Two essays, eight years apart, telling the same story: political campaign coverage is deeply broken

Before I get to the heart of today’s item, I first want to apologize to my loyal readers for a couple of weeks of radio silence. Last week I was on vacation. And this week I came back to a feeling of—well, despair is probably too strong a word. (That was most of July.) The new feeling was: how the fuck is this presidential campaign still so close? How is Donald Trump drawing the support of roughly 45 percent of Americans? How is it possible—again—that a tiny fraction of votes in a handful of states could tip the presidency away from the candidate with millions more in the popular vote to Trump?

I opened my laptop to write about this a few times this week. (David Bernstein wrote about his disbelief/dismay about polls, and I recommend his post to anyone who looks at polls, although I’d advise against doing that in the first place, for your sanity.) I began a few times to write about Trump’s abject incoherence on the campaign trail; how the New York Times and other outlets ran countless stories about Joe Biden’s unfitness owing to his age and declining ability to speak coherently and compellingly; how Trump and his crew are a bunch of fascist thugs; how, since Trump is old, if he were to become president again, we’d have a pretty good chance of seeing JD Vance, a deeply unpopular and retrograde misogynist, ascend to the presidency.

But every time I thought about putting those thoughts into a cogent essay, filled with examples and links and robust evidence, I felt defeated and exhausted. I’ve been writing about Trump’s extremism, lies, gaslighting, corruption, and crimes for nine years. Are all the people who are going to be convinced already convinced? Do those people want to see the evidence—the old, the repetitive, the additional—again? Do they even want to lay eyes on it, or are they so spent by it—as fascists intend—that their impulse is to find something else to think about? Or do they, possibly, just want the reassurance that they are not crazy—what they are seeing with their own eyes is true, and what they read in the newspaper or see on cable TV is a profession-wide sanitization of a sadistic, narcissistic, and unhinged dictator who lies incessantly and would blow up our democracy to serve his own corrupt ends?

The consternation that I and a lot of my fellow journalists and media watchers are feeling right now is rooted in the obvious disconnect between the actual Trump that we hear dissembling and disintegrating on C-Span or Fox or social media and the Trump that is presented to us by conventional campaign coverage. The coverage far too often tries generously to make sense of incoherent blather, strains to extract a meaningful policy from a word salad, or pretends that this is a campaign that has finally, now that both parties have their nominees, settled into a sense of normalcy.

Which brings me to the two essays of my headline. The first, by Eve Fairbanks, written in the early time of Trump's presidency, in 2017, is ostensibly a #MeToo story but really is about the moral failure of Beltway journalism. I remember reading it when it was published, and I periodically go back to it, again and again. I suspect I've read it perhaps between 10 and 20 times. It's that good.

Fairbanks recounts coming to DC in 2005 as a hungry young reporter, hoping to make her mark in what turned out to be a vapid land of gossip, access, self-aggrandizing insularity, and meaningless scoops. The central villain of her story is Mark Halperin, who at the time of her writing in 2017 had been booted from ABC News for sexual assaults reported by five women. When Fairbanks first arrived in Washington, though, Halperin's newsletter The Note was a daily must-read for those seeking to break into the DC reporting game (and yes, it was a game). The Note, Fairbanks wrote, "purported to reveal Washington’s secrets," but actually performed the opposite function: "to make the city, and US politics, appear impossible to understand."

Halperin's clubby insiderism fostered the perception that politics is inscrutable to regular people, and has to be decoded by a well-connected elite. That is how, Fairbanks argued, we got to Trump, who understood a certain disconnect or disgust with this sort of coverage, and aimed to supplant it—and simultaneously harness it for his own ends.

In other words, he understood that the political press corps hungered for "apocalyptic" tidbits, and that he was more than capable of feeding a beast that would then "decode" it to appear like "normal" politics. At the same time, he knew that most people outside the Beltway didn't care about this kind of political coverage, and that he could speak directly to them, simultaneously feeding another kind of apocalyptic beast. All the while, the press corps, blindly devoted to both-sides-ism, would merrily cast him as an iconoclast—but still within the range of "normal" politics, as they explained it.

Recently another essay provoked me to once again revisit the Fairbanks gem. Meredith Shiner, who came to Washington at roughly the same time as Fairbanks, wrote last month at the New Republic about how the Beltway press's insistence on maintaining their own outdated rules has driven us "to the brink of authoritarianism."

Shiner argues the Washington press corps is "conservative in the most traditional, unideological sense of the word: They are clinging to a status quo" that vanished long ago. A status quo, perhaps, of the early days of Mark Halerpin's The Note, or when, Shiner writes, "Republican operatives dressed as cable news pundits can shape the decision-making of the Democratic Party, 'sensible' Democratic leaders are the ones who tack to the right to win over voters and politicians who can never be won, and everyone can grab a martini at Café Milano—Washington, D.C.’s version of what the late Anthony Bourdain would call 'The Despots’ Club'—and laugh about it afterwards."

To anyone fully paying attention, the notion that there are two normal political parties each working in good faith to Get Things Done for the American People is long dead and buried. (The press prefers to cast the failure to get anything done as the result of a "deeply divided" Congress and a "polarized" America.) In reality, one party wants the return to power of a fascist who tried to overturn the last election with a violent mob; the other offers fresh faces, exhilarating vibes, and policy proposals focused on restoring trampled rights and lifting up the middle class. Yet the press yearns to dismiss the existential crisis we face in favor of coverage that treats each side as regular red and blue mirror images of each other, subject to roughly equal critical coverage lest anyone accuse them of taking sides. That's how we get headlines like "How Harris dodges scrutiny" (Axios) and "Kamala Harris ran her office like a prosecutor. Not everyone liked that" (Washington Post).

Shiner gave a great interview to Greg Sargent on his podcast today, about how the media is failing to cover Trump's incoherence in nearly every speech and appearance. It's very much worth the 20 minutes of your time. And hear also what Shiner says about her motivations, which I share: "my media criticism comes from my love of journalism and a deep-seated belief in the role of a functioning media in the democratic project—not disdain for media." It has to be better.