vanity Fair last year, she cracked the door open to Donald Trump and the era of grievance politics, just like conservative populism. Without Sarah Palin, there wouldn’t have been the Tea Party. I don’t think Donald Trump would have necessarily been a thing because the birther movement came out of the Tea Party movement, which came out of Sarah Palin. Seeing her in front of these rapturous crowds attacking the media talking about how red America was, standing up against the elites, echoed through Trump’s campaigns and continues to
HPR: What are your plans and projects you have in store?
Hamby: I’m excited about Puck News, which you mentioned. It’s a startup that covers the intersection of Washington, Silicon Valley, Hollywood, and Wall Street. It was built by my old editor at Vanity Fair who wanted to create a similar, but perhaps more provocative news organization that like covers these power centers. It’s a new business model where the journalists are the ones in charge. It’s behind a paywall. We bring our followers over and they subscribe to us. Journalism for the last 40 years has been advertising-supported. We’re trying a new business model.
HPR: Are there any closing remarks you’d like to say to the college or our audience?
Hamby: I haven’t been here for two years because of COVID. It’s just really a delight to be back here. I think this place in particular, like a lot of campuses, does a very good job of convening people of all perspectives: International, Domestic, Republican, Democrat, Old, and Young. People talk to each other here with respect.
