What do you think of how the election is being covered and conducted through the press?

The press has let the country down. It's taken a very amoral stand, in that essential issues are often portrayed as simply one side says this and the other side says that. I think that Fox News and the Republican right have intimidated the press into an incredible self-consciousness about appearing objective and backed them into a corner of sorts where they have ceded some of their responsibility and righteous power.

The Washington Post and New York Times apologies about their initial reporting about Iraq not being critical enough were very revealing. I am a dedicated Times reader, and I've found enormous sustenance from Paul Krugman and Maureen Dowd on the Op-Ed page. There has been great reporting, but there has also been some self-consciousness in some of the reporting about the policy differences in this election.

This is going to be an issue after the election. I don't know if it began with the Iraq war, but shortly thereafter there was an enormous amount of Fox impersonators among what you previously thought were relatively sane media outlets across the cable channels. It was very disheartening. The job of the press is to tell the truth without fear or favor. We have to get back to that standard.

The free press is supposed to be the lifeline and the blood of democracy. That is the position of responsibility that those institutions have. Those things are distorted by ratings and by money to where you're getting one hour of the political conventions. No matter how staged they are, I think they're a little more important than people eating bugs. I think that for those few nights, the political life of the nation should take priority, and the fact that it so casually does not means something is wrong. If you want to watch people eating bugs, that's fine, I can understand that, too, but let's do it on another night.

Real news is the news we need to protect our freedoms. You get tabloid news, you get blood-and-guts news, you get news shot through with a self-glorifying facade of patriotism, but people have to sift too much for the news that we need to protect our freedoms. It should be gloriously presented to the people on a nightly basis. The loss of some of the soberness and seriousness of those institutions has had a devastating effect upon people's ability to respond to the events of the day.

Do you think the press is leading us away from a fair and objective reading of this election?

It's gotten very complicated, and I think it's blurred the truth. Whether you like the Michael Moore film or not, a big part of its value was that it showed how sanitized the war that we received on television at night is. The fact that the administration refused to allow photographs of the flag-draped coffins of returning dead, that the president hasn't shown up at a single military funeral for the young people who gave their lives for his policies, is disgraceful. You have the Swift-boat guys who have been pretty much discredited, but there is an atmosphere that is created by so much willing media exposure that it imparts them credibility.

What do you think the responsibility of the artist is in society?

There is a long tradition of the artist being involved in the life of the nation. For me, it goes back to Woody Guthrie, James Brown, Curtis Mayfield and Bob Dylan. These were all people who were alternative sources of information. When Dylan hit in the mid-'60s, he brought with him as true a reading of what was going on as was out there.

People have the choice to not listen, but you have these business lobbyists who affect the direction of public policy. For example, what is going on with the assault-rifle ban is disgusting. The labor unions try to affect policy in their fashion. Artists do it by talking and singing and addressing the life of the mind.

I don't think the audience are lemmings. They get their various points of view from a lot of places. I try to come in and be that alternative source of information. I try to speak my case as directly as I can. If that makes you angry, that's fine. The artist is there to open up discourse, to get people thinking about American identity: Who are we? What do we fight for? What do we stand for? I view these things as a fundamental part of my job, and they have been for the past thirty years.

You've tried to think long and hard about what it means to be an American and about our distinctive identity and position in the world. What is that great thing about America that appeals to you that you are fighting for?

I felt I lived the prototypical American life -- the way I grew up, the town I grew up in, my family life. Things that I cared about, things that I aspired to, they were just something that naturally came to me when I wrote. I think that this particular election is, at the core, a debate about the soul of the nation. I think we can move toward greater economic justice for all of our citizens, or we cannot. I think we can move toward a sane, responsible foreign policy, or we cannot. For me, these are issues that go right to the heart of the spiritual life of the nation. That is something I have written about. It cannot be abandoned and is worth fighting and fighting and fighting for.

When you embark on a creative life, it has a dynamic of its own. You are partially directing it, and you are partially riding the wave. If your work is threaded into people's lives and into the life of your town, your family, your country, then you're like everybody else -- you're at the mercy of events, you're borne along on the currents of time and history.

It's sort of "Gee, I came from this place, I wrote songs about these things that mattered to me." I was serious about them. I was serious about taking what I had written and having some practical impact, which we started to do in the early Eighties. Nothing fancy. I can play my guitar, I can make a few bucks, I can bring some attention to some folks doing the real work and have some small impact in the towns we visit. You move down the road and it just sort of ... happens.

Did you feel the call of your nation or the call of your community?

I don't know. Personally, I wouldn't view myself as that kind of valuable.

So you feel the call from your heart?

Yeah, I can hear the bells chiming. I've had a long life with my audience. I always tell the story about the guy with "The Rising": "Hey, Bruce, we need you!" he yelled at me through the car window. That's about the size of it: You get a few letters that say, "Hey, man, we need you." You bump into some people at a club and you say, "Hey, man, what's going on?" And they go, "Hey, we need you." Yeah, they don't really need me, but I'm proud if they need what I do. That's what my band is. That's what we were built for.

Reprinted by permission of Rolling Stone magazine.

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