Why the media has so much trouble covering the presidential election

Watching Kamala Harris and Tim Walz do their first big media interview with CNN’s Dana Bash late last week, I couldn’t help but think of the false equivalencies that come up when the media tries to cover Harris and Trump as if they are both normal presidential candidates. Harris is the kind of person we expect to run for higher office — she has the right resume, skills, and tone. Trump has none of those things, and is a convicted felon.

Now, you can love either of these candidates or hate them, but trying to cover them in the same way leads to a real cognitive disconnect. Consider that just a few hours before Bash grilled Harris over whether the American people should trust her after she changed her position on fracking, Donald Trump was attempting to tape a campaign film in a restricted area of Arlington National Cemetery, where America’s war dead are buried. He falsely claimed to have permission and when a staffer tried to stop him, she was pushed aside and accused of being mentally ill. But sure, yes, we should all worry about whether Harris is trustworthy because she made a politically astute decision to moderate her position on fracking, an issue on which smart people often disagree.

The American media takes itself far more seriously than the British press, and this is especially so of the brand name institutions. The idea when covering presidential candidates is to be neutral, and quiz each person in the same manner as the other, drilling down on misstatements, flip-flops, and any sort of questionable behaviour in equal measure. The problem is that this approach actually creates an unfair equivalency, because it puts a small issue on par with a much larger and more serious one. 

With Trump, of course, you’ve got nothing but questionable behaviour. It all sort of bleeds together, leading to a kind of numbness and fatigue on the part of both journalists and audiences. We’ve heard it all before, we know who he is, what’s left to say?

Indeed, that was the approach that Harris herself took when asked about Trump’s comment that she had “just turned Black,” in recent years, after identifying as Indian (she’s always owned both sides of her identity). She simply said “same old tired playbook — next question.” Bash responded, “that’s it?” And she said, yep, that’s it.

While I like that approach coming from Harris, it works far less well for the media. Bash, who’s a pro, ended up looking foolish while spending several minutes earnestly parsing whether Tim Walz — a national guard member who has worked with arms during guard training — had knowingly misrepresented his military record when he said he “carried weapons in war” rather than “of war.” I mean really? We’re spending time on this while his counterpart is trying to limit the civil liberties of people who don’t have children?

Walz, like Harris, responded just the right way, saying not only that his English teacher wife often had to correct his grammar (endearing to the American everyman) but that people “know who I am” and “know where my heart is.” True enough, and it also echoes the way Bill Clinton used to deflect silly media questions in a politically astute way by saying that the “American people understand,” X, Y or Z, elevating them above the journalist asking the question.

Aside from thinking that much of the media still hasn’t figured out how to cover this election in a really useful way, I came away thinking that Harris and Walz were even more polished and politically savvy than I’d thought. What I wanted was more substantive content. I wish the interview would have focused a lot more on their personal visions and policies rather than on whatever small mistakes that could be dragged up so as to make it seem that the media was being just as hard on them as it is on Trump and Vance.

Peter, would you agree? And what do you wish Bash would have asked them that she didn’t?

Recommended reading

• The New Yorker does yet another strong climate change feature — this time, looking at how sea levels have been historically tracked and what it tells us about our planet and society.

• My former TIME magazine colleague Bill Saporito, now at Inc., did a typically funny and smart piece about why coffee complexity is at the root of Starbucks’s problems. Truth be told, the complexity problem is rife — too many choices equals no purchase.

• I was surprised to see the New York Times’s progressive columnist Nicholas Kristof decrying European regulation, but he has a good point.

• And in the FT, I really enjoyed this Big Read on the economic promise of textiles, and how a T-shirt can jump start an economy (or not) by David Pilling, our Africa editor. Also, don’t miss Robin Wigglesworth’s Lunch with economist Eugene Fama, who says markets have gotten less efficient in recent years.

Peter Spiegel responds

Rana, for the first time since we started exchanging views here in public — rather than over drinks in Brooklyn — you’ve asked me a question I’m rather squeamish about answering. I always tend to take an “honour among thieves” approach when it comes to criticising fellow journalists, so I think I’m going to pull a Kamala Harris (“next question!”) on how I might have handled Thursday’s interview differently than CNN’s Dana Bash.

But what I will tackle is the related issue of why it took so long for Harris to sit down for her first big interview, and why it’s important for her to quickly become much more accessible to the political press corps. Our fellow Swampian Ed Luce made the argument last week that the undecided voters she needs to win over are not going to be satisfied with bromides from the stump, and sit-down interviews are the only real way to convince them.

I think Ed is right, but I’ll make a slightly more cynical case for engaging with the legacy media. Think back to John McCain’s 2000 presidential campaign, when the Republican candidate sat in the rear of his “Straight Talk Express” bus, talking for weeks on end to any reporter who would spare an hour or three to join him as he criss-crossed early primary states. A strange thing happened: the more reporters talked to McCain, the more they got to understand his world view, and the more favourable his coverage became. He even once joked that the political press was “my base”.

Contrast that to Joe Biden, whose team shielded him from the press, including a petty refusal to sit down for an interview with the most influential newspaper in America: the New York Times. What happened when his campaign ran into an existential crisis following his disastrous debate performance? Nobody in the press had spent any time with him to counter the narrative that he had become too addled to run for re-election. There was no one around to tell his side of the story — because Biden hadn’t engaged with any of them.

For Harris, it is inevitable that something will go wrong in the next 10 weeks. There will be a flub, or a mini-scandal, or a revelation that will throw her off stride. If she has been engaging with the press, reporters covering her will be able to put the mishap into context — after all, they will have been hearing directly from her. If she hasn’t been engaging, it’s going to be hard to find media allies on the fly. 

The dirty little secret about journalists is this: we’re human. If you sit down and tell us your story, we’re more likely to understand your views and give you the benefit of the doubt. If you think you can coast to November while ignoring us . . . well . . . good luck to you.

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “On China, Kamala Harris is a blank slate”:
“I find it remarkable that the Republicans suggest, with a seemingly straight face, that Walz was being groomed by the Chinese. Putting aside how Tiananmen Square would likely have undermined that intended result, the evidence (sure to be resurrected) that Russia played such a significant role in saving Trump’s business, would strike me as a dog they’d just as soon let lie.” — Gail Berney