Fourth Estate Sale

My enthusiasm for the Harris/Walz campaign has cooled a little recently. Not enough to change my vote, obviously, but enough to make me less optimistic that we’re going to see the significant reboot of the US political system that I’d been hoping for.

The problem: it seems like whoever was the Harris campaign’s Authenticity Manager was brought in for a meeting with the Democratic elite and quietly let go. “Thanks for your service, I guess, but I think we can take it from here,” they said with condescending smarm, probably. “After all, we have been running Democratic campaigns for the past forty years, so I think we know a thing or two about elections. Why don’t you Pokemon Go on home?”

Do campaigns even have Authenticity Managers? I don’t know. But for a while, it sure seemed like the campaign was cutting through the bullshit and taking a definitive stand on a bunch of issues that Democrats have normally tossed around like a hot potato. I was even happy to hear Harris taking a stand on issues I don’t agree with (She said repeatedly, “We’re not taking away anybody’s guns,” and I’m like, “Well, you could take away some guns, certainly, seeing as how the problem is that there are too many?”) because it meant we were getting back into the realm of adults who can reasonably disagree on important issues. Instead of “my unassailable and infallible savior” vs “the demon who will destroy civilization as we know it.”

Over the past couple of weeks, though, it seems like the campaign has been settling back into the old familiar nonsense.

I understand that the Democrats are still traumatized by the 2016 election, and they want to avoid being overconfident. And I also understand that it’s in Harris’s best interest to play the underdog. But every day I see another message from the campaign suggesting that things have taken a terrible turn, they’re just barely hanging on, they desperately need our help, doom is upon us all. This isn’t the party that was coming in and energizing everyone just a couple of months ago; this is the party that’s spent the last decade with control of multiple branches of government and still shrugging and insisting that they were powerless to do anything. Wouldn’t it make more sense to be emphasizing enthusiasm and excitement? Saying “our message is really connecting with people,” reminding us that the GOP doesn’t have the overwhelming mandate it insists that it does, and giving us some hope that they intend to make a difference?

And seeing more of the same in terms of funding requests is particularly frustrating. Early on, we were getting reports of raising hundreds of millions of dollars within a week or two, which was hugely exciting as a sign that there was a clear mandate for Harris. After the announcement of Tim Walz as VP candidate, the enthusiasm and support took off again. Last I checked, the campaign had raised almost a billion dollars, mostly from first-time donors — meaning this wasn’t the usual Democratic machine grinding away, but genuine excitement that change was coming. But now, I’m getting increasingly desperate requests for donations from Harris, Walz (with increasingly strained football metaphors), and Barack Obama. We’re being outspent in battleground states! Ma’am, you’ve got a billion dollars! The Obamas have enough money to buy at least a dozen of me, outright! If you’re getting outspent, that sounds like a you problem, tbqh.

The ad that set me off in particular was something like “Do you want to wake up November 6th feeling like you could’ve done more?” Deliberately — shamelessly — taking advantage of the despair a lot of us felt back in 2016, when our anxiety over “why is the race this close?” turned into “holy shit, how did this happen?” I’ve already donated more money to this campaign than I have to any other political campaign, and that’s on top of trying to donate to hurricane recovery and humanitarian relief charities from the multiple disasters going on. And we all know that the most prominent Democrats are very wealthy (if not obscenely wealthy) people, and most of us don’t begrudge them that. But when the Obamas are coming onto my phone to tell me that if Trump wins, it’s because people like me didn’t do enough, that just strikes me as extraordinarily tone deaf.

It all makes me wish there were some way to get information about what is actually going on, from a source that’s not directly invested in any political party or campaign. It would be great if something like that existed in the United States.

Instead, we’ve got the most prominent newspapers and broadcast media all deciding at once that they’re bored with the same old journalistic malpractice they’ve been doing over the past decade, and committing to actively undermining campaigns and eroding our faith in our institutions.

I wish that were hyperbole, but there’s just no denying it anymore. It’s not even tricky to find examples these days; I just randomly went to The New York Times website, and right there at the top of the front page are multiple examples of misreporting things that I know to be true. Creating a false equivalence between Harris’s support for an actual child tax credit, Trump lazily repeating the old GOP cure-all of tax cuts for the rich (or people “higher up the income scale” in Times speak). Harris’s outreach to black communities spun as political maneuvering to “shore up” the Black male vote at the last minute, even though she’s made a point of talking directly to Black men for the duration of her last two campaigns at least. Reporting on Trump’s blatantly fascist speeches — in which he promises to use the government to punish his enemies — not with emphasis on what he actually said, but on the idea that his supporters don’t believe it’s a serious threat.

For the past several years, I’ve been making excuses for the Times and the rest of “mainstream media,” saying that they were driven by fear of litigation or an overabundance of caution over journalistic integrity. We saw it in the “both sides” coverage of the climate crisis, long after the truth was evident even to the most gullible person? We thought we saw it with the Clinton campaign, where they normalized the most lunatic fringe claims of the GOP, seemingly out of respect for political norms or some such. I find it impossible to be so charitable anymore, and keep giving them the benefit of the doubt.

With the Harris campaign in particular, it seems like a prolonged tantrum. They spent months painting Biden as being too feeble to function, much less serve as President1 and then were furious that Harris became the nominee without all of the news cycles and opinion pieces that would’ve been guaranteed by a rushed Democratic primary. Then they insisted that Harris was being evasive or hiding from the media, even as she was going around the country talking to people directly. Her first interview with a CNN reporter was a bizarre and pointless exercise in goading for responses to bullshit right-wing talking points, telling us nothing, but giving the media plenty of opportunities to praise Dana Bash for being so hard-hitting. Bash was later interviewed2 and said that she figured she must be doing something right, since she was being criticized on both sides. That’s certainly one way of looking at it; personally, I would take that as a sign that I’m doing so bad at my job that I’m providing a service to no one.

It’s tough for me to imagine why so many people would so thoroughly abdicate their journalistic responsibility. Any explanation I can think of seems either:

Too simplistic: the media is owned by rich people, and rich people benefit (short term) from Republican tax breaks

Too cynical: the media needs the 24-hour news cycle to justify its own existence, and the chaos of Trump means that there’s always news

Too charitable: they’ve been huffing their own farts for so long that they can no longer recognize long-term changes, or understand how much damage they’ve done to the American political system.

And yet at the same time, I suspect all three are partly true. I’m certain that there are billionaires out there who believe William Randolph Hearst’s greatest failure was a lack of ambition, and who have been pushing for a Trump presidency while being convinced that their wealth will keep them insulated from everything horrible about a Trump presidency. But I’m highly skeptical that Zaslav or Bezos or whoever can just issue an order on how the election should be covered, and then dozens of ego-driven journalists would all fall into line. If it were that blatant, there’d be no shortage of reporters eager to get the payout and the recognition from an expose about corruption in the mainstream media!

I’m not completely naive; I’ve been able to tell for a long time that national journalism — and political journalism in particular — is a big circle-jerk. I saw All the President’s Men, and even as a gullible teenager who was feeling defensive for not knowing more about American history and cinema history, I was still rolling my eyes at the lengths that movie went to make Woodward and Bernstein out to be rock star heroes. But I always assumed that all of that was on the side, and what really someone to get into such a hard career was a responsibility to the truth.

My already-dwindling respect for the profession took a nose dive when I saw the reaction to news that Olivia Nuzzi had an inappropriate relationship with Robert F Kennedy Jr. I don’t give a damn about Nuzzi one way or the other, but I spent years hearing people that I do respect describe her work as a fresh, take-no-prisoners, bullshit-free insight into American politics. Every time I read one of the articles, it just came across as self-important trash from someone desperately trying to be a Washington insider. It demeaned the important business of federal government by treating it like celebrity gossip. And yet I always figured that other people know a lot more about politics than I do, so I must be wrong.

Even after it was revealed that she had violated the most basic rules of journalistic ethics3, there was no shortage of journalists coming out to defend her, and dismiss the accusations as being nothing more than misogyny. The whole reaction made it clear what’s valued among today’s most prominent political journalists, with access and exclusive information taking precedence over anything as mundane as accuracy or relevance.

None of this is new, really. The New York Times Pitchbot parody Twitter account has been around for a long time, and it was already a long-running gag by that point. But over the Biden administration, it’s transformed from regrettable bias into something worse. I just saw a social media post that put it very well, the media’s transformation from “complacent to complicit.” The media has long insisted that they’re simply reporting on Trump and the right wing; they’re not shaping the news any more than they would be if they were reporting on a hurricane. Denying the obvious fact that hurricanes don’t just fizzle out if you stop giving them constant attention.

And comparing it to a hurricane is apt, because that’s what makes this a crisis, instead of just business as usual: the media has largely refused to examine what’s actually happening, and instead treated the rise of the right wing as some inexplicable, uncontrollable force of nature. We’ve had the same question for at least a decade: why is any of this happening, when none of it makes sense? And the people most capable of and responsible for explaining have instead gone from shrugging to denying that it’s even happening at all.

Why is this a close race? Is it even a close race, or are we being misled? Who is driving support for an obviously irrational and incapable Presidential candidate? Why would anyone suggest that the candidates are comparable? Why do stories about corruption in the judicial branch keep being dropped? Why are we going through the same cycles as if no one has learned anything?

This is what happens when you erode trust in your institutions, and when you willfully mislead people. I’m still optimistic enough to hope that there’s a way back from it, but at the moment I have no idea what it would be.

1
An idea that’s been conveniently forgotten as Trump’s speeches have gotten increasingly incoherent, as if it’s no longer important.

2
For some reason. No better illustration of the pointlessness of multiple 24-hour news stations than the ouroboros of interviewers interviewing interviewers.

3
And I mean we’re not supposed to judge but come on. RFK Jr. Gross.

1 An idea that’s been conveniently forgotten as Trump’s speeches have gotten increasingly incoherent, as if it’s no longer important.

2 For some reason. No better illustration of the pointlessness of multiple 24-hour news stations than the ouroboros of interviewers interviewing interviewers.

3 And I mean we’re not supposed to judge but come on. RFK Jr. Gross.