Why Kamala's slow-footing the media
Would you subject your message to a distrusted, irrelevant intermediary?
Welcome to the weekend edition of The Experiment, your official hopepunk newsletter. If you’d like to support my work, become a paid subscriber or check out the options below. But even if you don’t, this bugga free. Thanks for reading!
“It’s been 23 days since Joe Biden ended his candidacy. It’s been 7 days since Kamala Harris was formally named the Democratic presidential nominee. She has yet to sit for an interview with ANY media outlet,” tweeted journalist Chris Cillizza. This has now become an ISSUE, and not just with Cillizza who is very much On It. Journalists and Republicans are also QUESTIONING why the Vice President hasn’t done a press conference.
Implicit in this line of attack is the assumption that a presidential nominee submitting to a press conference is a good thing (maybe… more on that below) and an obligatory rite of passage to give the American voters necessary information.
For a profession where they are paid (admittedly, not well) to ask insightful questions, Cillizza et al are missing a better one than “When will she talk to us?” The last month has been one of the most dizzying rags to riches stories in American history. If you had told me in June than by the end of summer Kamala Harris would become the focal point of explosive joy and optimism by single-handedly changing the national electoral climate, I would have stared in wonder at your madness. By every measure she has done this, and she did it without a single press conference, much less a one-on-one interview.
The question isn’t when she’ll submit to being grilled at a press conference. The real question is how did American political journalism become so irrelevant to American politics?
That’s not funny.
It’s true. Most politicians aren’t funny, especially when they try to be funny. (See also: Ted Cruz) This is mostly because political people are put in show business positions (on stage at rallies, in television commercials, being interviewed remotely on live television) with little in the way of show business training and even less show business talent. It’s like picking who is going to star in a movie based on whether they made law review.
But in fact humor and politics have a big thing in common: They need to be based on a common truth. Guest hosting a recent episode of The Pivot podcast, Mike Birbiglia, in order to explain why the Harris/Walz campaign was effectively deploying humor, first taught co-host Kara Swisher Joke Writing 101 and what that had to do with politics.
“I think in comedy, typically a joke has a setup and a punchline and a setup is something that we all agree to be true. And the punchline is a left turn that we don't see coming. And I think the problem with political comedy in everything year 2016 on is that we don't all agree on what is true.”
True that. We largely used to draw different conclusions based on agreed-upon facts. Republicans thought dynamic scoring was valid, Democrats thought it was bunk, but everyone agreed what dynamic scoring1 was. Fact-checking used to matter. Then came alternative facts, and American politics exploded into the Factiverse.
“Terminal bothsidesism”
What does this have to do with the news media’s relevance? Go back in time to McCarthyism, the criminal investigation of Vice President Spiro Agnew, George H. W. Bush’s re-election campaign, or even the conservative pushback to the Iran nuclear deal in Barack Obama’s second term. What have conservatives been inveighing against since forever? The liberal media.
And for about as long, the news media has tried to prove they are not liberal by presenting two sides to every argument and even to the facts. See also: school library controversies and climate change. When Kellyanne Conway recast Trump administration falsehoods as “alternative facts,” the news media’s tendency to hide behind false equivalences metastasized in the Factiverse into what the late Michael Gerson called “terminal bothsidesism.”
The news media’s false equivalences metastasized in the Factiverse.
The New York Times opinion pages have become the headquarters for this reality-twisting worldview in which bad-faith commentary makes excuses for craven and mendacious Republicans (Trump is going to pivot!) and anything good the Democrats do is actually bad. The popular social media account New York Times Pitchbot ably skewers this pattern. “Trump has not released a healthcare plan, a tax plan, or an infrastructure plan. But this is what I think those plans would include and how they'd all be paid for,” went one post. In another: “Whether it was Donald Trump saying ‘grab 'em by the pussy’ or Hillary Clinton saying ‘Pokemon go to the polls’, both 2016 major party presidential campaigns were marred by awkward coinages.”
Did it work? Did bothsidesism protect American political journalists from being labeled the “liberal media”? Hell no. Shortly after becoming President, Trump accused the news media of being an “enemy of the American people.” And if he’s returned to the White House, he’s promised to throw reporters in jail where the threat of being raped by a “prisoner who’s extremely strong, tough, and mean” might convince them to give up their confidential sources.
Trust in media at all-time low
Here we are in the year of our lord 2024, and the following things are true: America’s liberal political class, which is fundamentally wired to support accurate and fearless journalism, does not trust the news media. The MAGA movement trusts Russian propaganda2 more than it does the American news media which it considers not just biased but now traitorous. And non-MAGA conservatives are too scared to go on the record with reporters.
Meanwhile, while the industry can’t figure out which drain to swirl down—Are we streaming now? Are we making people pay for online content now, or…? Is our radio station an app?—reporters and editors do not know how to heal their self-inflicted wounds. There are unanswered fundamental questions about what the news is in These Unprecedented Times, how to report it, and to which audience.
There are unanswered fundamental questions about what the news is in These Unprecedented Times, how to report it, and to which audience.
As a consequence, trust in the news media is at an all-time low. Trust tanked in 2016 thanks to the media’s obsession with Hillary Clinton’s emails (for which Cillizza has since apologized) and Trump’s insult-comedy routines that forced journalists covering him to hire bodyguards. Trust rebounded among liberals when journalists actually started covering Trump as the noonday violation of the Emolument clause, causing the “horse in a hospital” effect among news consumers.
But then, in a whiplash effort to not appear to be biased against a politician who wanted to end freedom of the press, among many other freedoms, they got right back on their bullshit and treated Moms for Liberty as if they were regular people and not the new tea party. Headlines hyped a recession that never existed and a red wave in the 2022 midterms that never arrived. And they endlessly carped that Joe Biden was old. This was admittedly true, it was just as true for Trump, but the way the media leaned on this issue disadvantaged Democrats in a way that felt infuriatingly familiar.
In an essay I shared in the last mid-weeker, John Stoehr expressed this frustration perfectly.
It didn’t matter what Joe Biden did – pull the country out of a pandemic, dodge a recession, tame inflation, grow jobs, grow wages, enforce anti-monopoly laws, revive every single one of the so-called “left behind” counties that voted for Trump in 2016 because of “economic anxiety” – it didn’t matter what Joe Biden did. The press corps decided nothing was more important than his age, and lo! 2024 became an election about vibes and vibes ended his candidacy.
The result is that now, for the first time in the history of everything, less than a third of Americans trust the news media. Put aside your politics for a second, as well as questions about bias and accuracy, if only to acknowledge this new truth of American politics: The news media is a damaged brand.
Disintermediation nation
When Kamala walked over to those reporters on the tarmac in Detroit, the five questions she took reflected an industry-wide obsession with their own relevance: When are you going to do a sit-down interview? Which debates are you going to do with Trump? Are you open to more debates? How do you respond to Republican attacks on Tim Walz’s military record? Why do you think Trump initially backed out of the ABC debate?
Good job, good effort. Now get back on the bus to get your cookie. These are not the questions that will re-establish the press’ role as gatekeepers of the public interest in a newsy environment. If the first question she gets when she finally talks to the press is some version of “When are you going to talk to the press, but in a chair?” then you haven’t demonstrated the value of talking to the press.
Kamala’s campaign isn’t just innovative in its fluency in Gen Z’s meme-based language. It’s also noteworthy for embracing the reality of how Gen Z and Millennials consume news: from social media. I’m an old head. My morning routine is email newsletters and hitting the websites of newspapers. Gen Z doesn’t like and subscribe to that. This is the new reality of news consumption. The new audience isn’t where the news industry is.
All modes of communication have been disintermediated.
You also no longer need the news media to reach news consumers. All modes of communication have been disintermediated.
No longer does a congressman need a press secretary to write up a statement to send to a Capitol Hill reporter to write up an article to send over the wire in hopes that newspapers in his district will pick them up and, one hopes, someone will read it. Now we have AOC streaming live from Congress. We no longer need newspapers to read the news. We no longer need television news to see the news.
Put yourself in Kamala’s shoes. You know you’re going to have to talk to the press. It’s a test you have to pass, a box to check. But when you’re trying to reach voters and tell them about your plans to rein in the cost of living, are you going to rely on a historically distrusted intermediary that is increasingly irrelevant to young voters?
Or are you going to do exactly what Kamala’s been doing?
Cillizza was laid off by CNN in 2022 and now makes his living with his own Substack newsletter, in which he’s shown varying degrees of self-awareness. After incessantly harping on Hillary’s emails, he’s kinda leaning into Kamala’s press avoidance in a similar fashion.
Whether he realizes it or not from his newfound position in independent media, the real importance of Kamala doing a press conference is less about her than it is about him. He needs her to confirm that the news media still matters. Cillizza, who surely misses the credibility and power that a brand like CNN gave him, needs proof that he still matters. The irony is that he does. Now that he has a direct, disintermediated line of communication of his own to his readers, he might end up mattering more than before.
Jason Stanford is a co-author of NYT-best selling Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of an American Myth. His bylines have appeared in the Washington Post, Time, and Texas Monthly, among others. Follow him on Threads at @jasonstanford, or email him at jason31170@gmail.com.
Further Reading
My bratty sister-in-law helped me understand why CNN failed
We set up a merch table in the back where you can get T-shirts, coffee mugs, and even tote bags now. Show the world that you’re part of The Experiment.
We’ve also got a tip jar, and I promise to waste every cent you give me on having fun, because writing this newsletter for you is how I have fun.
Buy the book Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick banned from the Bullock Texas History Museum: Forget the Alamo: The Rise and Fall of the American Myth by Bryan Burrough, Chris Tomlinson, and myself is out from Penguin Random House. The New York Times bestseller is out in paperback now!
It’s not important.
I’m not exaggerating. The Russian-owned One America Network is among the most-trusted sources of news for Republicans.
I couldn't agree more. Why suck the air out of the campaign by doing a press interview at this point? Or maybe at any point, though I suppose eventually she has to. But as much as I appreciate your analysis, more importantly thanks for reminding me of one of the all-time best political comedy routines. Mulaney captured exactly what it was like during the Trump administration. I returned to that routine many times and him making me laugh at it all really helped me get through those years. (And if any your readers didn't catch it, go click on the horse in a hospital reference.)
What I’m finding funny about this whole discussion is that we’re seeing political journalism go the way of film and music criticism, and for many of the same reasons. There’s still an attitude with big political writers of how “Kamala had better give me a sit-down interview…or else.” As with the innumerable film and movie critics 25 years ago making threats of bad reviews unless they got sufficient swag and access to make them change their mind, their subjects responded “So else WHAT?” Chris Cillizza is no different from Rex Reed or Michael Corcoran in that his real issue is that the Harris campaign isn’t stepping up and yelling “HOW HIGH, SIR!” the moment he stamps his widdle foot about exclusive access. THAT right there is why political news coverage has such a horrible reputation with younger readers: they’ve gotten really good at spotting entitled alter kokkers from dealing with their parents and grandparents, and if they wanted to listen to has-been and never-were blowhards whining “Well, this is what _I’d_ do if I were Kamala Harris,” they’d just get on Facebook.