If you're a journalist, politicians are not your friends
When a free press is tough on people you like
“You cannot make friends with the rock stars. That's what's important. If you're a rock journalist - first, you will never get paid much. But you will get free records from the record company. And they'll buy you drinks, you'll meet girls, they'll try to fly you places for free, offer you drugs... I know. It sounds great. But they are not your friends. These are people who want you to write sanctimonious stories about the genius of the rock stars, and they will ruin rock and roll and strangle everything we love about it.”
-Lester Bangs, in Almost Famous
There is no question that Democrats — and particularly Democrats of color, and Democratic women — are held to higher standards than Republicans, by the media, the public, and by both parties. That’s all playing out this week during Neera Tanden’s confirmation battle. She should be an easy yes: She’s highly qualified, her progressive political views fall squarely in the Democratic mainstream, and Biden won the election, so barring a significant problem, he should get to pick his own cabinet.
It’s not playing out that way, because Republicans are cynically leveraging Tanden’s “mean tweets” to tank her. Of course it’s not really about the tweets — Republicans had little to say about the tweets of the last Republican president, and most of them refused to hold him accountable when his tweets sparked a deadly insurrection. It’s about Tanden’s politics, and the fact that the GOP thinks if they tank her, Biden will nominate someone more moderate in her stead.
I wrote about all of this for the Washington Post, and how so many Republicans have the same issues Trump did with powerful women. So now I want to talk about something Tanden-adjacent: How progressives treat the press when Democrats are the ones in power.
Earlier this week, Washington Post reporter Seung Min Kim approached Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski and showed Murkowski a tweet Tanden had directed at her, which read, “No offense but this sounds like you’re high on your own supply. You know, we know, and everyone knows this is all garbage. Just stop.”
For the record, Tanden was right: The Murkowski tweet Tanden was responding to said, “Lowering the corporate tax rate is a critical component of this tax legislation and will allow American businesses to compete against foreign competitors, and make the investments in American operations that will bring the jobs and economic growth that have eluded us for years.” That is… not true; it is indeed garbage. Murkowski sounded like she was getting high on her own supply. And Tanden’s response, though sharp, was hardly cruel, unhinged, or way out of bounds.
But a nominee’s past statements, including tweets, are certainly relevant to confirmation hearings. And so when Kim presented Tanden’s tweet to Murkowski, she was doing her job — and doing the same thing she had done many, many times before when she asked Republican senators about Trump’s tweets.
For doing her job, though, Kim has been on the receiving end of ugly racist and sexist vitriol, ironically from some of the same people arguing that Tanden’s confirmation is being torpedoed by racist and sexist Republicans. Even many of the criticisms that didn’t include racial slurs were spurious: Showing Murkowski the Tanden tweet was “snitching” or “causing drama” or somehow wasn’t fair because Kim only pulled up the critical tweet and not a different one where Tanden praised Murkowski (were reporters also supposed to put a nice Trump tweet side by side the inflammatory ones?).
Of course it’s frustrating that Republican senators spent four years denying that they had even seen anything the president was tweeting, and seem to have finally learned how to read tweets just as Tanden began her confirmation process. Convenient for them, certainly! But that bald-faced lying is also on them — it’s on journalists to note it, but it’s not on the journalist to scale back the obligations of her profession now that the tweets come from a Democrat, even if the tweets are significantly less bad.
The way liberals and leftists interact with the press over the Biden years is going to tell us a lot. The Trump era brought a whole lot of folks into the liberal and leftists folds and was a starting point for political engagement for a lot of Americans. For liberals especially, opposing Trump was a primary motivator, and opposing Trump meant supporting what he opposed, including a free press and reporters who ask tough questions. When Trump whined about the press being so unfair to him, most liberals responded (fairly!) with: Tough shit. Liberals broadly seemed to understand that one role of the press is to hold the powerful to account — and to hold the powerful to a higher standard of transparency and accountability.
Well, Trump isn’t in charge any more; a moderate Democrat is. And as the press holds Joe Biden and members of his team to a high standard of transparency and accountability, that’s going to mean a press that asks difficult and invasive questions, that sometimes (even often) runs stories that are not flattering to Biden or his team, and that will at times be critical of his policies and actions. It means reporters will ask elected officials about Democrats’ tweets. And if you really do believe in the power and necessity of a free press, then you support that work even when it’s aimed at someone whose politics you like.
That isn’t to say that the press always gets it right, or that the media is beyond criticism. Republicans have indeed worked the refs so effectively, and their party has become so absurd and dishonest, that the standards are simply different for Republicans and Democrats. The Trump administration was such a colossal, constant clusterfuck of lies and cruelty and corruption that reporters were always on and stretched thin; a long list of vitally important stories never really broke through, because there were so many other stories of dysfunction and self-dealing and norm-breaking and general shocking terribleness. A lot of stories that would have been reported out in any other administration were skimmed over, because there was just so much wrongdoing to cover. And the public became accustomed to a constant stream of blood-boiling news. News outlets can’t maintain the same pace and tone they took during the Trump era during an administration that is much more normal, cautious, honest, and decent unless they sensationalize minor stories and create scandal where there is none. And so we are already seeing even some reputable news outlets sensationalize minor stories and create scandal where there is none.
This was the key imbalance in 2016, too — there was a sense among fair-minded journalists, editors, and media institutions that the deluge of Trump coverage necessitated equally critical coverage of Hillary Clinton. The fact that there weren't equally bad acts to cover critically didn’t seem to factor in to this perverse definition of “fairness,” which is how we got a right-wing operative’s false story about “Clinton Cash” on the front page of the New York Times, and many months of “but her emails” reporting, culminating in front-page coverage just days before voters cast their ballots in 2016 — a devastating editorial decision that may very well have handed the election to Trump. According to the Columbia Journalism Review, “in just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election.”
So this is not a plea to ignore imbalances and unfairness in how the press covers the two parties differently, or — the real problem — how the two parties behave differently and create different incentives. But it is a plea to be more circumspect about what is and is not unfair. “The press didn’t do this to Republicans” is not an answer to the question of whether the press should have done it to Republicans. Asking tough questions or being hard on Democrats is not bias, it’s the job.
And it’s never ok to attack a reporter in racist, sexist terms (or to attack a reporter at all for who they are).
It’s also counterproductive. The more decent reporters who are trying to be fair are barraged with unhinged vitriol, the more they will do the normal human thing and dig their heels in. I’ve certainly experienced this when attacked by both the right and the far left. Even though I agree with the latter on 98% of policy questions, vitriolic pile-ons did not in fact have the effect of making me reconsider my position; they had the effect of making me defensive and pissed off and too quick to write off the whole lot of ‘em. In other words, even if you think the criticisms of Kim are correct, big swarms of angry tweeters and an avalanche of outraged emails to a reporter who has a long track record of doing very good work are unlikely to have their intended effect; the sense will be that she is being besieged by crazies and is experiencing a response wildly disproportionate to any wrongdoing. The anger at Kim is wrong on its face, but even if you think it’s perfectly valid, the wave of outrage is a really bad strategy.
It’s also a preview of what’s to come for reporters who are tough on the Biden administration. Progressives should absolutely highlight media bias where we see it (there’s a lot of it), and recognize where the scales have been tilted in favor of the right. But just because we don’t like a particular line of questioning or the angle of a particular story doesn’t mean those questions or those stories are “bad journalism.” It’s not license to attack a reporter. This is a good moment for progressives to pause and ask whether our Trump-era support of a hard-nosed press was really about the importance of the fourth estate, or whether it was merely convenient and situational.
I hope it’s the former.
xx Jill
By Century Film / Universal Pictures - Exhibitor’s Trade Review (Dec. 1922 - Feb. 1923) on the Internet Archive, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=84565946