Upper School History

Radio Owner, Former White House Correspondent Meets Students

By Aaron Mak

Student Correspondent for the Torrey Times

On Monday, January 30^th, journalist Robert Hughes, father of an Upper School Country Day student Georgi Hughes, came to the AP US Government and Politics class to share his knowledge as a media practitioner and to discuss the function of the media in government. 

 For the first part of the class, Mr. Hughes, as a former a radio reporter and member of the White House Press Corps, described to the class his own experiences with the Watergate Scandal. Two weeks before Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward famously broke the scandal in the Washington Post, Mr. Hughes had a chance encounter with Carl Bernstein and relayed to the class Mr. Bernstein’s skills and methods as a reporter. Mr. Hughes then described another incident in which his friend resigned from the campaign to reelect Nixon after being told to mislead reporters, thus illustrating the often-tense relationship that politicians have with the media. 

 The class then moved into a discussion format in which students asked Mr. Hughes questions based on what they had been learning about media and politics. Several students brought up the question of NPR’s alleged liberal bias and controversial federal funding, to which Mr. Hughes was able to offer an inside perspective as president and owner of KPRI in San Diego. Mr. Hughes then shifted conversation towards the current race for the presidency and asked for the students’ perspectives as they have been following the race very closely. He then spoke about how candidates usually win the presidency with a single galvanizing word. As “change” was the word for Obama in 2008, Mr. Hughes now predicts that Obama will promote the word “fair” in 2012. The class ended with Mr. Hughes putting forth his own strategy on the type of rhetoric that the GOP candidate could use to combat Obama’s run for reelection.