Horizon’s 40th anniversary with Howie Fischer

We conclude our coverage of Horizon’s 40th anniversary by talking about the Friday Journalists’ Roundtable, consistently one of the most popular segments of the show. Capitol Media Services reporter Howie Fischer, who has been on the show since the start, will talk about the roundtable over the years.

The Journalists’ Roundtable began for the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981.

The roundtable had a lot of opinion on the roundtable but it was bringing the entire story to Arizonans that has separated Horizon from other television shows.

“There was a little bit more opinion in there but the line between opinion and fact is analytical,” Fischer said. “They want to know why it happened and that’s what Horizon has been doing.”

Fischer did point out that things that were vastly different when Horizon was born. Arizona had a democratic governor in Bruce Babbitt but had a republican-led legislature. It required compromise and working together, something that Americans don’t see every day four score years later.

“There was a lot more cooperation, understanding and working across the aisle,” Fischer said. “It’s changed with every governor, everybody who’s been covering journalism and in some ways we have younger journalists’ involved.”

The addition of social media to the journalism landscape has made an already difficult job even more difficult. With the 24/7 access to news through many different platforms, people are hearing more information, true or false, than ever before.

“I think that has made Horizon that much more important because people can go to social media to get their own spew of things,” Fischer said. “I think that’s what we do that much more important because it’s not just picking up the beginning of the story, you’re getting all of the story.

“We have to figure out what the key of the story is and how do we get that across effectively,” Fischer continued.