According to his son Nick, pancreatic cancer was the cause.
Mr. Fineman started his journalism career in the early 1970s at The Louisville Courier-Journal in Kentucky. He moved to Washington in the late 1970s and worked as a reporter and editor for Newsweek for almost 30 years after initially writing for The Courier-Journal.
He belonged to the generation of journalists that came after Watergate. Mr. Fineman and his associates, no longer directly dismissed by the tenacious, pioneering nature of the youthful Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, approached their work with a refined professionalism combined with a tenacious ambition that was appropriate for the Washington of the Ronald Reagan period.
Both among political parties and between them and the news media, it was a more cooperative period. Mr. Fineman quickly established himself as one of the busiest and most effective reporters, able to find sources for the kind of continuous, slow-burning scoops that Washington journalists consider to be the hallmark of success.
His contributions made Newsweek stand out during what many see as the magazine industry’s golden age. Working with colleagues such as Gloria Borger, Michael Isikoff, and Evan Thomas, Mr. Fineman helped develop a weekly report that established the standard for how many Americans discussed national events by combining context, measured analysis, and breaking news.
His coworker at Newsweek, historian Jon Meacham, emailed, “He believed in the story, always attuned to where the political conversation was headed.” Howard, the magazine’s principal voice and a renowned “violinist,” composed the music that functioned as the prelude to all that came after.
Being an early adopter of anything that could aid in his pursuit of the news was something Mr. Fineman took great delight in. He claimed to be one of the first Washington reporters to own a laptop, a TRS-80 Model 100 that could save up to ten pages of text and included a modem for contacting his Newsweek editors.
Just as the channel was taking off in the early 1980s, he was among the first journalists in Washington to understand the impact that cable news would have on their profession. Mr. Fineman fit the description of a witty, charismatic, and knowledgeable pundit—all three of which were sought after by CNN, Fox, and MSNBC in the future.
He appeared frequently on MSNBC’s “Hardball with Chris Matthews” and PBS’s “Washington Week.” Later, he became a familiar face on satirical news series like “The Daily Show” and “The Colbert Report.”
In an interview, E.J. Dionne—then a correspondent for The New York Times and currently a columnist for The Washington Post—said of Dionne, “He was a pioneer in making the transition between a time when print was the most powerful force to a time when TV took over.”
Mr. Fineman calculated that he appeared on 200 TV shows about President Bill Clinton and the Monica Lewinsky affair alone in the late 1990s. He was a part of the talk-show landscape for so long that he managed to pull off that most elusive of Washington accolades: the realization of the age-old joke, “If Howard Fineman’s here, who’s on TV?”
Politicians are sometimes just as harsh. In 1999, Mr. Fineman said that George W. Bush was almost certain to win the Republican presidential nomination over Senator John S. McCain of Arizona, who was his main competitor. The senator referred to Mr. Fineman as a “gasbag” who was ignorant of the realities of life outside of Washington.
Mr Fineman remained unfazed. He quickly called Senator McCain to make amends, telling him that while he was correct about Beltway insularity, he likewise wasn’t a fan of the East Coast bubble and that he had already covered thousands of miles during the early stages of the campaign.
McCain sent Mr. Fineman a set of red boxing gloves as a gesture of goodwill.
Mr. Fineman was, in fact, still quite proud of his professional beginnings in Kentucky, where he picked up deadline-driven writing and political and policy reporting skills. During his four years with The Courier-Journal, he covered environmental and energy-related stories, including the controversial toxic waste that was found in 1977 at Love Canal, close to Niagara Falls, New York.
In an interview for this obituary last year, he stated, “That was as good a place as any to get a grounding in what the next half century of American politics was going to be about.” “The South bears a significant amount of the weight of the rise of Reagan, the rise of the conservatives, and what we now refer to as the anti-woke movement.”
In December 1977, the Courier-Journal sent him to Washington. He began working at Newsweek in 1980 and held positions as a political journalist, chief political correspondent, senior editor, and deputy head of the Washington bureau in addition to earning a law degree during his free time.
He had established himself as a dependable member of the print and cable news-dominated Washington journalistic establishment by the 2000s. When he left Newsweek in 2010 to join The Huffington Post, which was only starting to establish its journalistic operation, many were taken aback. Once more, he perceived a revolutionary change in political journalism as internet platforms broke the conventions and values imposed by print media.
In 2010, he told The New York Times, “Once I really started to think about it, it really wasn’t a difficult decision at all, because this is where the action is.” “It is impossible for anyone to turn down the opportunity to embrace the future.”
Mr. Fineman authored “The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country” in 2009, just before he left Newsweek. In addition to providing a broad overview of some of the nation’s long-standing divisions, the book functioned as a kind of road map for Mr. Fineman’s viewpoint on the central theme of his career.
He declared in 2009 that “democracy is rough and nasty” to The Jewish Weekly. We are the first nation established on the principle that there is no one perfect solution in public life. We need to debate and discuss the matter in order to determine what has to be done. The argument over our culture gave birth to the nation.
On November 17, 1948, Howard David Fineman was born in Pittsburgh. His mother, Jean (Lederman) Fineman, was an English teacher, while his father, Charles, was employed by the Dexter Shoe Company.
In 1981, he wed tech lawyer Amy Nathan. Mr. Fineman is survived by his wife, their daughter Meredith Fineman, an author and speaker, and his sister Beth Fineman Schroeter. His son Nick, a senior producer at MSNBC, is also gone.
It was a common joke among Mr. Fineman’s friends that his contentious father had given him the edge in his journalism and particularly in TV punditry.
“From my table to ‘Hardball,’ there’s a direct line,” he stated to The Jewish Weekly. “My father asked and answered his own questions, just like Chris Matthews.”
He received his degree in 1970 from Colgate University, where he studied English and served as editor of the student newspaper. He was able to explore his family’s Jewish heritage by traveling around Eastern Europe and the Middle East thanks to a travel scholarship.
He graduated from Columbia with a master’s in journalism in 1973 after his return. In 1980, he graduated from the University of Louisville with a law degree.
2018 saw Mr. Fineman depart from The Huffington Post. In addition to teaching a course at the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School of Communication titled “New Media Journalism and Politics in the Trump Era,” he went on to work as a political analyst for NBC and MSNBC.
In addition, he began to doubt the American dream he outlined in his 2013 book. He stated in 2024 that it was “naïve” to believe that free-wheeling debate would lead to development or that a shared sense of political good will was still a given after experiencing the divisiveness and partisan animosity of the previous ten years.
Additionally, he was concerned that, just as technology and societal change were dismantling the traditional news media, the drive for celebrity and wealth had destroyed the political journalism corps. But only a revitalized press sector, he continued, could stop the nation’s decline.
He declared, “I think there is a new global world war going on for control of the search for truth.” “In order for America and democracy to survive, we must muster our strength in seeking the truth.”
