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On Thursday night, a middle-school teacher posted a video to social media about the redistricting push that is currently underway in Texas, where Republican lawmakers are attempting to draw a map that could give them as many as five more seats in the US House of Representatives after President Donald Trump called on them to do so. (“We are entitled to five more seats,” Trump said on CNBC last week.) “When politicians draw their own lines—when they draw our districts into these crazy shapes, when they crack and pack communities of color—it’s called ‘gerrymandering,’” the teacher explained. “It’s basically politicians manufacturing the outcome they want.” Both parties engage in the practice, the teacher continued, but “not this brazenly…at the direct request of the president of the United States. This is not an issue of party. It’s an issue of power.” At the end, he tacked on a mini history lesson: about the time that Abraham Lincoln, while serving as a state lawmaker in Illinois, attempted to deprive his colleagues of a quorum by jumping out of a window.

This was relevant because the teacher—or former teacher, at this point—was himself in Illinois and breaking quorum: the video was posted by James Talarico, a member of the Texas House who, along with his Democratic colleagues, recently left the state in a bid to stop the Republicans from passing the gerrymander; those Democrats have since faced a fusillade of legal reprisals from the state’s Republican leadership and a pair of bomb threats phoned into the Illinois hotel where they’re staying. Talarico is not that well-known nationally, but that appears to be changing, in part due to his knack for posting compelling videos online; even before the redistricting attempt took center stage, those came to the attention of the hugely popular podcaster Joe Rogan—perhaps the most coveted interlocutor for Democrats right now, given his perceived influence in Trump’s election last year—who invited Talarico onto his show and suggested that he run for president. According to the Texas Tribune, Talarico did twenty-five media interviews in the first twenty-four hours of the quorum break; according to Politico, by Thursday night, his tally had risen to forty-eight, making him “something of an unofficial spokesperson” for the fleeing Democrats. All the attention might also be boosting Talarico’s own ambitions: he’s considering a run for US Senate next year, and has recently inquired with TV stations about advertising rates, per the Tribune. “The attention economy is defining everything about our politics right now,” he told Politico, “for good and for ill.”

Talarico is not the only one who has attracted attention from the media, old and new, amid the redistricting fight. Gene Wu, the chair of the Democratic caucus in the Texas House, is “a self-described wallflower,” as the New York Times put it recently—he enjoys playing with stereos and gardening in his spare time, and claims still to cringe when people call him by his legislative titles—but has also emerged as a leader of the response to the gerrymandering push. (The extra attention has reportedly made him a target for anti-Asian racism, including from a Republican lawmaker who asked last week whether Wu has gone back to China.) On the Republican side, Ken Paxton, the controversial Texas attorney general who is challenging the incumbent US senator John Cornyn in a primary ahead of next year’s election, has also made himself a main character of the fight; Politico noted that he has “adapted to our new, disruptive attention-based political era” by running “to where MAGA eyeballs are,” be that Fox News or Steve Bannon’s podcast. Politico wrote that Cornyn, for his part, has “taken a more institutionalist approach” to the fight—an odd, if technically correct, way of referring to his call last week for the FBI to track down the quorum-breakers—but noted that this move itself generated plenty of “earned media.” And so it did, judging by the push alerts about it that I received. 

I found myself wishing that the headlines had explained succinctly whether or not Cornyn had a case. (The answer: it’s far from clear he does.) Indeed, I’ve found the topline coverage of this entire episode somewhat lacking: the focus has often been on the political ramifications of the fight and its tit-for-tat nature, especially since Democratic-led states, including New York and California, have promised to fight fire with fire by redrawing their own congressional maps, and irresistible headlines about a legislative game of “Texas Hold’em” have given way to talk of a nationwide redistricting war. Such coverage has been totally fair—a tit-for-tat is what is happening—and yet I’ve found myself wanting to know more: What’s new about this? What’s not? Who started it, anyway? There has been coverage that has sought to answer such questions. But even this has sometimes failed to paint the full picture. Gerrymandering, it seems, is a very hard story to put in context.

At least in a literal sense, the person who started it was Elbridge Gerry, the governor of Massachusetts and future vice president who, in 1812, signed off on a map that drew an oddly shaped district favorable to the Democratic-Republicans; apparently, it was a local newspaper, the Boston Gazette, that coined the term “gerrymander,” running a cartoon by Elkanah Tisdale that depicted the ungainly district as a salamander. (Gerry’s name was pronounced with a hard G, but today the word “gerrymandering” is pronounced with a soft one—to the apparent chagrin of Gerry’s descendants, whose appeals have clearly fallen on the deaf eyes of cable-news anchors.) Some recent coverage has highlighted this history, including a fascinating, if brief, segment in which Major Garrett, of CBS, explained how Gerry, who had not been an avowed partisan, became “willing ever more to go to extremes to exact revenge and expand political power” (even if Garrett, or should that be Jarrett, pronounced his name wrong). More recently, a 2003 redistricting push in Texas—during which Democrats also fled the state—upended its congressional balance of power and established a national “model for how to get control,” as one of the architects of the plan told The New Yorker’s Lawrence Wright in 2017; in an article for The Guardian over the weekend, David Daley, the author of a book about redistricting titled Ratf**ked, traced the current situation to a concerted effort that party operatives made to take over state governments in the wake of Barack Obama’s victory in 2008 and the census of 2010. (District lines tend to be redrawn after the decennial census; the current Texas push is unusual for abandoning this timeline.) “Extreme GOP gerrymanders have remade American politics over the last 15 years,” Daley wrote. “They have locked Republicans into office in state legislatures nationwide, even in purple states when Democratic candidates win more votes. They have delivered a reliable and enduring edge to the GOP in the race for Congress.”

In recent years, however, Democratic-led states—not least Illinois—have partaken in gerrymandering, too, and members of the media have noted this fact during their recent coverage. Channeling his inner Elkanah Tisdale, the (for now) late-night host Stephen Colbert confronted J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois, with the state’s congressional map, tracing his finger over one decidedly salamander-shaped district and referring to another as resembling “the stinger on a scorpion” (“We handed it over to a kindergarten class and had them decide,” Pritzker responded); yesterday, on Meet the Press, Kristen Welker similarly challenged Pritzker, who this time replied, less playfully, that the Illinois map had been settled lawfully and was a distraction from the Texas crisis. Welker also interviewed Eric Holder, the Obama-era attorney general who has long campaigned against gerrymandering but recently suggested that blue states should fight back this time, and asked him how the practice can “both be a threat to democracy and also the way to save it”; Holder responded that Trump is using Texas to make “authoritarian moves” and that “there has to be a response to that.” Various outlets, however, have suggested that this response might be doomed, since leaders in blue states generally seem to face greater legal and political obstacles to redrawing their maps than their red-state counterparts. Numerous observers have suggested that the response—and the Texas quorum break, which itself can’t last forever—is ultimately about messaging. Which brings us back to the attention wars.

After Trump won last year, I observed a palpable pessimism among some members of the old media as to their ability to command or steer attention in an increasingly noisy age; in many ways, the Joe Rogans of the world appeared to have become more powerful than the traditional gatekeepers of political discourse. There’s some truth to this, but I have always found the argument to be overstated. Traditional news organizations still have significant agenda-setting power, including providing the fuel (a/k/a actual reporting) for many a gabfest in the podcast space; Talarico’s recent interview tour, of course, has taken in Rogan but also local TV stations. It’s thus still worth asking whether the attention that the mainstream press has lavished on the redistricting fight has been useful, or whether it could have been better apportioned. At least one critic—Rick Hasen, a prominent election-law expert—suggested last week that it was “unfortunate” that the media had, on the whole, devoted more space to the redistricting question than a recent signal that the Supreme Court might soon gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act; the Texas story, Hasen writes, has “great visuals of fleeing legislators and threats to bring in the FBI, and Democratic governors vowing to engage in tit-for-tat warfare,” whereas “when the Supreme Court acts, it’s very hard to make exciting for the public.” Daley, however, shared an alternative view: that “as someone who has been trying to get media interested in redistricting for more than a decade, it’s great that finally that story—one of backrooms, invisible lines and wonkery—has caught on.” He had, he noted, once “had to name a book Ratf**ked to have a shot!”

If the centrality of the Texas story in recent media coverage is justified—and I think it is, even if newsrooms could, as ever, have done a better job keeping focus on other stories at the same time, especially those tangled in the broader web of national voting rights and electoral-law questions—it’s fair to conclude, again, that the coverage hasn’t always felt satisfying. Some of it has felt decidedly both-sidesy (one headline in Axios declared that Democrats had gone “nuclear” in the redistricting race, alongside an unsettling image of a donkey in a mushroom cloud; one observer dismissed this as the “‘Ukraine provoked Russia’ of redistricting framing”)—and yet to some extent, both sides are at it. Historical context has generally enriched the coverage—but has also risked obscuring that this is a peculiarly dangerous moment given Trump’s wider threats to democracy; there might be deep precedent for politicians to go to extremes to exact revenge and expand political power, but the brazenness with which Trump is behaving is also meaningfully new. (And just because there’s precedent for cheating doesn’t make it not cheating.) Such considerations make for difficult balancing acts, which the press must try to strike amid a rapidly changing and currently highly uncertain picture on the ground across multiple states.

One good starting point would surely be to dial down the horseracey takes. This isn’t to say that they don’t offer important context—Talarico and Cornyn, for example, are clearly behaving the way they are, for good or for ill, because they have one eye on the Senate contest. But as I’ve written often in this newsletter over the years, horserace coverage ceases to make sense if the track on which some of the horses are running is rigged. Talarico’s recent explainer video was, of course, a partisan attention play, but I think he got it right when he said that “this is not an issue of party,” but one “of power.” Of course, it is an issue of party, too. But the overarching story of this moment is very much about power—and the increasingly brazen ways Trump is wielding it.

Other Notable Stories
By Jem Bartholomew

• At 11:24pm in Gaza last night, Anas Al Sharif, a prominent Al Jazeera journalist, posted a video on X of a falling bomb. “Nonstop bombing.… For the past two hours, the Israeli aggression on Gaza City has intensified,” he said. Then his account went quiet for a while. Shortly afterward, an Israeli air strike hit and killed Al Sharif and four colleagues in a tent in Gaza City, in a bombing that sparked fury from the Qatar-based media organization. In the aftermath, Israel’s military admitted targeting Al Sharif, who was part of a team that won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography, with the IDF claiming he led a Hamas cell. Before his death Al Sharif, twenty-eight, had strongly denied the allegation, saying in July he was being smeared because “my coverage of the crimes of the Israeli occupation in the Gaza Strip harms them and damages their image in the world.” Seven people were killed in the attack; beforehand, at least 186 journalists and media workers had been killed since October 7, 2023, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists. “Israel’s pattern of labeling journalists as militants without providing credible evidence raises serious questions about its intent and respect for press freedom,” Sara Qudah, CPJ’s regional director, said after the air strike. It came after media organizations, banned from entering Gaza, had used ride-alongs on planes providing aid drops to document the sheer destruction of the coastal strip (which Liam Scott has documented for CJR) as global outrage continues to build over Israel’s conduct.

• “Joaquin, it’s Jim Acosta. I was wondering if you could tell me: What happened to you?” That was the opening question from Acosta, the former CNN White House correspondent, in his “interview” with an AI-generated avatar modeled on Joaquin Oliver, who was killed at seventeen in the 2018 Parkland shooting. “I appreciate your curiosity. I was taken from this world too soon due to gun violence while at school,” the AI replied, in a robotic and breathless voice. Acosta, now an independent journalist, posted the clip to his YouTube (the description read: “This is where real journalism happens”). He faced a swift backlash for the segment—which he said was offered to him by Oliver’s family—accused of “facilitating a grotesque puppet show” by one Bluesky user. It’s part of a wider trend of people creating AI avatars of deceased people, such as Ozzy Osbourne and Tina Turner recently. Acosta, Gaby Hinsliff wrote for The Guardian, “should arguably have known better than to muddy the already filthy waters in a post-truth world by agreeing to interview someone who doesn’t technically exist.”

• In the UK, a media analysis from the Runnymede Trust, a think tank promoting racial equality, found a pattern of “hostile language” toward people of color—which it said has contributed to an “increase in reactionary politics and backlash against antiracism which has emboldened the far right in this country.” The charity analyzed 52,990 news articles as well as 317 parliamentary debates between 2019 and 2024. Researchers found that the word “illegal” came to be more prominently associated with the terms “migrant” and “immigrant” in news coverage, and that news organizations often invoked an image of people of color when discussing migration—associating Black and brown people with illegality. By contrast, the analysis showed UK media mentions of Ukrainian immigrants were met with “humanizing terms” such as “guest,” “brave,” and “community.”

• On Wall Street, the New York Times’ stock price hit an all-time high last week, after the company posted strong quarterly results—adding 230,000 digital subscribers in the year’s second quarter. That took total digital-only subscriptions to 11.3 million, with further growth forecast. The company also said revenue increased by a third, to $54 million, for sports outlet The Athletic, which the Times acquired for $550 million in 2022 (CJR’s then-editor, Kyle Pope, wrote about the company’s strategy at the time). The stock price fell back from highs of about $62 per share, but it still closed Friday around $57.50, up from a pre-results price of $53.62. The Times’ reliance on subscriptions has proved a resilient strategy in recent years to combat the collapse of digital advertising revenue across the media industry.

• And Michael Lydon, a founding editor of Rolling Stone magazine who chronicled the swinging sixties, died on July 30 at eighty-two, from complications of Parkinson’s disease. Lydon rubbed shoulders with the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead, and more. He started as a correspondent at Newsweek after graduating from Yale University, reporting from London, then San Francisco. When Jann Wenner, cofounder of Rolling Stone, launched the magazine, in 1967, Lydon had an investigative piece in the first issue and became one of Wenner’s top lieutenants, according to Lydon’s New York Times obituary. While covering the beat, “at concerts and communes I heard friendly encouragement to be myself,” Lydon later reflected. “I let my hair grow long and quit Newsweek.”

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