The Weekly Sift

In recent weeks, Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have taken opposite approaches to dealing with the media. Harris has taken few on-the-record questions from reporters, and has focused instead on talking to the voters directly in rallies. She and her running mate Tim Walz are drawing large, raucous crowds that cheer their every word, much the way Trump’s crowds did in past elections, when he was more energetic and his act wasn’t quite so stale.

Trump, meanwhile, seems reluctant to leave home. He has settled into a schedule of two rallies a week, appearing only eight times in the month since the Republican Convention. Harris, by contrast, recently spoke to seven rallies in five days, and has made her way towards the Democratic convention on a bus that stopped in numerous small towns in Pennsylvania. Instead, Trump held news conferences at his Mar-a-Lago home and his Bedminster golf club, as well as an online interview with centibillionaire Elon Musk.

For obvious reasons, the media prefers Trump’s approach, even though it seems to be working badly for him. Harris has been surging in the polls, and now leads Trump in all the national polling averages (RCP, 538, NYT, Economist), as well as in recent polls of most swing states. While Biden’s hopes for Electoral-College victory followed only one shaky path (Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania — where he was behind, but usually within the margin of error), Harris is also ahead or very close in Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and even North Carolina. She is unlikely to carry Ohio or Florida, but is running strong enough that Republicans will have to actively defend those once-safe states.

Nonetheless, the media holds that it is Harris who needs to change her strategy. She “must speak to the press” and “needs to present her ideas” by answering press questions. Otherwise she’s running a “no-substance campaign“. She needs an Issues page on her campaign website, filled with white papers proposing specific policies that can be analyzed and critiqued in the media (because that worked so well for Hillary Clinton).

All this lines up with a vision of democracy I grew up believing: The press represents the People. Reporters use their access to ask the questions that voters want answered. When they demand answers, it is because the People need those answers. Ignoring the press means ignoring the voters, which the voters will resent.

And sometimes, the press is an older, wiser aunt or uncle to the voters. Reporters have the time to study issues and become experts in them, so they ask questions that the voters would ask, if they knew more. While voters may get distracted by the flash and gimmickry of a campaign, the press will stay focused on what’s truly at stake.

Quite likely you are laughing now, or at least smiling, at my younger self’s naivety. Because if the press ever filled such a role, it hasn’t for a very long time. James Fallows was already diagnosing the problem in his 1996 book Breaking the News: How the Media Undermine American Democracy. Rather than raise the questions the voters are or should be asking, the press covers elections like sporting events: Who’s ahead? What is each team’s strategy? How likely is that strategy to work? Or (like trouble-making junior high gossips) they try to get one candidate to say something nasty about the other, which they can take to the other candidate and (hopefully) get something nasty in response.

None of that is what wavering voters want or need to know. None of it helps the electorate imagine how a future Smith or Jones administration will affect their lives.

For example, look at what reporters asked about when they did get access to Harris: her plans to debate Trump, and what she thought of Trump’s criticisms of herself or Tim Walz. Not a word about taxes or inflation or competing with China or climate change or abortion.

And why would Harris sit down for an extended interview with a “neutral” journalist, when she has just seen how un-neutrally journalists treated President Biden? After his disastrous debate with Trump, Biden tried to prove his mental competence by meeting with ABC’s George Stephanopoulos. Stephanopoulos could have simultaneously tested Biden’s mind and served the public interest by asking a wide range of questions that would force the President to jump from one serious issue to the next: Ukraine, the economy, voting rights. Instead, he spent 22 minutes badgering Biden with different versions of the same question: What would have to happen for Biden to drop out of the race?

When Biden held a press conference after the NATO summit, and demonstrated his deep and detailed knowledge of problem areas around the world, headlines the next day focused on moments when he said the wrong name, and on his “defiant” insistence on staying in the presidential race. (Who was he defying, exactly?)

Trump, meanwhile, has the media tamed. After years of insults and abuse, the “fake news media” doesn’t even try to ask follow-up questions that challenge his false claims. Whatever he says is just “Trump being Trump”.

Saturday, for example, Trump appeared not to know what state he was in. At a rally in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania, he asked the crowd: “Would that be OK, North Carolina?” If Biden had done that a few weeks ago, it would have been a banner headline. But CNN , the NYT, and the WaPo didn’t find Trump’s confusion worth mentioning. (Robert Reich claims to have asked reporters why they don’t cover “Trump’s malfunctioning brain”. They reply that it’s old news.)

Post-event fact-checking has its place, but the checks never catch up to the lies, because far fewer people see them. NPR fact-checked Monday’s Mar-a-Lago press conference and found 162 lies and distortions delivered in 64 minutes — approximately one every 24 seconds. But the news networks had given Trump free air time to spew those lies with no real-time corrections. He took full advantage by telling the millions of viewers these howlers:

• Willie Brown told him “terrible things” about Kamala Harris, which Brown would do because Trump knows him “very well” after they “went down in a helicopter” together. (This entire story is a fantasy. Three decades ago, Trump shared an emergency helicopter landing with a different Black politician who has not discussed Harris with him.)
• “Millions” of people are coming to America from other countries’ “prisons, from jails, from mental institutions”.
• Harris replacing Biden as the Democratic candidate is “unconstitutional”.
• His January 6 crowd was larger than the crowd that heard Martin Luther King’s Dream speech.
• Reversing Roe v Wade is what “everybody” wanted: “That’s Democrats, Republicans and Independents and everybody, liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back in the States, and I did that. … I’ve done what every Democrat and every every Republican wanted to have done.”
• An electric truck is “two-and-a- half times heavier” than a gas-powered truck.
• Democrats want to allow abortions after birth.
• He was “very protective” of Hillary Clinton. “They used to say, lock her up, lock her up. And I’d say, just relax, please.” (You remember that, don’t you?)

Check NPR’s article for why none of that is even close to being true.

But in fact Trump’s Potemkin press conferences are even worse than just the specific lies, in ways you can only appreciate if you watch the whole video or read the whole transcript. Because in the entire 64 minutes, there was not a single speck of useful information.

When he wasn’t lying outright, he was making claims about the parallel universe where he was reelected in 2020. Everything is perfect there: There was no post-Covid inflation. Putin didn’t invade Ukraine. Hamas didn’t attack on October 7. Iran folded under the pressure of his sanctions and ended its nuclear program. That’s why he doesn’t need to tell us how he would deal with these situations, because none of them ever would have happened if he were still president.

Or he was predicting disaster without offering any explanations: We’re on the verge of “a depression of the 1929 variety”. Simultaneously, “we’re very close to a world war”. If Harris becomes president “It’s going to be a failure the likes of which this world has never seen.”

Or he was testifying to things that (even if they were true) he couldn’t possibly know: President Biden “is a very angry man right now. He’s not happy with Obama and he’s not happy with Nancy Pelosi.” (Does Biden call him late at night and confide his deepest thoughts?)

Or he was throwing around value judgments unmoored from any standards: Biden is the worst president in US history. Harris is the worst vice president, and also “the most unpopular” (though she’s kicking his butt in the polls). She is “a radical left person” and also “the worst Border Czar” (a position that has never existed). Nancy Pelosi is “crazy”. Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom “destroyed San Francisco” and “destroyed the state of California”. “We have a very sick country right now.” Josh Shapiro (whose approval/disapproval rating is at +18) “is a terrible guy and he’s not very popular with anybody.” Tim Walz is “heavy into the transgender world”.

In short, he said nothing of any news value, and nothing that would help a voter picture his life in a second Trump administration. The “press conference” was a string of take-it-or-leave-it assertions, a naked attempt to overpower voters’ thought processes rather than convince them of anything.

But you would not grasp any of that from the news stories written about the event. The Hill described it as “long and characteristically rambling”, i.e., Trump being Trump.

After the Mar-a-Lago press conference, Lawrence O’Donnell called out his colleagues in a rant that is well worth watching in its entirety. He began by questioning why a network (especially his own MSNBC) would put Trump on the air to say whatever he wanted without live fact-checking. But then he unloaded on the whole Trump/Harris comparison:

There are rumblings now in the news media about Kamala Harris as a presidential candidate not doing what Donald Trump did: stand in front of reporters today and take their questions. And some of the tiny minds in the news media continue to give credit to Donald Trump for standing up and lying in response to every single question they ask. A lie is not an answer. Donald Trump never answers reporters’ questions. Anyone in the news media that tells you Donald Trump has answered reporters’ questions and Kamala Harris hasn’t is lying to you. And they are too stupid to know they are lying to you because they don’t know what an answer is.

Trump has no policy proposals worth mentioning. The RNC platform promises that he will end inflation “very quickly”, but gives no hint as to how. He has said he would end the Ukraine war in 24 hours, but again, that sound bite is the whole of his stated policy on the topic.

Or at least, he has no proposals he will admit to. Project 2025 is full of detailed policy for a second Trump administration, but its proposals are unpopular, so Trump denies it, despite a recently-revealed undercover video in which Project 2025’s Russell Vought gave his pitch to British journalists that he thought were prospective donors. Vought dismissed Trump’s denials as “graduate-level politics”, and noted that Trump is “not even opposing himself to a particular policy”.

But Project 2025 never came up during the Mar-a-Lago press conference, and Trump faces no general demand from the press for policy details. Only Harris does.

The liberal blogosphere is having none of this. Jeff Tiedrich imagines what Harris will be asked when she finally does hold a press conference:

let’s imagine that Kamala agreed to hold a presser tomorrow. we all know what would happen: it would devolve into a shit-show. the press would waste everyone’s time — and drop our collective IQ by three points — by asking worthless questions.

“Madam Vice President, Donald Trump says you only recently became Black. what is your response?”

who fucking cares? what fresh insight could possibly be gained by asking these kinds of questions? what’s Kamala going to say, that Donny’s a racist lunatic? we already know this. what would be the point of bringing up the toxic sludge that oozes out of Donny’s rancid anus-mouth?

He predicts further questions of similar heft, all based on Republican talking points that have nothing to do with reality and nothing to do with what voters want to know.

Justin Rosario adds:

I want to be super clear: The press is demanding Harris give them access so they can:

A. Badger her with stupid questions

B. Generate soundbites they can take out of context

C. Try to catch her with gotcha questions

D. Use A-C to undermine her campaign because Donald Trump is imploding at light speed and their precious horse race is threatened.

The only useful suggestion I’ve heard from the mainstream press comes from the WaPo’s Perry Bacon. He begins by invoking the old-time religion of the press’ role in democracy:

Harris is making a mistake. She should be doing interviews and other engagements with journalists, in recognition of their important role in democracy.

But after more-or-less acknowledging that reporters haven’t been playing that role and probably can’t be trusted to do so in the future, he does contribute one good idea: Continue ignoring mainstream political reporters (like Bacon himself), but do interviews with “wonky” journalists who specialize in particular areas, like foreign policy, economics, or the environment.

This makes sense to me. CNN or the Wall Street Journal may be eager to ask Harris inside-baseball questions about polls or her response to ridiculous Trump accusations (like what she’ll do about his mythical “migrant crime wave” or whether she supports abortion-after-birth), but Grist would undoubtedly want to know substantive things about her approach to climate change, while Foreign Policy would be curious about how her approach to Iran or Israel might differ from Biden’s. A reporter who specialized in immigration policy — even one from the NYT or the WaPo — would already know that she was never “Border Czar”, understand the details of the bipartisan border bill Trump had his allies block in Congress, and ask meaningful questions about how to help local governments whose resources are being stretched by the inflow of migrants.

Unlike general press conferences or one-on-ones with the likes of Stephanopoulos, those interviews actually could serve democracy. It might be worth a try.