You know, it’s funny, Hanna: I listened to Adam Davidson duking it out with Elizabeth Warren on Planet Money (love that podcast) and came away filled with satisfaction. That’s partly because I like a good argument. But it was also because Davidson and Warren were having a substantive, heated disagreement about economic policy, and they trusted each other enough to argue both rationally and with real emotion seeping into their voices. The flap over his referrals to “senior statesmen” seems like a canard. I don’t think he meant that she wasn’t senior or statesmanlike. He made it clear that he thinks her views aren’t mainstream enough for her role overseeing the bailout, and that’s fair game - she’s a policymaker with power; he’s the kind of journalist who covers his sources and also forms and shares opinions about them. Especially because she was so clearly capable of defending herself and fighting back to show that her concerns about family really should be at the heart of the bailout. And after they played the tape of the fight, Davidson and his colleagues on the show talked about how overwrought he’d gotten, and how it had taken him hours to calm down, and that played to me like a very human sign of how seriously he took the exchange, too.
