#Political Journalism

[uboat53]

Okay, this one's been building for a while. It's going to be long even for my usual standards. Strap in for a really LONG RANT (TM).

INTRODUCTION

Over the last 4 years, the news media has substantially degraded in their ability to do any significant analysis of political events. Maybe it's the drop in viewership after the Trump presidency, but something's off. People calling themselves political journalists are falling for the stupidest nonsense and failing even the most basic understanding of politics.

MY FIRST INKLING

Over the last few decades, I've put together a list of journalists who are consistently interesting and insightful. I look for their pieces when they come out and note when they change publications.

Over the last 4 years, however, nearly all of them have disappeared from major publications. David Weigel left the Washington Post and Jordan Weissman left Slate, both ended up at Semafor. William Saletan left Slate and Charlie Sykes no longer writes for The New York Times, both are now at The Bulwark. Matthew Yglesias left Vox and ended up writing on SlowBoring (although he occasionally also writes for Bloomberg News these days).

What do all of these have in common? All of them left fairly large, well-read publications and ended up at smaller, more niche publications. And they're not alone, a huge amount of competent, capable, and insightful journalists have quietly led an exodus from major publications since the end of the Trump presidency leaving behind journalists who don't seem to be nearly at the same level.

OVER THE LAST FEW YEARS

Take, for example, that we've all known for the last 4 years that Trump was going to run for president again. It wasn't a mystery. So why haven't we seen any coverage of him? Yes, he's not on Twitter anymore, but he still rants and raves on Truth Social. Yes, he's not president anymore, but he still does rallies all the time. Who's covering any of that? Do you know what he's said? Do you know if anything has changed about him since 2020?

Seriously, did you see any coverage of the insane things Trump has said or done over the last four years? Have you seen coverage of the Heritage Foundations Project 2025 plan? It's been four years, has the media actually vetted the presidential candidate of one of the two major parties? I mean, sure, he was president before, but it's been four years. Is there anything new we should know about? I already know a bunch of new things about him, but not because I read about it in major publications of the US news media.

The same lack of knowledge was clear when the media was covering the legislative battles in the first half of Biden's term. You had enough reporters shouting questions at Biden about why he didn't comment more about negotiations on his bipartisan infrastructure bill that he had to remind them all that it was a stupid question. Negotiations rely on trust and the easiest way to destroy that trust is to blab about everything you've discussed. Any reasonably competent journalist would know that, but apparently not the White House Press Corps.

You see the same thing happen again and again and again if you look for it. Coverage of Manchin and Sinema's antics during the legislative battles was nothing more than surface level commentary and did nothing to dig into their tactics and strategies or their goals and objectives. Coverage of Mitch McConnell's freeze-ups basically added no new information after the first hour. Heck, if you even wanted to know what Congressional negotiators were negotiating about in the various bills that they worked on, you'd have to look it up yourself.

TRUMP COVERAGE

What's brought this to a head for me is noticing the coverage of Trump over the last year. I've read tons and tons of detailed and nuanced articles from numerous major publications about his legal travails, but how many have there been about his politics and political fortunes? I'm sure you've read in detail how his New York City trial went, but how many articles have you read about how most of his stories at his rallies devolve into unintelligible nonsense? You've no doubt read about how the Supreme Court granted him a level of immunity from prosecution, but have you read any stories about the likely results of his economic plans?

What you're seeing is an example of how barren the political news landscape has become. Trump's trials are covered by the legal news team, a team that, at most publications and outlets still has a high degree of expertise and experience in their subject, and it shows! The comparison of the legal coverage of Trump to the political coverage of Trump is particularly damning, it's a team at the top of its game standing next to a team that clearly hasn't ever played before.

Tell me, have you seen any analysis of Trump's tax plans? Have you seen anyone discuss the likely effects of his deportation and immigration plans? Has anyone even looked at Project 2025, the plan that a large group of likely Trump staffers have come up with to guide his hoped for second term? And, once you start looking around, you'll realize this isn't even just a Trump problem! What do you know about Biden's proposed policies? Is he proposing any new ones or is he just running on the same things as last time?

THE DEBATE AND POST-DEBATE COVERAGE

Watching the coverage of the 2024 campaign is what really started crystalizing this in my head, but what pushed it over the edge and made me write this all out is the coverage of the debate. Look, we can all agree that Biden had a bad night, but is that literally the only thing a reputable journalist could write about?

Do you know how many falsehoods each candidate uttered that night? How about policies, did they mostly confirm their proposed policies or were there some surprises? We know that Biden seemed confused, but what about Trump? Was he in touch with reality? After all, it's much easier to seem confident and clear in something that you're making up on the spot than something that you have to remember; was he confidently spouting nonsense?

Honestly, the lack of journalistic professionalism didn't start with the coverage after the debate, it was on the stage as well. CNN had two journalists reading the questions, but why? They didn't do any follow-up, they didn't do any fact checking; why did we need journalists on the stage at all? They could have found a random guy off the street or a fourth grader if all they needed the moderater to do was ask questions. Heck, why not advertise your new AI? AI doesn't actually understand what it's reading, but clearly that isn't necessary anyways!

And the post-debate calls for Biden to resign from major outlets have been similarly devoid of actual journalism, resembling celebrity "news" coverage more than they do real investigation. What would it take for Democrats to replace Biden on the ticket? Who would/should be the replacement? If it's not Kamela Harris, what challenges would come up from bypassing the first black woman vice-president for a (likely) white guy? If it is Kamela Harris, what challenges and baggage does she bring to the race? Do any of the proposed candidates do better than Biden in general polling at this point?

If you don't know the answers to any of these questions, that's okay! Apparently real journalists don't even know enough to be asking the questions!

THE CLINTON AFFAIR

Haunting all of this is that the American news media royally screwed up in exactly the same way not that long ago. Eight years ago, the news media descended on the Clinton e-mail story like a pack of rabid piranhas, completely ignoring just about any other story. Every major news outlet (except for those in the right-wing news ecosystem which have no shame at all) has admitted that their coverage of the 2016 election was poor and that they focused on the e-mail story to the exclusion of actually vetting the two candidates, and yet here we are again.

And, for the record, there was literally nothing to the Clinton e-mail scandal. Clinton used a personal e-mail server much as Secretary Powell had done before her with permission from the State Department. Every classified e-mail on her server was found to have come from others inappropriately sending it to her rather than her sending it out. And yet, coverage dominated the 2016 election, driving a drip-drip-drip cycle that damaged Clinton immensely and distracted from any coverage of Trump's very real issues.

Coming out of that election, most news outlets committed to higher journalistic standards. They committed to more aggressive fact-checking, more investigation, and less hysterical coverage of single issues to the detriment of broader coverage, and, during the four years of Trump's term, they largely did that to varying degrees of success. That, more than anything, is what makes their recent decline that much more eggregious. They know how to do this correctly and are actively choosing not to.

WHERE TO FIND GOOD JOURNALISM

And now the answer to the question I've posed obliquely this whole rant: if so much of political journalism is bad, where can I find good journalism?

Honestly, there's not a lot of it out there, but it does exist. NPR, as usual, is a bastion of great journalism. They are sometimes prey to the same instincts that lead the broader media astray, but they've done a great job keeping in place the structures they built as a response to the 2016 election and Trump in general such as active fact-checking and analysis immediately after each interview rather than letting it wait until a lie or piece of misinformation has solidified. PBS is similarly effective in this way; public media, as always, remains pretty much the best large outlet for information in this country.

The Daily Show is also a great source for journalism which is a sad commentary on journalism because, as should be obvious, these people are comedians and not journalists. Still, they do great work, better than most actual journalists because they take seriously the charge to dig deeper for the real story and speak truth to power.

Outside of that, there aren't really any large media outlets that I would strongly recommend. There are, however, smaller news organizations that are doing good work.

Semafor, for example, has a lot of great analysis of politics and actually asks the kinds of questions I noted above and sometimes even finds answers to them. The Bulwark is another one, though it tends to do broader political analysis rather than up-to-the-minute reporting. There are also individual journalists and writers who put forth very insightful analysis in larger publications such as Fred Kaplan at Slate, Joshua Keating at Vox, and Tyler Cowen at Bloomberg, but these are generally the exception to the broader coverage at those outlets. There are also writers at smaller publications like Julia Ioffe who now writes for Puck, though I can't recommend the whole publication.

Honestly, though, it's pretty barren out there. I'd love to have more sources of information that can check each other and make sure I'm not being pulled off into a lane of misinformation, but I'm not finding much out there. Please, if you find any, let me know, I'd love to have more good sources.

SUMMARY/CONCLUSION

The American political news media, which improved significantly as a response to Trump, seems to have lost most of its institutional capacity since his defeat in 2020 to the point where they are now reduced to covering only a single story for days on end without adding any meaningful information or insightful analysis. Even a dedicated news hound like me is left frustrated with the difficulty of finding meaningful coverage and the drumbeat of nonsense is preventing this country from having a real discussion about the real issues in the upcoming presidential election which may be one of the most consequential of our lifetimes.

Don't get me wrong, Biden had a bad debate, but is that really the ONLY THING going on in politics right now? It isn't, but you certainly wouldn't know it from the sheer volume of "think pieces" and "breaking news" articles dominating the headlines these days.

And if it were just that, if it were just this one instance where political journalists were falling down on the job, I would accept it, that kind of thing happens from time to time, but it's not. Time after time on issue after issue for the last four years, political news generally at the nation's largest outlets has shown itself to be incapable of actually covering and analyzing the section of news that it supposedly specializes in with any kind of depth or nuance, instead, descending time and time again into tabloid nonsense.

I know where to find good information, but it takes a lot more digging than I'm used to and people don't follow the news as voraciously as I do shouldn't be expected to do that kind of digging just to have the bare minimum of information necessary to carry out their duties as citizens.

I don't have any solutions here, I just hope that you know that what you're seeing on most TV, radio, and newspapers/online these days is just a shadow of the information you should be getting. Let me know if I'm missing something, because it's getting really depressing.

[deadpresidents]

Any good books on losing presidential candidates?

This is an older book but They Also Ran by Irving Stone is a great read about Presidential candidates who came up short.

Almost President: The Men Who Lost the Race But Changed the Nation by Scott Farris [BOOK | KINDLE] is a newer take (2011) on the subject of losing Presidential candidates.

And Michael Lewis -- author of Moneyball and The Big Short, among others -- wrote a frequently overlooked and criminally underrated book called Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House [BOOK | KINDLE] that is awesome and genuinely funny. Losers follows the candidates in the campaign for the 1996 Republican Presidential nomination: Senator John McCain of Arizona, Alan Keyes, Steve Forbes, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, Pat Buchanan, and the eventual nominee, Senator Bob Dole of Kansas. It's forgotten classic of campaign literature.

[homewiththearmadillo]

These Professional Ding-Dongs Don’t Understand Abortion, But Nobody Asked Me!

Welcome to But Nobody Asked Me!, an occasional holler about stuff people are wrong about. 

Four days before the 2022 midterm elections, the New York Times ran a piece headlined “At Campaign’s End, Democrats See Limits of Focus on Abortion.” The article, written by two reporters who, the Times is careful to note, “have written about abortion for more than a decade,” quotes a number of “strategists and pollsters” who are reluctant to assert that abortion would absolutely guarantee big Democratic wins. Somehow, these two reporters with over a decade of experience (between them? each? unclear!) decided that this entitled them to call an election that hadn’t happened yet.

The piece is bad in general -- it’s too long, poorly edited, and lacks focus even as it genuinely tries to acknowledge the limitations inherent in predicting the future of abortion nationwide based on a handful of interviews with people scattered around the country, who have vastly different levels of experience and investment on the issue and with politics in general. Somehow, the “private” opinions of a few people became evidence of the nationwide deflation of all Democrats’ hopes of winning in the midterms. That’s not just poor reporting, that’s irresponsible journalism.

But what’s especially grim is that the piece is emblematic of an entire genre of outdated, old-world political reporting based on outdated, old-world political polling, stuck in a pre-Trump era when pollsters were still able to capture a relatively accurate snapshot of the American electorate. (Arguably most political reporting remains stuck in 2016, but that’s a post for another day.)

The AP: “Some in White House worry abortion message bungled before midterms,” published two days before the election. In the Washington Post, “Five reasons abortion may not deliver for Democrats,” published five days before the midterms. And here’s another piece in the Times, worrying about men’s general empathy failure around abortion having “profound implications” on elections -- published two days before the vote.

There were lots of “abortion will save the Democrats!” articles too, though those mostly ran many weeks and months ahead of the midterms. But as the days ticked down to November 8, 2022, the hand-wringing around whether Democrats had blown their political load too soon on abortion reached its peak, driven by mouthy pundits and overworked journalists desperate to fill pre-election quotas and even actual politicians who should know better, namely and specifically the senator from Vermont who in the year 2022 still does not understand that abortion is an economic issue.

Of course, we know what happened: abortion access was a big winner at the ballot box, thanks in no small part to Gen Z women, especially young women of color. (And actually and seriously no thanks at all to white women, who continue to vote for white supremacy over reproductive freedom, not to toot my own horn but I fucking told you so.)

So what’s going on here? Are mainstream and legacy reporters conspiring to tank Democrats by any means necessary? Something something but her emails? Nah, they just don’t know how to cover abortion, and the pundits and pollsters and strategists they’re prone to interviewing about abortion don’t know much about it, either. 

Abortion is very difficult to poll on. One of the few true experts on abortion polling (and by “few” I mean literally like, I don’t know, one of three or four individuals total nationwide), Tresa Undem, explained this in Vox:

We need to ask questions about how the public views abortion policy — but do so in a more real and accurate way. We shouldn’t, for example, simply ask "Do you support or oppose recent restrictions to abortion?" when we know most people aren’t aware of any trend or what the restrictions might be. Maybe one place to start is moving beyond legality and into reality. Although we don’t talk about it much, one in three women in this country will have an abortion in her lifetime. Maybe pollsters should learn more about what the public knows about access and what they want in place for a woman who has decided to have an abortion.

But pollsters do at least try to understand where folks are coming from; pundits, on the other hand, are pretty much hopeless on abortion unless they happen to have spent significant time working in or with the reproductive health, rights, and justice movements. Most pundits do not understand how common abortion is (even/especially among people whose religious views conflict with the right to abortion), how likely people are to choose, or feel forced to choose, abortion for financial reasons (very!), and how popular early clinical abortion is even among Republican voters. Big, mainstream pro-choice orgs like Planned Parenthood and NARAL have not, historically, done much to improve these professionals’ understanding of abortion, and have done more than a little to hurt it -- for example, by downplaying the percentage of abortion care Planned Parenthood provides, or by clinging to stigmatizing “safe, legal, and rare” language years past its expiration date.  

More broadly, politicos and pundits and journalists are all prone to overestimating the numbers of “undecided” or “swing” voters, as part of a causality loop fueled by outlets trying fruitlessly to shirk accusations about the “liberal media.” Many reporters working for mainstream and legacy publications that rely heavily on (older, conservative) subscribers are pushed by editors and decision-makers at their outlets to privilege right-wing perspectives, or have seen stories that may upset conservative subscribers killed or relegated to the back pages. And mainstream and legacy reporters can absolutely be fooled by campaigns on the basics -- just last month, the AP reported a touching scene between Mehmet Oz and an ostensibly random Black voter who supported him; turns out, the voter had been a paid staffer. If it’s that easy to pull one over on a seasoned AP reporter who’s just looking for a nice opening scene, imagine how little scrutiny goes into an issue as misunderstood as abortion.

Until mainstream and legacy reporters and broadcasters -- including your favorite TV hosts, even the lefties -- stop turning to the nearest political scientists/general pollsters/paid party strategists for easy quotes and facile perspectives on abortion, we are going to keep seeing coverage that, at best, misleads the public and, at worst, is being deliberately manipulated.

But nobody asked me!

[seventhdiscipleworldwide]

[mysharona1987]

[genuinelyshallow]

In WWII, in 6 years, 67 journalists were killed

In the Vietnam war, in 20 years, 63 journalists were killed

In Gaza, in 70 days, 89 journalists were killed

[moonlayl]

“Mistake”

[chaithetics]

EDIT: I've now made a post that you can read here with more information about the ICJ rulings, their powers and what we can do with this ruling here. I had to this morning and will continue to delete, report, and block all comments/asks that are anti-Arab, zionist, Islamophobic, racist, and/or antisemitic.

We already knew this but the ICJ has now ruled that Israel's continued occupation of Palestine is illegal and needs to end ASAP.

They found that Israel's occupation does not give it the right of sovereignty over the West Bank and Gaza and that it is not a temporary occupation but is an illegal, permanent and discriminatory annexation. The ICJ also found violence against Palestinians, Israeli exploitation of Palestinian natural resources, transfer of civilian population (settlers and companies/organisations), extension of Israeli laws to replace local Palestinian laws, forced displacement of Palestinians, confiscation of Palestinian land, annexation. That Israel's 'security concerns' are not valid justifications for any of these measures.

The ICJ has ordered Israel to end its presence in the West Bank and Gaza immediately and to cease all new settlement activity, return all lands and assets to Palestinians that they've ceased since 1967 and that includes archives and items of cultural significance, evacuate all of their settlers from the settlements, pay compensation, and repeal all laws that maintain this occupation and discrimination. The ICJ is not legally-binding but does carry significant political weight and this ruling is important for continuing to advocate for Palestine and to put pressure on our government's to do the right thing and for them to put pressure on Israel. Keep contacting your representatives!

[hussyknee]

[omgellendean]

[odinsblog]

Elon will probably have the community note removed, like he usually does on any facts that don’t conform to his opinion

[gwen-wjmc]

WJMC Day 3

This morning was SO COOL!! We got to see Brian Lamb speak and he gave us tons of good advice and stories about his time in journalism. He was so engaging, and it didn’t feel like he was talking down to us (which a lot of adults tend to do with teens 😕)

Right after Brian we saw Tom Jackman from the Washington Post. He wrote a story live in front of us after interviewing a few people in the audience to show us the process of putting together a breaking news piece.

After lunch a few of us stopped by TJMaxx (i got some pants 😗) and got ice cream from an ADORABLE old lady.

We got to visit the National Press Club where journalists who don’t have an office can go to work on their stories, usually right after a press briefing. There we saw Carmella Boykin and Nisha Chittal speak.

Carmella works as a TikTok news media manager, and she told us all about how she got there and how she maintains the Washington Post’s account.

Nisha spoke about her career path and how she got to where she is at Vox, but the highlight for me of her speech was when she talked about still being a successful journalist without all kinds of “connections”. Honestly it has felt icky to think you need to know everyone and hear “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know” every 10 minutes.

After dinner we had another group meeting where we prepped for tomorrow’s simulation (yay…). After that, we got to play color group feud (like family feud) which was actually really fun!! Maroon lost super bad tho lol

Over 📻

[nezreblogz]

bisan's instagram post

[charliejaneanders]

Twitter never has and never will be a vehicle for democratic expression. It is a privately held corporation that monetizes human expression and algorithmically maximizes its distribution for profit, and what turns out to be most profitable is sowing social, cultural, and political division. Its participants are a very tiny, skewed slice of humanity that has American journalism in a choke hold.

How Elon Musk Went from Superhero to Supervillain

[mysharona1987]

[glrlafraid]

do non brits know about the lizz truss lettuce. do you guys know what i'm talking about