Member Newsletter
I heard from a reader yesterday who saw one of the country’s top political journalists give a public presentation about the race. The run-down I got of that event crystallized something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to over the last few months and writing about here and there. At the elite level, political journalists have a basic contempt for Democrats. It’s not even very concealed because in a way it’s hardly even recognized as such. This continues to be the case despite the fact that most of the people I’m talking about, if they vote, probably vote for Democrats. They are socio-economically and culturally, if not always ideologically, the peers of Democrats. We often confuse cosmopolitan social values for liberalism. If anything, this basic pattern has become more the case over the last decade. These people are highly educated. They are affluent. They are the creatures of the major cities.
Are they secretly rooting for Donald Trump? Hardly. Or at least not in the great majority of the cases. Trump is a tiger on the savanna, dangerous but also fascinating and above all alien. That’s why the notorious rustbelt diner interview stories were and are such a staple. They’re safaris. It defines the coverage, and in ways seldom helpful for Democrats in electoral political terms.
I am on strong ground and in my professional element describing this dynamic. Precisely why that dynamic is the case might be better left to social psychologists or cultural critics. Perhaps it is simply a matter of familiarity breeding contempt. Maybe it’s born from watching Democrats struggle in the lopsided ecosystem the business of modern news publishing created and which journalists manage and oversee. We’ve discussed this so many times: political news remains wired for the GOP.
When I focus here on elite-level political journalists, I’m not implying that it’s different at other levels of mainstream media. But in the nature of things it’s the people at the top of the profession who set the tone. We’ve had a whole conversation over recent months about the subtext and framework that seems to inform New York Times headlines. People get baffled. What’s wrong with the Times? Again, nothing — if you have a clear read of that basic MSM mindset. It all fits together. It’s compounded by the professional anxiety felt by that kind of media that no longer feels and no longer is the central channel of political information in the country. That’s what the whole “Harris needs to be doing more real, set-piece, traditional media interviews” thing is about.
Of course, complaining about the weather is a loser’s game. And in some ways the national media, and its mindset, is the weather. But there’s a key way in which it’s not quite like that. Democrats and elite media are in a bad relationship trending toward divorce. And divorce or at least a separation is almost certainly the best outcome.
Here’s what I mean.
Democrats are far more likely than in the past to attack elite and mainstream media in the way I am doing here. The response from members of the media is usually some version of either “well, if I’m being criticized by both sides I must be doing something right” or something else a bit more revealing: “you say you’re on the side of democracy and a free press, but you’re doing just what Trump does now.” I’m thinking of a recent exchange with a prominent New York Times journalist in which the journalist protested that if Democrats say they care about free media and democracy how do they think they’re helping things by criticizing the Times and thus eroding trust in media. And there you have it. Democrats must not only submit themselves to whatever scrutiny comes their way. They also need to prop up the media, sing its praises, knock down any criticism of it as part of their advocacy of civic democracy.
That’s a perverse and impossible position. Being for a free press means recognizing its critical role in a free society and supporting the legal protections that make it possible. It doesn’t mean going soft on bad journalism. It means not denouncing journalists as a class. In any case, the idea that reporters, journalists have ever been truly popular in the way many seem to hope for just isn’t true. Journalists ask questions people don’t want to answer. That’s the nature of the job. People who do that are always going to be annoying. That’s how it works.
The perverse thing is that Democrats kind of agree with the conceit of that Times journalist, that it’s their job to be propping up elite journalism and that they can rely on elite journalism to treat them on equal terms when in fact they can’t. It has all the attributes of a bad and failing marriage, mutual feelings of unmet expectations and obligation, pervasive acrimony and disappointment.
Democrats can’t force reporters to act differently. It’s in the nature of a free press that they shouldn’t be able to. The relationship is in any case a complex sociology that I, a reasonably bright guy who’s been observing and thinking a lot about this specific topic for a quarter century, still have a hard time quite understanding in its totality. What you can do is recognize that contempt and imbalance as a real thing that creates a structural tilt in basically all dominant political news coverage and act accordingly. What does that mean? It means don’t expect it to be different but be ready and more than happy to call out and run against bad coverage anywhere and everywhere. Yes, run against the press. That’s 100% okay. Journalism is another player in the civic space, another player that has to take its knocks like everyone else. Running against bad and lopsided reporting isn’t the same as running against the concept of a free press. Never has been. The current fraught tangle of mutual disappointment is bad for everyone.