Yesterday, PBS Senior Correspondent Gwen Ifill was at the Center for American Progress for an event on her new book, The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama. Afterward, she sat down with ThinkProgress, and we asked her about her thoughts on NPR analyst Juan Williams’s recent comments comparing Michelle Obama to Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress.

Ifill politely declined to comment on these specific comments, but made clear that she often disagrees with him. She also said that reporters who are supposed to just “gather the news” need to be careful about slipping into punditry:

IFILL: Well, there are a couple of different questions there. Since Juan was one of the people who criticized my book before it was published, I really — I just leave it at that. I think that people really should make a better effort to know what they’re talking about.

But in general, the whole idea of this line between commentary and straight journalism, is a fuzzy one, and it gets fuzzier every day, in part because of the growth of new technology. But I also think it can be a fairly bright line if we bother to draw it. It is really easy to tell the difference. … But the viewer doesn’t often see the distinction; they think everyone is doing this.

As Ifill noted, Williams went on Fox News last fall and criticized the fact that she was going to host a presidential debate while writing this book, picking up on a right-wing smear campaign. He said that Ifill “spent a lot of time with Obama, she praises him in the book, and so therefore it seems as if she’s invested — and the book’s success — invested in Obama’s victory.” (Ifill’s book had not yet been written.)

Watch ThinkProgress’s interview with Ifill:

Ifill also addressed Washington Post style writer Robin Givhan’s recent column, which said that many journalists and pundits are intent on canonizing Michelle Obama, and anyone who attacks her faces an unfair amount of “vitriol.” “I think we’re four weeks into this presidency, and anybody who assumes that any kind of coverage is too much this or too much that, really ought to take a deep breath and let it unfold,” said Ifill. She added that this sort of coverage is part of a honeymoon period, which will be over “as soon as the sun rises and falls.”

Transcript: Read more

An excellent point from Dave Roberts:

The Washington Post editorial board, which just this weekend elected to run a column from George Will denying climate change entirely, now presumes to lecture Barbara Boxer on how to solve it.

The classic post-war American newspaper has been largely insulated from market pressure and competition. Typically, you’d have a city and the city would have a newspaper. People could choose to subscribe to the newspaper, or they could choose not to. But they couldn’t choose a different paper. You just had to decide, as a citizen and as an individual, if you wanted to be the sort of person who read his town’s broadsheet or else if you didn’t want to be that sort of person. Thus, the audience was guaranteed and, at the time, so was the advertising. Under the circumstances, papers were remarkably free to just do whatever they wanted to do with their actual content.

When you talk about this with working journalists and newspaper nostalgics, there’s a tendency to focus on the upsides of this insulation from market competition. You could dispatch some reporters to work on a Pulitzer-contending feature or major investigation and not really worry too much if the marginal increase in readership justified the cost. You could keep a Moscow bureau open just because you thought it was important. All good stuff. But it’s also bread this weird arrogance where nobody in the business seems to think that the deplorably low quality of the product plays any role whatsoever in the declining relevance of these institutions. But here’s a George Will column in my paper, lying to me about global warming. Here’s Will’s editor refusing to correct the record or say anything about why he decided it would be a good idea to run a column in which George Will lies about global warming. And now here’s the very same indifferent-to-the-truth editorial team writing about global warming. And I’m supposed to read the editorial why? What value to me, as a consumer of information, do inaccurate uncorrected George Will columns offer me? How will the addition of Bill Kristol to the roster increase the value of the newspaper to me as a consumer of information?

These issues don’t get considered, at all. These guys are Important Conservatives so it’s important that we pay them to lie to people.