Most journalists still believe there’s a difference between a free press and a press release. So how are they convincing themselves to do only the latter?
Why are they doing it? Why is the national political press all-in for Kamala Harris, to the point where outlets such as Politico and Axios are de facto spokespersons for the Harris campaign? Sure, we’ve seen media bias before, but the past month has taken things to new levels. The press took Barack Obama’s personality cult and magnified it; with Harris and Tim Walz, they’ve invented one from whole cloth. The press let Joe Biden slide for years on taking few, scripted questions and ducking interviews; now they’re letting Harris get away with taking no questions at all (no interviews, no press conferences, no interactions with voters) and issuing statements through spokespeople disavowing her own prior record and positions with no explanation. Even those who could claim to be unaware and hoodwinked by the White House regarding Biden’s visible mental decline can’t claim that now — they know perfectly well that Harris is refusing to so much as talk to them. Some in the press even defend this on the grounds that it’s sound campaign strategy — as if it’s the job of the media to applaud rather than challenge candidates who try to manipulate them and avoid uncomfortable questions.
Consider, as emblematic, Jonathan Martin of Politico on X (formerly Twitter) when asked how he could defend Harris taking no questions:
No, i think the righty fixation w her lack of access is cover for your actual frustration: that your stuck w a candidate incapable of driving a message after the other guys yanked off the band-aid and dumped their guy who couldn’t drive a message..Put another way… it doesn’t take the analytical powers of Freud to assess why so many Republicans are furious or just plain frustrated at the Democrats’ switch and are taking it out on the media: The non-MAGA Republicans only wish they could pull off what their opposition did last month. But the Democrats have become what Republicans once were, brutally efficient, on-message, establishment-driven and singularly committed to winning general elections.
Martin has hardly been alone. There are, in my view, seven major, non-exclusive explanations for the behavior of the press:
1. Simple partisanship. We know that most national newsrooms are filled almost monolithically with liberal- and progressive-leaning people who would never consider voting for a Republican, and who are especially left-leaning on cultural issues such as abortion and immigration that are prominent in this campaign. That’s the simplest explanation for the baseline level of bias we’ve seen for a long time. And the younger generation of reporters, raised in woke universities, may feel more comfortable as nakedly obvious activists. But most people who go into journalism still have a self-image as journalists — they believe there’s supposed to be a difference between a free press and a press release. So how are they convincing themselves to do only the latter?
2. Identity politics. Propping up Joe Biden was a partisan act, but nothing more. Harris, by contrast, would be the first female president — like Obama, she appeals to the sense of doing something historic — and even better, she is a “woman of color.” Many female reporters are especially invested in the narrative of Harris as a stand-in for all women and a referendum on women as president. That is complicated only if you start looking at her as an individual with a record and (until now) political positions of her own. So the wagons get circled in order to preserve the simplicity of Harris-as-women, rather than the grubby reality of Harris the politician.
3. Trump. Trump’s general awfulness as a person, his open hostility to the media, January 6 . . . you name it — a lot of people in journalism have bought into the notion that democracy and a free press will end if Trump wins again. Trump creates a permission structure that allows his opponents to excuse all manner of violations of their own professional obligations, and this is as true in the press as it is in the law and politics and academia.
4. Audience capture. Put simply, if you work for CNN or MSNBC or the New York Times, all your incentives are to give your readers and viewers what they want — and conservative-leaning audiences have tuned those outlets out so much that there is nothing but negative feedback for coverage that does anything but help Democrats defeat Trump.
5. Guilt trips. On a few rare occasions, the press rouses itself as a herd to report on a story that’s too good to resist, such as Hillary Clinton’s use of an insecure private email server in her home for State Department communications. Often, as in the case of staff infighting in Harris’s office as vice president or the avalanche of coverage after Biden’s debate blowout, this is driven by Democratic insiders who believe they are advancing the party’s interests. But doing this sort of reportage imposes a huge cost in negative pressure from peers, from the audience, and from Democrats. These are their friends! So, whenever the moment ends, there’s a lot of peer pressure and even internal guilt over having gone off the side. Like an umpire trying to fix a bad call, whenever the national press as a whole moves against a Democrat, you can expect a snap-back effort to restore the natural order of things by going too far in the other direction.
6. Source-greasing. In a world of proliferating outlets and declining revenues, politicians have figured out that they hold a lot of leverage over reporters, and every reporter knows that any given story that isn’t viewed with favor can result in losing access to scoops and background. Harris herself, while refusing to talk on the record, has reportedly been chatting off the record with the people on her campaign plane — shaping coverage in her favor in exchange for an agreement not to tell voters what she’s been saying to them.
7. Respect for the game. There’s a certain type of national-politics horse-race reporter that makes a real effort to be, or at least seem, world-weary and cynically detached from the parties and the issues in politics, and covers the whole thing as a game. It’s hard not to get taken in by some of the drama, especially in this turbulent era. If you grew up on The Making of the President, What It Takes, The Boys on the Bus, Showdown at Gucci Gulch, The West Wing, House of Cards, and other examples of journalism and fiction painting politics mainly as a strategy game played for egos, it can be tempting to reward the people who seem to play the game well and punish those who play it poorly — entirely without regard to what the press or the politicians should do in the interests of the public. That’s the language Martin is speaking here. It’s a species of what Orwell described: “Power worship blurs political judgement because it leads, almost unavoidably, to the belief that present trends will continue. Whoever is winning at the moment will always seem to be invincible.”
By dumping their unpopular incumbent nominee midstream, a coup apparently masterminded by the aged former speaker of the House, and seamlessly substituting a new nominee and then unifying their party behind her and subduing the press into prostration, Democratic power brokers have indeed played the inside-the-Beltway game very well the past month. If your concept of political journalism is simply to cheer those who wield the knife well, that yields good coverage. But it’s not what a free press is for in a free and democratic republic.