Yes, Democrats Should Still Care How Real Journalists Cover The News

Just because most mainstream news consumers are already Biden voters, doesn't mean big problems with mainstream news coverage don't seep into the larger culture.

(Photo via Gallup)

Six years ago, White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders attended a dinner at a Virginia restaurant called the Red Hen. By 2018 Sanders had established herself in politics as an accomplished liar and an accomplice to an administration that was in the midst of orphaning migrant children, using cruelty as a deterrent. Her presence perturbed the staff, who alerted the owner, who in turn politely asked Sanders to leave and comped her companions for the food and drink they’d already been served. 

Nobody heaped abuse on Sanders. So far as we know, nobody filmed the confrontation, and if anyone did, it never found its way to the internet, which would’ve compounded Sanders’s embarrassment. Democratic leaders in Congress did not applaud the Red Hen. Neither did Barack Obama or Joe Biden. It’s likely that the whole episode would’ve been forgotten quietly, lost to the mists of time, had Sanders not exploited it herself to whip up right-wing outrage and get revenge. 

“Last night I was told by the owner of Red Hen in Lexington, VA to leave because I work for @POTUS and I politely left,” she tweeted indignantly, putting an independent entrepreneur in the crosshairs of an official government account. “Her actions say far more about her than about me. I always do my best to treat people, including those I disagree with, respectfully and will continue to do so.”

Recriminations poured forth. Trump supporters flooded the restaurant with negative Yelp reviews. Trump himself called the establishment “filthy.” Protesters forced the owner to close its doors for two weeks. It eventually closed its doors permanently, and reopened under a different name. 

For all that trouble, media elites deemed the Red Hen imbroglio a crisis—for liberalism.

Liberalism and its supposed appetite for incivility. 

HECKLE AND CHIDE

Joe Scarborough isn’t exactly Sanders’s equal and opposite in liberal politics. He’s a former Republican congressman and cable-news show host who eventually came to despise Donald Trump and criticizes him frequently on air. But they are people of comparable influence—or at least they were before Sanders became governor of Arkansas. 

A couple weeks ago, a Trump supporter accosted Scarborough at the airport, harassed and threatened and swore at him, and posted the confrontation, which he’d recorded, to his Instagram account. Unlike in the Red Hen case, Donald Trump quickly reposted the video to his own social-media website. He was thrilled by the altercation and eager to incite more like it. 

As Greg Sargent first observed, the media shrugged. Reporters did not view it as controversial in the least, let alone worth dwelling on. We will not read mainstream or centrist struggle-session op-eds on the right’s crisis of incivility.

To the contrary, the right is overrun by influencers fantasizing about executing liberals and Democrats in a second Trump term—including the prosecutors and judges in Trump’s criminal trials. Rep. Jim Banks (R-IN) called New York City a shithole. Everyone shrugs. 

“Imagine if the Biden campaign Twitter feed posted video of a supporter confronting Laura Ingraham, cursing at her, and saying this: ‘Biden will get rid of all you fucking conservatives. You conservatives are gone when he fucking wins.’” Sargent added later. “Do you think the press would cover that?”

The answer is obviously yes! But I’m not concerned first and foremost here with media bias or hypocrisy. I’m interested in the reach of information, and how it propagates. How most people in America come to know what they know—or think they know—about news and politics. 

Surely the Red Hen incident didn’t reach every corner of the electorate. Very little does. But it almost certainly did reach tens of millions of citizens, including at least a few non-voters, and people who don’t consume mainstream news. 

The question is, How? From the moment Sanders tweeted her version of events until the controversy died down several days or weeks later, how did the information propagate? 

Some people no doubt heard about the story from Sanders’ feed directly, and from Trump-loyal Twitter users who passed along her recounting. But that’s not the only conceivable way people with light or non-existent media footprints might have learned about what happened at the restaurant. If influential mainstream news figures treat something as important, others follow. Their individual audiences may be modest, but they are quite large in aggregate, and their cultural influence is vast. What a political media herd decides to pursue will diffuse through society, becoming received knowledge even of people who don’t take much interest in politics. What goes viral on social media or YouTube or around the water cooler is not in any way disconnected from what people in the journalism industry focus on as real news. Likewise, the front page of the New York Times is not hermetically sealed from non-traditional media. 

How did low-information swing-voters who never read the New York Times learn about Hillary Clinton’s emails? About Hunter Biden’s laptop? It’s clearly not all coming from right-wing content creators. 

THE FOX AND THE CLOWNED

This is why I don’t take much solace in data showing mainstream news consumers are Biden’s best cohort, broken down by media-consumption habits, or in the corollary idea, quickly becoming fashionable on the left and in liberal politics, that Democrats are wasting their time working mainstream refs and should ply that effort into reaching people (or competing for eyeballs) on non-traditional platforms. 

Surely both are important. But one is much easier than the other. And the whole counter-critique is built atop the false conceit that newspapers and national network news don’t seed the factoids and memes and propaganda that people ultimately scroll past on social media. 

Consider an analogy to the differences between progressive political media and right-wing political media. The latter is much larger, and more consolidated. There are outlets and creators of all shapes and sizes on the right, but there’s also Fox News. A single email from the News Corp C-suite can change the message blaring into millions of households, gyms, and offices that have televisions tuned to Fox News. And from there, it will be amplified further by lawmakers, pro-Trump influencers, talk radio hosts, the hosts other right-wing cable news channels, and maybe, eventually, more mainstream sources. 

Progressive media has no mechanism like this. It is highly fractured and balkanized by issue-area. Even if the audiences for progressive and right-wing media were of similar size, it would be difficult if not impossible for anyone to feed the progressive audience talking points or marching orders or a small handful of ideas to focus on. 

Directly influencing the vibe on social media, where millions of users compete for eyeballs and ear canals, is similarly daunting. Even the social media companies that aren’t run by right-wing fanatics have throttled professional political news, and the political news that does break through is almost all framed to get people’s hackles up. Tens of thousands of atomized liberals can not counteract these effects. The Biden campaign could in theory stand up a troll army to post on-message content all day, but there’s likely a reason it has not.

By contrast, influencing the handful of people who control the editorial consensus in the news industry is much simpler. Democrats don’t have a Fox News, at least not yet, and they don’t control the New York Times. But they can exert influence over mainstream news, and thus what diffuses through the culture, in two ways: 1) by mounting sustained media criticism; 2) by getting a handle on the kinds of things elite journalists understand to be newsworthy—novelty, conflict, scandal—and making or uncovering more of those things. 

To return to the introductory example: High-profile figures get a hard time from activists and rabble rousers in public all the time. Whether those confrontations transform into Red Hen Civility Crises or forgotten Scarborough abuse rituals is to some extent up to Democrats. 

NOW MALAISE ME DOWN TO SLEEP

If all you’ve just read is correct, it should have some bearing how Democrats conduct themselves—particularly vis-a-vis the messages they craft, and tactics they consider, to shape what people know about news and politics. 

Not all issues are small like Red Hen. 

Some seem trivial, but can mushroom like EMAILS into election-altering behemoths. 

Others are of utmost importance: Was Donald Trump a good president or not? Who’s a better steward of the economy, Joe Biden or Donald Trump? Who if anyone is responsible for America’s worst-among-peers COVID body count? The 2020 economic collapse? Inflation? Should an unrepentant felon who’s cheated in all of his elections be president?

Where did people (the majority of people, anyhow) get the idea that Trump bears no responsibility for the disruptions of 2020 and was thus a good jobs president? Where did they get the idea that inflation—also a pandemic effect—is Joe Biden’s fault? Did millions of individual Americans conjure these ideas, fully formed, on their own? Did they only spread on Fox News, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook? Or did they also diffuse through mainstream culture, beyond the ranks of news consumers with high media literacy? Did the New York Times have anything to do with why Joe Biden’s age (81) has been a huge liability for him, while few people suspect Donald Trump’s age (77) has anything to do with all the crazy and untrue things he says? What about the Wall Street Journal?

Will Americans form a consensus on on their own that a felony conviction should disqualify a presidential candidate, or should Democrats make that case to them in a memorable fashion?

What has fed Trump-stalgia? Trump-nesia? Did millions of Americans revise their views of Trump through pure reason—reason that happened to lead them all to similar conclusions? Or did Trump and his allies challenge the views held by the overwhelming majority of people, while Democrats allowed the process of forgetting to proceed as usual?

Why, under nearly identical circumstances, did Americans agree that 1984 was morning in America, when they now say 2024 is a time of great suffering and malaise?

If Joe Biden wants to upend this false consensus, how should he go about it? With conventional Democratic Party boilerplate that dares not challenge mass opinion? By validating the existing consensus? Or by challenging it in a way that will diffuse through the culture—just like the idea that Trump gets a pass on the year 2020, or that a Republican should never be asked to leave a restaurant.