Since I’ve been constantly criticial of The Times and its coverage of the election, here is a thread from the socials in which I note a Sunday morning of positive coverage of Kamala Harris leading the paper online:
Well knock me over with a bald eagle feather: The Times leads today with positive coverage of Kamala Harris. Maybe they recognize the momentum; maybe they want that interview. In either case, I welcome this good & fair reporting.
Elsewhere on the socials, prof-née-Timesman John Schwartz accuses me of “labored parsing of every story and hed” to impute ulterior motive. Isn’t such labored parsing what once made The Times the Times? What I seek is that they recognize what legions of their readers do.
I struggle every day wondering what has happened to The Times; why it does what it does now. Apart from clearly campaigning to oust Biden, I do not impute motives apart from those unfortunately built into our business: a bias for chaos & confrontation, thus attention.
I have wondered whether as a journalist and prof I might overreact to The Times’ failures — but then I see what legions of readers (apart from a few defensive journalists) say, agreeing with and amplifying my criticism. They see it, too. If only The Times would.
It is my fondest hope that The Times listens and learns, for we need it to be better. Note I never threaten to cancel my subscriptions to The Times (and the faltering Post). They should be so lucky. No, I will stay on their ass, expecting better of them.
You might say I’m complimentary of The Times now because it’s complimentary of Kamala Harris, whom I support. No. Its reporting backs up its presentation & there is fair criticism in it. What strikes me is how The Times could see no positive light on the left. Today it does.
Now I can only hope that as the election draws nigh, The Times will also do a better job of seeing and reporting on the fascist storm yet threatening on the right. That is my greater criticism and I’ve yet to see constructive change there.
With profound regret, I’ve declared The Times broken. Can it be fixed? I don’t know. And it is not alone. The incumbents of mass media are failing & falling. One advantage is that I am taking to reading more sources every day.
I read The Times & Post but also now others (without paywalls): The Guardian, of course, plus the Sun-Times, The 19th, Talking Points Memo, The Grio, SF Standard, and others. It is time to support such new and independent journalism.
Note well that I do not speak alone. See the quote tweets and responses to my thread suggesting Kamala Harris should bypass incumbent mass media to speak with new and independent media.
I should add that in The Times, it takes three to make a trend, so one day does not a trend make. I am happy to note a good day and hope for more. We have 80 days to the election, so we shall see….
POSTSCRIPT
Well, that didn’t last long. A day after I praised The Times for fair coverage, it carps that four weeks in, Harris hasn’t written a 110-page policy document, and it has to point out that people disagree about Israel and Gaza. Regression to the mean.
Margaret Sullivan — whom I greatly respect and with whom I almost always agree — wrote a Guardian column asserting that “Kamala Harris must speak to the press.” Go read it first.
I disagree. That resulted in a thread on the socials I duplicate (with mended typos) here:
What “press”? The broken and vindictive Times? The newly Murdochian Post? Hedge-fund newspaper husks? Rudderless CNN or NPR? Murdoch’s fascist media? No. She can choose many ways to communicate her stands with others outside the old press and with the public directly. The old press can and should be bypassed.
Look at the press’ behavior. When given a chance to ask questions, they sound like they’re in a lockerroom, seeking quotes, not policy. This does nothing to inform the electorate. I know the argument about testing a candidate. But the press as currently configured aims for game & gotcha.
Job 1 is to inform the electorate about policy and stakes. That is up to the candidate to communicate and voters to judge. The press is unnecessary in that process. It can still analyze all it wants. But its questions will do nothing more to inform.
If Harris preempts interviews with the hostile press — which includes not just Fox but now The Times and Post — and goes for an interview on MSNBC she’ll be accused of seeking softballs. (Not that Trump didn’t just get a BJ from Elon Musk…)
The next question is one of character. There we would learn more from seeing Harris and Walz sit down with Howard Stern (his interview with Biden was stellar and revealing) or late-night hosts (Colbert, not for God’s sake Fallon) or podcasters.
What I most want to see Harris & Walz do is bypass old, white mass media (run by people who look like me) and enter into conversations — scarce time allowing — with Black & Latino press, podcasters, community press, thereby validating their role over the priviledged & powerful incumbents in political discourse.
I’ll say this again: The press needs Kamala Harris. Kamala Harris doesn’t need the press. Their motive in whining for what they take as their birthright (hello, A.G.) is to salve their editorial egos and earn them attention (and money). They have not earned this role; they have forfeited the privilege by their behavior.
I agree with Margaret almost always. But here, not. It is time that we as media critics face head on how broken the press is. It does not perform a constructive and productive role. To the contrary, it has been damaging to democracy. Facing the press is not a proper test. The press fails its tests.
It is also critical that we as journalism educators enable our students to break free of the failures of incubment, white, mass media and build a different future for journalism, paying reparations for the sins of media past & present, listening — truly listening — to the public they serve.
As evidence of why I respect and admire Margaret so, this is her tweet in response to mine:
On MSNBC this morning, I watched Elise Jordan’s focus groups from Green Bay, Wisconsin — the first after the nomination of Kamala Harris. I was honestly shocked that, after the start of this unprecedented presidential campaign by a Black and Asian-American woman, the first voices we’d hear would be from Trump voters. The next group was “right-leaning swing voters.” I was all the more shocked that all the voters in both groups were white. I debated whether to sermonize on this offensive lapse of judgment but instead went light, posting screen grabs of both groups on the socials and asking who might be missing. Enough said, I thought.
Then I got a Twitter DM from Jordan:
This was terribly upsetting. Race-baiting? For pointing out the complete lack of diversity in her focus groups? I responded:
Having been accused of ignorance of Green Bay demographics, I looked them up.
She responded:
I replied:
I thought she might back away from the keyboard, but she did not. She escalated.
Morons like me. Dooming democracy. I didn’t want to see this escalate further. I should have replied, “Bless your heart.” Instead I just said:
There it ended. I’ve given this a few hours to settle but I cannot ignore it for a number of reasons.
First, I depend on MSNBC. I’ve lamented that The Times is broken, The Post has been invaded by Murdochians, CNN and NPR are scared and rudderless, Murdoch’s media are victorious with Sinclair on their side, newspapers are mostly in the clutches of hedge funds. We need MSNBC, now more than ever, as the sane network, not afraid of at least speaking with a liberal and diverse public. It is honestly all I watch all day (other than HGTV). But after the MSNBC post-Trump-shooting and Ronna McDaniel debacles, we need to hold to account the executives in charge of the network — executives from a corporation that, as one insider schooled me, “is a Republican company.” My post was my way of saying: I’m watching, MSNBC. Do better.
Second, I have written in my book, The Gutenberg Parenthesis, about the damage to public discourse done by public-opinion polling as well as focus groups, which I’ll quote:
Jordan’s focus groups are all-too-appropriate exhibits for what is wrong with these means of appearing to listen to the body public while instead revealing more about the worldviews of those who pose the questions.
Choosing to lead this first day of focus groups with Trump and “right-leaning” voters showed the judgment of Jordan and her producers. In this unprecedented moment, I’d far rather have heard from some of the 44,000 Black women who gathered on Zoom this week, for they the ones who will decide this election. To lead with white, conservative voters was an explicit choice. It was bad news judgment and a slap to MSNBC’s audience. And there is no transparency into how these individuals were selected.
Jordan’s first question to the Trump voters was whether the nomination of Harris changes the odds of Trump winning. “Everybody’s excited about it and that scares me,” one of the women said. One woman volunteered of the Vice President, “I think she’s an idiot.” To which Jordan asked, “Why do you think she’s not that bright?” And the answer: “Because she hasn’t done anything… she’s not real smart.” Another piped in: “No one respects her.”
None of that is surprising: Trump voters don’t like Kamala Harris. No news there. Wasted airtime. What is surprising is that Jordan only opened the door for further insult.
In what was shown to us, Jordan did not ask them about their own candidate’s intelligence, felonies, sexual predation (this was a group of women), and evident dementia. She did not press them on what they know about the Vice President, only their bad opinions of her.
Next came the so-called swing voters. I am on record doubting that undecided voters are undecided; my theory is that they like attention, such as this. Jordan’s first question to them was to share one concern about Trump and one about Harris — not a positive characteristic of either, but leading with the negative.
“Who do you blame for President Biden’s being in office in this condition?” Jordan asked the group. “Who deserves the blame?” Hang that in the museum of dead journalism, in the collection of leading questions.
One of the participants followed Jordan’s lead, spouting a budding conspiracy theory that, as best as I could interpret it, will end up with Biden leaving office entirely before the election. “If she’s willing to hide that kind of information…. Is is it a power grab or…?” Jordan then asked the group whether this calls into doubt the vice president’s judgment. Objection, your honor. Leading the voters.
To sum up, Jordan and her producers picked two cadres of white, conservatives to give MSNBC viewers their first sense of voters’ worldview in a state and city that Biden won in 2020, if narrowly, and then asked a series of negative and leading questions about the first Black and Asian American women to run for President.
In Jordan’s attack on me in Twitter DMs, she says that it’s morons like me (how’s that for network marketing?) who doom saving democracy. My assumption is that she thinks it is my obligation to hear the ignorant ravings of people known to already hate Biden and Harris or are quick to come to conspiracy theories about them while admitting that they know little about the Vice President.
I believe strongly that journalism must be better at listening to the public it serves. This is why I helped start a degree program in Engagement Journalism and why I am working to expand its reach to more universities. Focus groups and opinion polls are not exercises in proper listening. They are about promulgating the views of the pollsters and about sequestering people into their stereotypes. Indeed, Jordan’s focus groups are, if anything, unfair to the voters they portray by selecting extreme caricatures of Heartland citizens and setting them up for ridicule.
I am empathetic to them for what media does to them — and today’s focus groups are an example. If we are a divided nation, it is media that divides into its demographic and psychographic buckets, red or blue, robbing us of all of nuance and intelligence and reducing public discourse to gotcha bites.
Said one self-reported Trumpist on Twitter in response to the photo of the Trump group above:
Another apparent Trumpist:
An independent:
A lifelong Democrat opined:
And a self-identified centrist independent offered:
At the end of the day, that is the issue: Was this in any way informative? Is public discourse better off for it? Are voters themselves more informed because of it?
Here’s what a journalist I greatly respect said in response to my tweet:
The New York Times et al wish Joe Biden would go gentle into that good night. I wish mass media would instead. Here is a post from a thread:
In this defensive New Yorker reaction to Joe Biden (finally) criticizing the press that has been criticizing him, Jay Caspian Kang shares an important insight about the falling power of the press. But I come to a different conclusion.
Kang says that media are weakened and that’s what makes it easy for Trump and now Biden alike to attack them. I say what it shows instead is that as media realize they have lost the ability to set the agenda, their response is to shout louder and more often. That is what we see every day in The New York Times.
In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I chronicle — nay, celebrate — the death of mass media and the insult of the idea of the mass. Kang makes me see that I next need to examine mass media’s behavior in their death throes. They are not accustomed to being talked back to, by their subjects or by the public. They respond with resentment. They dig in.
Journalists have never been good at listening. That is why Carrie Brown and I started a program in Engagement Journalism at CUNY (now moving to Montclair State): to teach journalists to listen. In all the wagon-circling by The Times’ Kahn and Sulzberger, The Post’s Lewis, The New Yorker’s Remnick, CNN’s Zaslav, we see a failure from the top to listen to and learn from criticism.
Kang likens Trump/right-wing and Biden/liberal press criticism but they could not be more different. Trump et al want to destroy the institutions of journalism, education, and government itself. Biden and liberals wish to improve the press. We are begging for a better Times. But The Times can’t hear that over the sound of wagons circling.
As I also write in Gutenberg, we find ourselves in a paradoxical time when the insurrectionists formerly known as “conservatives” try to destroy the institutions they once wished to conserve, putting progressives in the position not of reforming but instead of protecting those institutions.
When I criticize The Times —and Kang quotes me doing so — it pains me terribly, for I have devoted my life to journalism and long held up The Times as our standard. No more. It is failing journalism & democracy. I fear the incumbents may be beyond reform & require replacement.
By the way, the incumbents of journalism know this. That is why they invest in lobbyists to pass legislation in New York, California, Washington (State and next DC), Canada, and Australia to benefit themselves at the expense of the media — community, nonprofit, startup, digital — that would replace them. More on that another day.
So I am glad that Biden is finally criticizing The Times and its mass-media peers, if not yet by name. I am glad he rejects the fair-weather platformed pundits, moneyed executives (corporations), and elites (Clooney) who reject him now. In trying to dismiss him, they only make him more progressive.
The New Yorker headline over Kang’s column calls Biden’s criticism of the press “cynical.” It is anything but. It is an overdue and proper response to the cynical exercise of — as Kang makes me understand — the dying power of The Times et al. No one elected Sulzberger, Kahn, Lewis, Zaslav — or Remnick — to run the nation. Millions of us voted for Biden to do so.
Some on the socials insist that The Times etc. want Trump to win. I’ve said that is a simplistic conspiracy theory. I’ve thought they want chaos: something for them to cover. Now Kang makes me think instead they want to recapture their lost agenda and influence: their power.
Kang closes: “If Biden believes he is the last chance for democracy in America, perhaps he should start acting like it.” That should be said of those in charge of America’s legacy mass media: If you think you can save democracy, then start acting like it.
Here are two attempts to redraw the binary political taxonomies of today:
In the FT, Gideon Rachman argues that after the “liberal false dawn” of Obama, “In the US and France, centrists and liberals are in full panic mode. Nationalist populism now looks like a permanent feature of Western politics, rather than a temporary aberration. The old left-right divide of the 20th century has given way to a new cleavage between liberal internationalists and populist nationalists.”
Yet he offers a balm for the nerves: “But liberals should not panic. Dismantling American or French democracy would be no simple task. The hopes of a decisive victory over nationalist populism — stirred by Macron and Obama — proved to be an illusion. But the fears of a decisive defeat for the liberal, internationalist cause are also probably exaggerated.” I’ll have whatever he’s taking.
In Die Zeit’s new political Feuillton, Thomas Piketty contends to Nils Markwardtthat the center is kaput (or kaputt if you prefer the German original) and that — at least in Europe — the only solution is to pit farther left against far right. “A return to the bipolar left-right system will take time, but it is absolutely necessary if we want to restore trust in democratic institutions and enable political change.”
Markwardt continues (with help to me from Google Translate): “In doing so, Piketty is following, whether consciously or unconsciously, a concept of politics that was recently shaped above all by the Belgian political scientist Chantal Mouffe. Her core thesis is that politics is always antagonistic, it consists of the clash of different world views and programmatic contradictions that can never be completely resolved. Wanting to resolve these contradictions in a ‘third way’ or a ‘new center’, as Tony Blair or Gerhard Schröder promised before Macron, is a mere illusion. Because in the end this only creates a feeling of post-political lack of alternatives among the majority of voters, which in turn increases the need for real alternatives — from which right-wing extremists in particular benefit.”
I’m not sure how either applies to the American two-party trap we are in. In The Gutenberg Parenthesis, I assert that roles of right and left are inverted: Conservatives no longer conserve but now seek to destroy institutions as insurrectionists, putting progressives in the position not of reforming institutions but instead protecting — conserving — them.
In all of this, it is clear to all that the old labels of right and left are useless.
The too-often-unspoken truth of what is happening everywhere but especially in the US centers on racism. That is occasionally touched on in pieces such as these — as the Europeans grapple with immigration — but it must be seen as the central factor. In the American election, that means that the Democratic Party steamrolls past its Black vice president and ignores the Black voters who saved us in 2020 at its and democracy’s mortal peril.
In the US, the taxonomy needs to be seen as white “Christian” nationalist vs. Black and liberal coalition (I hope).
In Gutenberg, I suggest that “the internet’s emancipation of the individual enables under represented communities to speak, organize, and act, enabling movements — reformations, even revolutions in the name of racial, gender, economic, legal, and environmental equity and justice. The existing, white power structure — in the person of the far right — counterattacks, burning the fields so as not to share their harvest with those who follow. They undermine the institutions of journalism, science, education, free and fair elections, democracy itself, and civility.”
In the US, the taxonomy that informs is Black and white.
It is no coincidence, then, that the two dissenters from The Times’ rush to guillotine Biden are Black men — see Jamelle Bouie and Charles M. Blow — and the lone supporter of Kamala Harris as a substitute is a Black columnist, Lydia Polgreen. In his immensely practical argument, Bouie said:
I have noticed that only a handful of calls for Biden to leave are followed by “and Vice President Harris should take his place.” More often, there is a call for a contested convention. But why, exactly, should Harris step aside? Why should Harris not be considered the presumptive nominee on account of her service as vice president and her presence on the 2020 ticket? And should Harris be muscled out, how does this affect a new nominee’s relationship with key parts of the Democratic base, specifically those Black voters for whom Harris’s presence on the ticket was an affirmation of Biden’s political commitment to their communities?
Blow speaks similarly:
Yet if Biden did stand aside and Harris was passed over in favor of another candidate, there would very likely be strong protest from her legions of Democratic supporters, many of them Black women, a voting bloc that is essential to a Democratic victory.
On top of that, a free-for-all selection process would be sheer chaos. Factions would fiercely compete, egos would be bruised and convention delegates would select a candidate, effectively bypassing direct participation by Democratic voters.
All the while, a mob of white columnists, editorialists, reporters, and commentators rush past them, proposing various white substitutes for Biden, giving glancing mention to the Black vice president. This is how the Democrats will lose democracy, by not at last facing the centrality of race.
