How The Media Lost The Democrats' Trust
Two Back-To-Back Revelations Last Week Shine A Light On The Dynamic
Since Vice President Kamala Harris became the Democratic nominee for president two months ago, the most significant criticism she has faced is her decision to do more sit-down, one-on-one interviews with national news media outlets. She sat with CNN’s Dana Bash after the Democratic National Convention in August but conducted it alongside her running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. Since then, she has spurred major news networks, focusing her time on local outlets and friendly venues instead. Last week, Harris held a town hall meeting with Oprah Winfrey, who openly supports her candidacy.
Her decision not to sit down with a prominent news figure has led to allegations that she is afraid to answer tough questions, invoking criticism of her being a lightweight and having no substance.
That criticism hasn’t hurt her much. As of this weekend, she is leading Donald Trump by four to five points in national polls and is up or tied in every swing state. Nevertheless, the decision not to do more interviews will hang over her for the rest of the campaign and be the primary scapegoat if she loses in November.
The question on everyone’s minds is, “Why?” The “she’s afraid” rationale does stick in some constituencies because it’s logical. Still, I don’t think fear is the cause. There are a couple of primary reasons why I think she’s avoiding interviews with legacy media – major national outlets like CBS, NBC, and ABC, as well as newspapers like The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal.
One reason is that her campaign thinks they don’t need them to communicate with voters. Since most voters get their news from the internet, the legacy media has less reach than they did a decade or more ago. Democrats believe one of Hillary Clinton’s mistakes in 2016 was to rely on legacy media, who undermined her anyway (more on this later), while her opponent dominated her online. Trends during the pandemic and in the years after – where stories that dominated the news cycle would be birthed on social media – supported that view. The legacy media doesn’t make the news often anymore; they follow the news. Many outlets have hired reporters whose job it is to scour social media looking for stories. Trump is constantly in the news because of his posts on his social media site, TruthSocial. The Harris Campaign no doubt sees that Republicans have been successful in using social media to get the attention of the legacy media and want to follow that strategy. Why would Kamala sit down with David Muir or Norah O’Donnell when they can post something on Twitter or TikTok and get their attention?
The other reason is that they don’t trust the legacy media. I know that seems weird, considering the legacy media's reputation for having a liberal bias, but that’s part of the reason they don’t trust them. In the 2010s, to repair their reputation with the half of Americans who see them as untrustworthy allies of liberals, media outlets began poaching reporters with conservative backgrounds to appease conservative critics. The media saw these young reporters as people who could utilize their connections to and affinity for conservative politicians and organizations to get legacy media outlets the same access as conservative media outlets like Fox News, who were killing them in viewership. Some were good hires, but some have turned the industry into a circus. Enter Olivia Nuzzi.
Nuzzi made a name for herself when, at 20, she interned with former Rep. Anthony Weiner’s mayoral campaign and then wrote a scathing article about her experiences in the New York Daily News. In it, she alleged that the other interns were there for self-serving reasons. A native of Monmouth County, New Jersey, she also wrote for a local conservative blog praising former Republican Gov. Chris Christie. She was later hired by The Daily Beast in 2014 to cover the Christie presidential campaign despite her open affinity for him. She later covered Donald Trump and was personally invited by him to sit down for an interview in the Oval Office.
Nuzzi became a household name last week when it was exposed that she had engaged in a personal relationship with former presidential candidate Robert Kennedy Jr. while also covering him for the New Yorker. In some circles, she developed a reputation for being borderline cruel on President Biden’s mental capacity while dismissive of similar issues with Trump. This dynamic has been repeated in many other media outlets, which gave liberals the impression, perhaps correctly, that the media is less demanding on Trump because his existence in the political sphere drives business for them.
That theory got another boost last week when Tara Palmeri, who ABC hired to cover the Trump White House in 2017 after she worked for several conservative Trump-supporting publications like the Washington Examiner and New York Post, admitted that she had received document stolen from the Trump campaign by Iranian hackers and refused to publish them. She alluded to “learning lessons from 2016,” when many journalists published items stolen from the Hillary Clinton campaign that Democrats believe hurt her with progressive voters. The admission led to outrage from Democrats, who suggested the media was changing the rules on publishing sensitive documents that can hurt presidential campaigns now that it could be used against Trump. Even some free-speech-minded media figures who are rarely friendly to Democrats, like Michael Tracey, have criticized the decision not to publish them, noting the hypocrisy.
Palmeri admitted she had the documents only after she reported via sources in Mar-a-Lago how the leak was playing within Trump's campaign, a sign that she is still in good standing with Trump’s inner team.
This is why I think the theory that the media is too often tilting the scales for Trump has merit. Not because these are all biased conservative journalists who favor Trump. “The media likes Trump and wants him to win” is a common retort that even I’ve quipped about, and there are certainly some biased pro-Trump reporters out there, but I think it’s not always that simple. The reason is “Access Journalism” – the horse-trading of favorable coverage or hiring of favored media figures for the promise of access to big scoops.
Another major national media outlet hired someone I knew from college to work the Trump beat despite his previous personal support for Donald Trump because, according to several people I’ve spoken to, they hoped his affinity for Trump would provide access to the former president, as he tends to give access to people who praise him. It worked. Though this reporter hasn’t always been biased in his reporting of Trump, much of what he has produced for the outlet he works for has not been investigative or groundbreaking but instead has been more “inside baseball” type journalism – reporting, as Palmeri did on Friday, on how sources say Trump feels or thinks.
Another reporter like this is Maggie Haberman, who has developed a reputation for being the “Trump whisperer.” She is a regular figure on cable news and in The New York Times, describing what “the thinking is” inside Trump’s team. Media outlets value, in my opinion, way too much and, to the detriment of their reputation, this type of palace intrigue. It downplays the seriousness of Trump’s continued dominance in the American political realm.
To repair their reputation with the half of Americans who see them as untrustworthy allies of liberals, media outlets began poaching reporters with conservative backgrounds to appease conservative critics.
Access Journalism is not new. The Trump team learned it from the New York Police Department, which pioneered the system. Until 2022, New York City journalists could only get press credentials to cross police and fire lines and access locations like City Hall by applying to the NYPD. Journalists had to personally go to One Police Plaza and make an appeal to the NYPD’s Deputy Commission for Public Information, or DCPI, office by offering three clips of “city-sponsored events” that you covered (keep in mind, you couldn’t get into most city-sponsored events without the credential in the first place), and hope whoever is on duty that day, who has the full authority to decide what is and isn’t a “city-sponsored event” arbitrarily, is in a good mood.
When I got my city press credentials in 2011, after two failed tries, I got them because of clips of two events I was allowed into because the founder of the newspaper I worked for – the Queens Tribune – was a sitting member of Congress and vouched for me. Despite getting the credential, the DCPI officer on duty scolded me for being able to cross police lines without one, stating bluntly, “Anyone else would’ve had you arrested.”
The NYPD was notoriously bad at the press, often to their detriment. Last year, in my first TikTok video, I shared a story about the NYPD spiking a story, using their influence over the press and the threat of losing access to do it.
I developed a good relationship with the commander officer of one of the precincts I covered and would get access to scoops that no other reporter would get, one of which won me an award. Still, the cost of that was having to bury damaging stories – including when cops arrested the wrong man for rape and another in which cops were accused of tampering with evidence in a shoplifting case where one of the suspects was the daughter of a detective. When I protested to other more seasoned journalists, I was repeatedly told that “this is how it is” or “it is what it is.” One reporter defended the system as “a compromise we make to serve New Yorkers.” I saw the same dynamic the NYPD used on the media repeated by the Trump campaign. The press responded to him in the same “it is what it is” way. The legacy media leveraged their hunger for access to sanitize Trump’s worst instincts. Access to Trump was vital because he was bringing clicks and views to media outlets, who desperately needed them to boost advertising revenue that had been dwindling for years.
Democrats, on the other hand, have been far less willing to trade access for good reporting because they’ve always seen the media as good for them. Journalism is facts, and facts, as they say, have a liberal bias.
The overwrought coverage of the Comey Letter in the closing days of the 2016 presidential campaign, which many believe cost Hillary the race, was the beginning of the end of that. During the Biden administration, Democrats felt snakebit again in the overwrought reaction to the end of the War in Afghanistan. The trend has eroded Democrats' trust in the media, which had near-disastrous consequences.
For example, Democrats did not take the media’s critique of Biden’s mental capacity seriously until it was nearly too late, partly because those criticisms were coming from toxic figures like Nuzzi.
With Biden out of the race and Kamala Harris on top of the ticket, Democrats have decided to play Trump’s “access journalism” game and make the legacy media work to access the vice president. This has left the legacy media in a pickle. It just isn’t possible to play the access game on both sides. Legacy media had a good thing going when Democrats gave them the goods for free. Now they have to work both sides or finally come to terms with the reality that the Republicans have been playing them, and the American people haven’t been better served for it.
This is one of the more insightful articles I've read on US media in a while. The other aspect to this story that goes uncovered (not surprisingly) is that the definition of 'mainstream media' thrown around by conservatives is really no longer defensible. When you have a wealthy juggernaut conservative information ecosystem that includes Fox, WSJ, NY Post, Sinclair, CNBC, Daily Wire, and now X, you can hardly make a credible claim that conservative voices are sidelined from the mainstream. Ben Shapiro has more followers on Youtube and Facebook than the Washington Post. As you rightly point out, even the iconic liberal boogyman outlets like CNN bother to have conservative voices on most panel discussions, something that rarely happens in reverse on Fox.