Columbia Journalism Review https://www.cjr.org https://cdn.cjr.org/wp-content/themes/cjr2017/cjr-icon-250.gif Columbia Journalism Review https://www.cjr.org The voice of journalism Copyright 2020 Fri, 06 Mar 2020 20:43:31 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1 Washington Post public editor: how DC came to dominate media reporting http://www.cjr.org/public_editor/washington-post-public-editor-how-dc-came-to-dominate-media-reporting.php Fri, 06 Mar 2020 17:00:32 +0000 Hamilton Nolan http://www.cjr.org/?p=83077 Did the media fail Elizabeth Warren? http://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/elizabeth_warren_drops_out.php Fri, 06 Mar 2020 12:48:00 +0000 Jon Allsop http://www.cjr.org/?p=83085 And then there were two. (And Tulsi Gabbard.) On the last day of 2018, Elizabeth Warren fired the starting gun on the 2020 Democratic primary; yesterday, two days after her poor Super Tuesday returns, she dropped out of the race. After announcing her exit, Warren went outside her house to address a throng of reporters. “Elizabeth Warren’s 430-day campaign for the presidency ended where and how it began,” the Washington Post’s David Weigel wrote afterward, “outside her Massachusetts home, talking to very skeptical reporters.”

Reporters have been skeptical of Warren’s electoral prospects for some months now: she crested as a frontrunner last year, and since then she has slid down in the polls, failing to break the top two in any of the year’s early primaries and caucuses. (On Tuesday, she finished a distant third in Massachusetts, the state she represents in the Senate.) Following her exit, however, skepticism was not the dominant emotion in coverage. The liberal media, at least, rung with praise for Warren’s candidacy—New York magazine ran an article headlined “An Appreciation of Elizabeth Warren As She Suspends Her Campaign”—and concern about its failure, and what that says about the place of women in American politics. Many noted that with Warren gone (and Gabbard a non-factor), the presidential race has narrowed to two white guys in their late seventies, fighting for the right to take on a president who is several years their junior as well as the oldest ever to have been inaugurated. In The Atlantic, Megan Garber wrote that America had “punished” Warren for her competence, which is a highly gendered concept. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly tweeted that Warren’s post-exit presser had been “hard to watch”; on air, Mona Eltahawy asked Kelly’s colleague Audie Cornish, “How low can the bar be for men, and how high must it be for women?” It wasn’t just the news media. Late-night hosts told variations on the joke that America, ultimately, did not deserve Warren. And the Merriam-Webster dictionary said that searches for “misogyny” spiked 2,400 percent after she quit.

ICYMI: The infinite scroll

Warren addressed the sexism question with the reporters outside her home. One of the hardest parts of her exit, she said, was “all those little girls who are gonna have to wait four more years” for a female president. The impact of gender, she said, “is the trap question for every woman. If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner!’ And if you say, ‘No, there was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?” Warren promised that she would have much more to say on the subject later on. Before the day was out, she got another chance, as she sat for an extensive interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Warren’s campaign ending “feels a little bit like a death knell, in terms of the prospects of having a woman for president in our lifetimes,” Maddow said. “Oh God, please no,” Warren replied. “That can’t be right.” Maddow told Warren that she’d been hearing all day, in her personal and professional circles, from “women who are just bereft. People are telling me they can’t get off the couch.” “I know,” Warren said. But “we can’t lose hope over this… We persist.”

After Warren got into the race, a pair of specters haunted early coverage of her candidacy: her much-criticized decision to take a DNA test establishing her Native American ancestry, and comparisons to Hillary Clinton, more than two years on from Clinton’s loss to Trump. (One Politico story asserted that Warren was “battling the ghosts of Hillary,” and risked a “Clinton redux”—being “written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground.”) The DNA story got its due scrutiny and then receded into the background. (It did not, as I feared at the time, become a Hillary’s-emails-sized albatross around Warren’s neck.) But, predictably, the sexist tropes stuck. In November, Donny Deutsch said, on MSNBC, that Warren has “a likability issue” due to her “high-school principal demeanor.” (Deutsch insisted this was “not a gender thing.”) News headlines probing the merit of such criticisms, Garber wrote the same month, may have had the effect of further implanting them.

Earlier this year, several commentators complained, relatedly, that the media had started to “erase” Warren—her third-place finish in Iowa, they said, was largely ignored, with lesser-performing candidates getting more hype. Lis Power, of the progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America, noted on Twitter yesterday that every cable news channel carried Warren’s withdrawal press conference live. “This type of media attention is something Warren was never privileged with while she was actually running, and that in my opinion, is a travesty,” Power wrote. “The media needs to reflect on who they privilege and why.”

The question of whether the media failed Warren is not without nuance. She made herself available to the reporters covering her campaign, yet, as Amie Parnes noted in The Hill last year, she mostly avoided set-piece interviews; she didn’t appear on a Sunday show in the whole of 2019. And much coverage of Warren’s candidacy—especially at its polling peak—was highly favorable. The editorial boards of major newspapers—including the New York Times, the Des Moines Register, and the Boston Globe (which previously discouraged her from running)—endorsed her (jointly with Amy Klobuchar, in the Times’s case). In general, Warren was most popular among highly educated white voters, who, needless to say, are overrepresented in journalism. “I’m 46, I’m a professional, I live in New England, I have an advanced degree,” Maddow told her last night. “You have a lot of people of a lot of different stripes supporting you around the country—but like, I’m your stripe.”

Still, Warren’s campaign undoubtedly found itself on the wrong end of several political-media pathologies—among them, the prevalence of gendered tropes; our obsession with “electability,” which does not favor women or candidates of color; and our related obsession with momentum. Once Warren started trending down, an oversimplified decline narrative crystallized around her campaign that, in the end, she couldn’t shake. This narrative was based, in no small part, on data—but there’s no question that pundits put a greatly more positive spin on Klobuchar’s third-place finish in New Hampshire than Warren’s similar result in Iowa. As I’ve written far too often in recent weeks, our judgments about electability and momentum aren’t neutral observations; they feed directly into what voters think. Yesterday, multiple reporters and commentators attested that voters they spoke to liked Warren, but were concerned other people wouldn’t, and so didn’t vote for her. Presumably, they didn’t reach that conclusion in a vacuum.

In many ways, Warren fit many liberal media types’ Platonic ideal of a presidential candidate—passionate, highly detail-oriented, impeccably credentialed. That so much coverage of her campaign still lacked imagination—to the point that for no substantive reason, it discouraged people who liked her from voting for her—is, if anything, a testament to the staying power of the narrative traps we keep falling into, around women candidates, and more generally.

Below, more on Warren and 2020:

  • The eye of the storm: On CJR’s podcast, The Kicker, Kyle Pope, our editor and publisher, spoke with Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times—a small yet influential Iowa newspaper that also endorsed Warren—for a local perspective on the campaign circus. “Newspaper editorials are only important in the minds of the editors,” Cullen said.
  • Warren and Fox: Last year, Warren broke with many of her rivals and said she wouldn’t appear on Fox News; she called the network “a hate-for-profit racket,” and said she would not lend it credibility. Her argument mirrored that of Media Matters, an aggressive Fox antagonist. Yesterday, the group’s president, Angelo Carusone, wrote on Twitter that “no other Democratic candidate has demonstrated as deep and consistent an understanding of the information asymmetry that we are all dealing with.”
  • Sanders and MSNBC: The day before her Warren sitdown, Maddow taped an extensive interview with Bernie Sanders. Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin, of the Times, called the interview a “striking turnaround” from Sanders, whose campaign has been extremely aggrieved by MSNBC’s coverage; he’s also set to do a town hall on the network ahead of the next round of primaries. Sanders seems to be signaling “a newfound need to engage with a broader swath of a Democratic electorate that is rapidly coalescing around his opponent,” Grynbaum and Koblin write.
  • Meanwhile, in Trumpland: Yesterday, Judd Legum, of the newsletter Popular Information, highlighted Facebook ads in which Trump’s reelection campaign encouraged users to “take the Official 2020 Congressional District Census today,” then linked them through to a campaign site. (The real census has yet to be distributed.) Hours after Legum’s report appeared, Facebook removed the ads, calling them “deliberately deceptive and misleading.”
  • Qdogba: Warren’s dog, Bailey, snatched someone’s burrito yesterday, and ate it, as dogs do. A clip of the incident went viral online.  “He just said the pressure of running for first dog had finally gotten to him,” Warren told Maddow. “I think it was stress-eating.”


Other notable stories:

ICYMI: The new coronavirus and racist tropes

]]> And then there were two. (And Tulsi Gabbard.) On the last day of 2018, Elizabeth Warren fired the starting gun on the 2020 Democratic primary; yesterday, two days after her poor Super Tuesday returns, she dropped out of the race. After announcing her exit, Warren went outside her house to address a throng of reporters. “Elizabeth Warren’s 430-day campaign for the presidency ended where and how it began,” the Washington Post’s David Weigel wrote afterward, “outside her Massachusetts home, talking to very skeptical reporters.”

Reporters have been skeptical of Warren’s electoral prospects for some months now: she crested as a frontrunner last year, and since then she has slid down in the polls, failing to break the top two in any of the year’s early primaries and caucuses. (On Tuesday, she finished a distant third in Massachusetts, the state she represents in the Senate.) Following her exit, however, skepticism was not the dominant emotion in coverage. The liberal media, at least, rung with praise for Warren’s candidacy—New York magazine ran an article headlined “An Appreciation of Elizabeth Warren As She Suspends Her Campaign”—and concern about its failure, and what that says about the place of women in American politics. Many noted that with Warren gone (and Gabbard a non-factor), the presidential race has narrowed to two white guys in their late seventies, fighting for the right to take on a president who is several years their junior as well as the oldest ever to have been inaugurated. In The Atlantic, Megan Garber wrote that America had “punished” Warren for her competence, which is a highly gendered concept. NPR’s Mary Louise Kelly tweeted that Warren’s post-exit presser had been “hard to watch”; on air, Mona Eltahawy asked Kelly’s colleague Audie Cornish, “How low can the bar be for men, and how high must it be for women?” It wasn’t just the news media. Late-night hosts told variations on the joke that America, ultimately, did not deserve Warren. And the Merriam-Webster dictionary said that searches for “misogyny” spiked 2,400 percent after she quit.

ICYMI: The infinite scroll

Warren addressed the sexism question with the reporters outside her home. One of the hardest parts of her exit, she said, was “all those little girls who are gonna have to wait four more years” for a female president. The impact of gender, she said, “is the trap question for every woman. If you say, ‘Yeah, there was sexism in this race,’ everyone says, ‘Whiner!’ And if you say, ‘No, there was no sexism,’ about a bazillion women think, ‘What planet do you live on?” Warren promised that she would have much more to say on the subject later on. Before the day was out, she got another chance, as she sat for an extensive interview with MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow. Warren’s campaign ending “feels a little bit like a death knell, in terms of the prospects of having a woman for president in our lifetimes,” Maddow said. “Oh God, please no,” Warren replied. “That can’t be right.” Maddow told Warren that she’d been hearing all day, in her personal and professional circles, from “women who are just bereft. People are telling me they can’t get off the couch.” “I know,” Warren said. But “we can’t lose hope over this… We persist.”

After Warren got into the race, a pair of specters haunted early coverage of her candidacy: her much-criticized decision to take a DNA test establishing her Native American ancestry, and comparisons to Hillary Clinton, more than two years on from Clinton’s loss to Trump. (One Politico story asserted that Warren was “battling the ghosts of Hillary,” and risked a “Clinton redux”—being “written off as too unlikable before her campaign gets off the ground.”) The DNA story got its due scrutiny and then receded into the background. (It did not, as I feared at the time, become a Hillary’s-emails-sized albatross around Warren’s neck.) But, predictably, the sexist tropes stuck. In November, Donny Deutsch said, on MSNBC, that Warren has “a likability issue” due to her “high-school principal demeanor.” (Deutsch insisted this was “not a gender thing.”) News headlines probing the merit of such criticisms, Garber wrote the same month, may have had the effect of further implanting them.

Earlier this year, several commentators complained, relatedly, that the media had started to “erase” Warren—her third-place finish in Iowa, they said, was largely ignored, with lesser-performing candidates getting more hype. Lis Power, of the progressive watchdog group Media Matters for America, noted on Twitter yesterday that every cable news channel carried Warren’s withdrawal press conference live. “This type of media attention is something Warren was never privileged with while she was actually running, and that in my opinion, is a travesty,” Power wrote. “The media needs to reflect on who they privilege and why.”

The question of whether the media failed Warren is not without nuance. She made herself available to the reporters covering her campaign, yet, as Amie Parnes noted in The Hill last year, she mostly avoided set-piece interviews; she didn’t appear on a Sunday show in the whole of 2019. And much coverage of Warren’s candidacy—especially at its polling peak—was highly favorable. The editorial boards of major newspapers—including the New York Times, the Des Moines Register, and the Boston Globe (which previously discouraged her from running)—endorsed her (jointly with Amy Klobuchar, in the Times’s case). In general, Warren was most popular among highly educated white voters, who, needless to say, are overrepresented in journalism. “I’m 46, I’m a professional, I live in New England, I have an advanced degree,” Maddow told her last night. “You have a lot of people of a lot of different stripes supporting you around the country—but like, I’m your stripe.”

Still, Warren’s campaign undoubtedly found itself on the wrong end of several political-media pathologies—among them, the prevalence of gendered tropes; our obsession with “electability,” which does not favor women or candidates of color; and our related obsession with momentum. Once Warren started trending down, an oversimplified decline narrative crystallized around her campaign that, in the end, she couldn’t shake. This narrative was based, in no small part, on data—but there’s no question that pundits put a greatly more positive spin on Klobuchar’s third-place finish in New Hampshire than Warren’s similar result in Iowa. As I’ve written far too often in recent weeks, our judgments about electability and momentum aren’t neutral observations; they feed directly into what voters think. Yesterday, multiple reporters and commentators attested that voters they spoke to liked Warren, but were concerned other people wouldn’t, and so didn’t vote for her. Presumably, they didn’t reach that conclusion in a vacuum.

In many ways, Warren fit many liberal media types’ Platonic ideal of a presidential candidate—passionate, highly detail-oriented, impeccably credentialed. That so much coverage of her campaign still lacked imagination—to the point that for no substantive reason, it discouraged people who liked her from voting for her—is, if anything, a testament to the staying power of the narrative traps we keep falling into, around women candidates, and more generally.

Below, more on Warren and 2020:

  • The eye of the storm: On CJR’s podcast, The Kicker, Kyle Pope, our editor and publisher, spoke with Art Cullen, editor of the Storm Lake Times—a small yet influential Iowa newspaper that also endorsed Warren—for a local perspective on the campaign circus. “Newspaper editorials are only important in the minds of the editors,” Cullen said.
  • Warren and Fox: Last year, Warren broke with many of her rivals and said she wouldn’t appear on Fox News; she called the network “a hate-for-profit racket,” and said she would not lend it credibility. Her argument mirrored that of Media Matters, an aggressive Fox antagonist. Yesterday, the group’s president, Angelo Carusone, wrote on Twitter that “no other Democratic candidate has demonstrated as deep and consistent an understanding of the information asymmetry that we are all dealing with.”
  • Sanders and MSNBC: The day before her Warren sitdown, Maddow taped an extensive interview with Bernie Sanders. Michael M. Grynbaum and John Koblin, of the Times, called the interview a “striking turnaround” from Sanders, whose campaign has been extremely aggrieved by MSNBC’s coverage; he’s also set to do a town hall on the network ahead of the next round of primaries. Sanders seems to be signaling “a newfound need to engage with a broader swath of a Democratic electorate that is rapidly coalescing around his opponent,” Grynbaum and Koblin write.
  • Meanwhile, in Trumpland: Yesterday, Judd Legum, of the newsletter Popular Information, highlighted Facebook ads in which Trump’s reelection campaign encouraged users to “take the Official 2020 Congressional District Census today,” then linked them through to a campaign site. (The real census has yet to be distributed.) Hours after Legum’s report appeared, Facebook removed the ads, calling them “deliberately deceptive and misleading.”
  • Qdogba: Warren’s dog, Bailey, snatched someone’s burrito yesterday, and ate it, as dogs do. A clip of the incident went viral online.  “He just said the pressure of running for first dog had finally gotten to him,” Warren told Maddow. “I think it was stress-eating.”


Other notable stories:

ICYMI: The new coronavirus and racist tropes

]]> Music criticism in the time of stans and haters http://www.cjr.org/criticism/stan-hater-music-criticism.php Fri, 06 Mar 2020 11:55:46 +0000 Luke Ottenhof http://www.cjr.org/?p=83080 Absolute power by any other name http://www.cjr.org/language_corner/autocrat-dictator-despot-tyrant.php Thu, 05 Mar 2020 16:55:38 +0000 Merrill Perlman http://www.cjr.org/?p=82984 Podcast: When the circus comes to town—The Storm Lake Times in Iowa http://www.cjr.org/podcast/circus-storm-lake-times-iowa-election.php Thu, 05 Mar 2020 16:35:16 +0000 Amanda Darrach http://www.cjr.org/?p=83076 Twitter plans misinfo labels, but are they a good idea? http://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/twitter-misinfo-labels.php Thu, 05 Mar 2020 12:50:18 +0000 Mathew Ingram http://www.cjr.org/?p=83074 Carol Rosenberg on Admiral John C. Ring, and the long arc of Guantanamo Bay http://www.cjr.org/special_report/carol-rosenberg-gtmo-nytimes.php/ Thu, 05 Mar 2020 11:55:28 +0000 Amos Barshad https://www.cjr.org/special_report/.php/ Will network news drop its climate disappearing act in 2020? http://www.cjr.org/covering_climate_now/abc-nbc-cbs-climate-coverage-election.php Wed, 04 Mar 2020 16:55:27 +0000 Mark Hertsgaard http://www.cjr.org/?p=83032 The media primary http://www.cjr.org/the_media_today/super_tuesday_2020.php Wed, 04 Mar 2020 13:01:36 +0000 Jon Allsop http://www.cjr.org/?p=83028 After Super Tuesday, Narrative-Shift Wednesday. Yesterday, 14 states, plus American Samoa and Democrats living abroad, voted. Bernie Sanders, the prior Democratic frontrunner, won three of them, and is on track to win California, which awards more delegates than any other state; otherwise, Joe Biden—revitalized since his big win in South Carolina on Saturday—swept the board, winning nine states including Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. (Maine is still too close to call.) Biden’s resurgence—just weeks after many pundits all but wrote off his campaign following its fifth-place finish in New Hampshire—marks another whiplash moment in a primary season that’s been full of them.

Should we have seen this one coming? Perhaps, though as Astead W. Herndon, a politics reporter at the New York Times, tweeted last night, plenty of contingencies—Elizabeth Warren taking out Michael Bloomberg at the debates; South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn endorsing Biden; Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out and backing Biden, too—have entered play since New Hampshire. Journalists and pundits love to post-rationalize, but in politics, nothing is inevitable.

ICYMI: Why did Matt Drudge turn on Donald Trump?

Another key factor behind Biden’s renaissance? The media. As one Biden aide put it, he rode an “earned media tsunami” heading into Super Tuesday; after South Carolina, CNN’s Brian Stelter noted, Biden profited from “made-for-TV moment after made-for-TV moment.” (Earned media refers, essentially, to airtime a candidate didn’t pay for, like when MSNBC carried Biden’s Monday-night rally with Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke without interruption at significant length.) According to one firm that monitors such things, Biden’s earned media between polls closing in South Carolina and yesterday evening may have topped $70 million in monetary value. That’s a lot of earning.

Advertising, nontraditional media platforms, and other, non-media dynamics also play roles, of course. Nonetheless, as Sam Stein and Maxwell Tani reported last week for the Daily Beast, it appears, in this cycle, as if “the main thing that is moving the electorate is the national media and there’s not really a close second.” Aides to every major Democratic campaign told Stein and Tani that they’ve “been stunned by the degree to which the conversation taking place on cable and national news has impacted the trajectory of the race.” This conclusion elicited some pushback online. If cable news is so crucial, how come Sanders—who, it is safe to say, is not a favorite of the TV pundit class—is doing so well; if ad dollars matter less, how to explain Michael Bloomberg’s rapid, cash-fueled rise in the polls?

These were—and still are—legitimate questions that point to a complex picture. Still, Biden’s performance since they were raised—along with Bloomberg’s struggles yesterday—looks like clear proof that news narratives count for a lot. As the Super Tuesday results came in, several political reporters pointed out that Biden did very well in areas where he was massively outspent by other candidates, and where he had little ground game or infrastructure to speak of. (Biden’s campaign pushed back on aspects of this characterization.) This phenomenon is hardly unprecedented. By roughly this point of the 2016 cycle, Donald Trump was running a relatively light operation and had spent less on ads than five of his Republican rivals (as well as Sanders and Hillary Clinton)—and yet he was already on his way to $2 billion worth of earned media, orders of magnitude beyond any other candidate. We all know how that one turned out.

In other words, what we say matters. A lot. Many journalists, it would seem, like to conceive of themselves as being above the fray—impartial observers who listen to what voters are thinking and report it back to them. In practice, we exist as part of a messy feedback loop; our judgments—who’s electable, who isn’t; who’s surging, who’s not—are crucial in shaping what voters think. A key reason that this Democratic primary season has felt disorienting is that we’ve shuffled through contradictory narratives at a dizzying pace. O’Rourke is one to watch; now he’s out. Buttigieg is on a roll; now he’s out. Warren is the frontrunner; Warren was the frontrunner for about five minutes. Bloomberg is killing on TV; Bloomberg has been killed on TV. Amy has Klomentum; Biden has Joementum. Sanders is inevitable; now he’s hanging on.

Barring a stunning fightback from Bloomberg or Warren (or *insert obligatory mention of Tulsi Gabbard here*), we now, finally, have a two-horse race: Biden v. Sanders. That gives political media—and cable news executives, in particular—a rare chance to reset; we can stop chasing flavors of the month and making bad predictions, and instead focus on the very clear, substantive choice facing the Democratic Party and the country. As Matthew Yglesias, of Vox, tweeted last night, of Biden’s surge, “[me, drunk with power] Earned media rules everything!” It’s time to sober up, and end the whiplash.

Below, more on Super Tuesday and 2020:

  • Burisma’s back, alright?: With Biden back at the top of the Democratic field, Republicans may redouble their efforts to cast aspersions on his son Hunter, and his role on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. (The Hunter Biden narrative was at the center of Trump’s impeachment trial, if you can remember that far back.) This week, we learned that Ron Johnson, Republican senator for Wisconsin, is planning to subpoena a witness linked to Burisma. Susan Hennessey, of Lawfare, argues that the media is “embarrassing” itself by taking Republicans’ Burisma claims seriously.
  • Boon companion: For CJR and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Sam Thielman and Ishaan Jhaveri analyzed where Bloomberg’s TV ad spend has been going. His outlay, Thielman and Jhaveri write, “is both a bid to bypass mediators like the press and the party machine, and a huge financial boon to local newsrooms across the country, where station-level advertising is a primary source of income.”
  • Swoon companion: Perhaps no candidate this cycle benefited from earned media as much as Buttigieg, whose aggressive courting of the political press elevated him from obscurity to genuine contention. After he dropped out, “reporters and pundits gave him a final swoon, for old time’s sake,” Politico’s Jack Shafer writes. “As if crowding onto a packed subway car, the commentariat jostled to pay homage to Buttigieg’s future.”
  • Last night’s other races: Super Tuesday also saw some intriguing contests down ballot, on both sides. Jeff Sessions, who gave up his Senate seat in Alabama to become Trump’s first attorney general, is trying to win that seat back; yesterday, he qualified for a runoff election against Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach, with the winner set to face Democrat Doug Jones in November. (Roy Moore, who Jones beat in 2017, is now out of contention.) On the Democratic side, Henry Cuellar, a moderate congressman from Texas, is currently beating a progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros, in a race which courted widespread media attention. And Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur’s bid to be a congressman in California has fallen flat.
  • Obstacles to voting: In some places yesterday, people had to wait in line for hours in order to vote. The issue occasionally punctuated cable news coverage last night; on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow called the obstacles to voting “an outrage.”


Some news from CJR: Last April, CJR and The Nation cofounded Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative committed to more and better coverage of the defining story of our time. The project has grown to include more than 400 news outlets, including The Guardian, CBS News, and Reuters, with a combined audience approaching 2 billion people. All bona fide news outlets are invited to join; there is no financial cost nor editorial line, except respect for climate science. Last September, we organized a week of high-profile coverage around the UN Climate Action Summit that helped drive a massive increase in overall media coverage of the climate story. That’ll happen again April 19-26, with a week of climate-solutions coverage coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. In the meantime, The Climate Beat, Covering Climate Now’s newsletter, analyzes highlights best practices in media climate coverage, and is co-published every other Wednesday by CJR and The Nation. You can read it here.


Other notable stories:

ICYMI: The new coronavirus and racist tropes

]]> After Super Tuesday, Narrative-Shift Wednesday. Yesterday, 14 states, plus American Samoa and Democrats living abroad, voted. Bernie Sanders, the prior Democratic frontrunner, won three of them, and is on track to win California, which awards more delegates than any other state; otherwise, Joe Biden—revitalized since his big win in South Carolina on Saturday—swept the board, winning nine states including Texas, Virginia, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. (Maine is still too close to call.) Biden’s resurgence—just weeks after many pundits all but wrote off his campaign following its fifth-place finish in New Hampshire—marks another whiplash moment in a primary season that’s been full of them.

Should we have seen this one coming? Perhaps, though as Astead W. Herndon, a politics reporter at the New York Times, tweeted last night, plenty of contingencies—Elizabeth Warren taking out Michael Bloomberg at the debates; South Carolina Rep. Jim Clyburn endorsing Biden; Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar dropping out and backing Biden, too—have entered play since New Hampshire. Journalists and pundits love to post-rationalize, but in politics, nothing is inevitable.

ICYMI: Why did Matt Drudge turn on Donald Trump?

Another key factor behind Biden’s renaissance? The media. As one Biden aide put it, he rode an “earned media tsunami” heading into Super Tuesday; after South Carolina, CNN’s Brian Stelter noted, Biden profited from “made-for-TV moment after made-for-TV moment.” (Earned media refers, essentially, to airtime a candidate didn’t pay for, like when MSNBC carried Biden’s Monday-night rally with Klobuchar and Beto O’Rourke without interruption at significant length.) According to one firm that monitors such things, Biden’s earned media between polls closing in South Carolina and yesterday evening may have topped $70 million in monetary value. That’s a lot of earning.

Advertising, nontraditional media platforms, and other, non-media dynamics also play roles, of course. Nonetheless, as Sam Stein and Maxwell Tani reported last week for the Daily Beast, it appears, in this cycle, as if “the main thing that is moving the electorate is the national media and there’s not really a close second.” Aides to every major Democratic campaign told Stein and Tani that they’ve “been stunned by the degree to which the conversation taking place on cable and national news has impacted the trajectory of the race.” This conclusion elicited some pushback online. If cable news is so crucial, how come Sanders—who, it is safe to say, is not a favorite of the TV pundit class—is doing so well; if ad dollars matter less, how to explain Michael Bloomberg’s rapid, cash-fueled rise in the polls?

These were—and still are—legitimate questions that point to a complex picture. Still, Biden’s performance since they were raised—along with Bloomberg’s struggles yesterday—looks like clear proof that news narratives count for a lot. As the Super Tuesday results came in, several political reporters pointed out that Biden did very well in areas where he was massively outspent by other candidates, and where he had little ground game or infrastructure to speak of. (Biden’s campaign pushed back on aspects of this characterization.) This phenomenon is hardly unprecedented. By roughly this point of the 2016 cycle, Donald Trump was running a relatively light operation and had spent less on ads than five of his Republican rivals (as well as Sanders and Hillary Clinton)—and yet he was already on his way to $2 billion worth of earned media, orders of magnitude beyond any other candidate. We all know how that one turned out.

In other words, what we say matters. A lot. Many journalists, it would seem, like to conceive of themselves as being above the fray—impartial observers who listen to what voters are thinking and report it back to them. In practice, we exist as part of a messy feedback loop; our judgments—who’s electable, who isn’t; who’s surging, who’s not—are crucial in shaping what voters think. A key reason that this Democratic primary season has felt disorienting is that we’ve shuffled through contradictory narratives at a dizzying pace. O’Rourke is one to watch; now he’s out. Buttigieg is on a roll; now he’s out. Warren is the frontrunner; Warren was the frontrunner for about five minutes. Bloomberg is killing on TV; Bloomberg has been killed on TV. Amy has Klomentum; Biden has Joementum. Sanders is inevitable; now he’s hanging on.

Barring a stunning fightback from Bloomberg or Warren (or *insert obligatory mention of Tulsi Gabbard here*), we now, finally, have a two-horse race: Biden v. Sanders. That gives political media—and cable news executives, in particular—a rare chance to reset; we can stop chasing flavors of the month and making bad predictions, and instead focus on the very clear, substantive choice facing the Democratic Party and the country. As Matthew Yglesias, of Vox, tweeted last night, of Biden’s surge, “[me, drunk with power] Earned media rules everything!” It’s time to sober up, and end the whiplash.

Below, more on Super Tuesday and 2020:

  • Burisma’s back, alright?: With Biden back at the top of the Democratic field, Republicans may redouble their efforts to cast aspersions on his son Hunter, and his role on the board of the Ukrainian gas company Burisma. (The Hunter Biden narrative was at the center of Trump’s impeachment trial, if you can remember that far back.) This week, we learned that Ron Johnson, Republican senator for Wisconsin, is planning to subpoena a witness linked to Burisma. Susan Hennessey, of Lawfare, argues that the media is “embarrassing” itself by taking Republicans’ Burisma claims seriously.
  • Boon companion: For CJR and the Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Sam Thielman and Ishaan Jhaveri analyzed where Bloomberg’s TV ad spend has been going. His outlay, Thielman and Jhaveri write, “is both a bid to bypass mediators like the press and the party machine, and a huge financial boon to local newsrooms across the country, where station-level advertising is a primary source of income.”
  • Swoon companion: Perhaps no candidate this cycle benefited from earned media as much as Buttigieg, whose aggressive courting of the political press elevated him from obscurity to genuine contention. After he dropped out, “reporters and pundits gave him a final swoon, for old time’s sake,” Politico’s Jack Shafer writes. “As if crowding onto a packed subway car, the commentariat jostled to pay homage to Buttigieg’s future.”
  • Last night’s other races: Super Tuesday also saw some intriguing contests down ballot, on both sides. Jeff Sessions, who gave up his Senate seat in Alabama to become Trump’s first attorney general, is trying to win that seat back; yesterday, he qualified for a runoff election against Tommy Tuberville, the former Auburn University football coach, with the winner set to face Democrat Doug Jones in November. (Roy Moore, who Jones beat in 2017, is now out of contention.) On the Democratic side, Henry Cuellar, a moderate congressman from Texas, is currently beating a progressive challenger, Jessica Cisneros, in a race which courted widespread media attention. And Young Turks founder Cenk Uygur’s bid to be a congressman in California has fallen flat.
  • Obstacles to voting: In some places yesterday, people had to wait in line for hours in order to vote. The issue occasionally punctuated cable news coverage last night; on MSNBC, Rachel Maddow called the obstacles to voting “an outrage.”


Some news from CJR: Last April, CJR and The Nation cofounded Covering Climate Now, a global journalism initiative committed to more and better coverage of the defining story of our time. The project has grown to include more than 400 news outlets, including The Guardian, CBS News, and Reuters, with a combined audience approaching 2 billion people. All bona fide news outlets are invited to join; there is no financial cost nor editorial line, except respect for climate science. Last September, we organized a week of high-profile coverage around the UN Climate Action Summit that helped drive a massive increase in overall media coverage of the climate story. That’ll happen again April 19-26, with a week of climate-solutions coverage coinciding with the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. In the meantime, The Climate Beat, Covering Climate Now’s newsletter, analyzes highlights best practices in media climate coverage, and is co-published every other Wednesday by CJR and The Nation. You can read it here.


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]]> The infinite scroll http://www.cjr.org/first_person/the-infinite-scroll.php Wed, 04 Mar 2020 12:00:24 +0000 David Roth http://www.cjr.org/?p=82950