Not content to report on the powerful on behalf of the people, the media must go after the people on behalf of the powerful.
Why do many Americans hate the national political media? If you talk to working political journalists, once you get beyond the initial defensive wall of denial, you may get some acknowledgment that, yes, there are some at least partly valid reasons why people tune out from our coverage, or don’t trust our credibility, or think we are biased. But hatred, loathing, and contempt? That must be because right-wing meanies stir up animus that comes from no legitimate place and is an entirely confected effort to ward off bad news and endanger us.
But there are reasons, and for a perfect exemplar of what those are, consider a report this morning from Newsweek national correspondent Khaleda Rahman:
The McDonald’s restaurant where Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump briefly worked on Sunday failed its last health inspection, documents show. The former president manned the fry station and served takeout to people in the drive-thru lane in Feasterville-Trevose in Bucks County, a key swing voter area in battleground Pennsylvania. The restaurant was closed to the public for Trump’s visit. . . . According to the Meidas Touch, he went straight to work without washing his hands. Employees not washing their hands was one of the reasons that restaurant failed its most recent inspection.
Rahman’s bio states that she “is Newsweek’s National Correspondent based in London, UK. Her focus is reporting on abortion rights, race, education, sexual abuse and capital punishment.” She goes on here at some length about inspection reports for the Feasterville-Trevose McDonald’s, as if it is seeking Senate confirmation.
What on earth is the news value of this? The only remotely newsworthy thing in this entire report is the contention that Trump failed to wash his hands. The sourcing for that is “according to the Meidas Touch,” a progressive activist outlet; no link or other identification of the writer or sourcing is mentioned. But even granting the fairness of reporting on how a political candidate behaved in a campaign stop, there is no possible reason why Newsweek should be going after one of the over 13,000 McDonald’s restaurants in the United States, which was of no interest to anybody outside of Bucks County, Pa., before Sunday.
Why do it? Because Trump manning the fry cooker and the drive-thru window was a well-executed campaign appearance, in which Trump was able to showcase his best side — his rapport with ordinary working folks, his humor, his spotlight-stealing stage presence — and minimize his many well-known weaknesses. This is called campaigning. It is done every day in every county and district in America, by candidates for every office from the highest in the land to the most humble. And it goes over well because people like to see and test the personable side of candidates, and because we live in a very diverse country where any candidate can go almost anywhere and find some supporters, some persuadable voters, and some people who don’t support the candidate but are willing to be civil and excited to meet a famous person. That’s democracy. There’s more to democracy than slapping backs, kissing babies, and handing out french fries, but that is and always has been part of it.
It should not be shocking to find people happy to see Donald Trump in Bucks County. If there is a single county in the entire country most likely to tell you who wins this election, it’s this one. This is where Trump showed surprising strength in 2016 and lost the election in 2020. As I’ve noted before:
In a state decided by 44,284 votes in 2016 and 82,166 votes in 2020, Joe Biden gained 144,000 votes (net) compared with Hillary Clinton in just five counties. Four of those (Montgomery, Chester, Delaware, and Bucks) are the suburban counties that ring Philadelphia. Bucks County is the only one of those that Trump almost won in 2016. The fifth, Allegheny, is Pittsburgh — which Trump lost by 16 points in 2016. Biden also gained significant ground relative to Hillary in Centre County (a college town, home of Penn State), and Dauphin County (which contains the state capital of Harrisburg), both of which Hillary won.
Even in 2020, when this and other counties in the Philadelphia suburbs were costing Trump the electoral votes of Pennsylvania and reelection, 187,367 people voted for him — 47.2 percent of the vote in Bucks County.
And yet, Rahman and Newsweek treat this ordinary fast-food outlet and its ordinary manager and employees as legitimate targets for a political attack read across the country and the globe because they didn’t treat Trump like a monster or tell the former president to get lost. Not content to report on the powerful on behalf of the people, they must go after the people on behalf of the powerful — if the people are even mildly helpful to one Republican for one afternoon. This is the same sort of thing the national political press has been doing since it dug into the background of “Joe the Plumber” in 2008 just because he had some sharp words for Barack Obama when the Democratic candidate showed up campaigning in his driveway in Ohio. It’s the instinct that led CNN to go after a grandmother who made internet memes. It’s a tactic we have seen increasingly (Jon Stewart’s Daily Show deserves a good deal of the blame): the idea of trying to discredit politicians by going after their supporters.
Indeed, there’s something even more sinister at work: an effort to shame or intimidate ordinary people away from Trump and other Republican candidates for office by sending the message that if you support them or even interact with them in a friendly fashion just once, the press will dig into your past to find whatever it can to embarrass you. This, from the very same press that can’t tell us what Kamala Harris was doing when Joe Biden was forced off the national ticket, or bother to dig up records of the cases she argued or tried in court as a lawyer. They can’t even track down Harris’s own claim of employment at a McDonald’s. This is exactly the sort of behavior that feeds into Trump’s popularity when he has the media and the prosecutors after him and tells people, “They’re not after me, they’re after you, I’m just in the way.”
Shame on Rahman for targeting the Feasterville-Trevose McDonald’s. Shame on Newsweek for printing it. And the next time somebody asks you why people hate the national political press, here’s your Exhibit A.