He appeared regularly on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell, and The Rachel Maddow Show.

The author of scores of Newsweek cover stories,[3] Fineman's work appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Republic, and RealClearPolitics, where he was a contributing correspondent during the 2020 election cycle.

[4] Between 2017 and 2019, Fineman was a lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School of Communications, teaching a seminar on “New Media Journalism and Politics in the Trump Era.” [5] He authored The Thirteen American Arguments: Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country, which takes the position that the United States is a nation built on healthy disagreements and arguments.

[12] In 2018, he wrote an opinion piece for the New York Times about how the horrific attack on the temple by an antisemite, killing eleven people, "is part of a larger pattern of mayhem and hatred in America and around the world".

[14] Fineman began his journalism career at The Louisville Courier-Journal, covering the environment, the coal industry and state politics before joining the newspaper's Washington bureau in 1978.

[9] In a discussion of pack journalism during the 1988 presidential campaign, author/journalist Richard Ben Cramer identifies a Fineman profile piece in Newsweek as the tipping point at which unattributed rumors and whispered speculation about the private life of Democratic candidate Gary Hart were made public and effectively legitimated.

McEvoy later complained that the comment was off the record and, in any event, based solely on speculation, but Fineman bootstrapped the quote into publication with the unattributed lead-in "many political observers expect the rumors to emerge as a campaign issue.

[20] Fineman wrote on the rise of the "religious right", the power of talk radio, race and politics, and the Pledge of Allegiance controversy.