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Overnight, Ben Smith opened Semafor’s media newsletter by noting an impending transition “from vivisection to post-mortem”: the election, he wrote, “will be followed inevitably by a round of handwringing on what journalists got wrong.” Looking forward at all the looking back, Smith entered an “early bid” as to what the hand-wringing might be about this year. The media “has always been more interested in young urban men than older suburban women,” he wrote, “and the balance of analysis this cycle was particularly out of whack.”
Whether Smith’s specific prediction comes true will depend, of course, on the result—but he is broadly correct that the hand-wringing will happen, in one direction or another. Not that the result will necessarily lend total clarity to the question of what the media got wrong; indeed, it could very well distort our collective memory of how this election played out in the press by loudly imposing the lessons of hindsight on a messy picture, perhaps based on little more than a relative handful of votes in a handful of states breaking one way or the other. To join Smith in getting ahead of such recriminations, it’s already worth looking back on how this election has been covered—and emphasizing the messiness of it all. Major political stories are commonly noisy and uncertain, but I can’t remember one as noisy or uncertain as this.
Coverage of polling has had a lot to do with this: following it can be a maddening experience at the best of times, but this year it has been especially so. Glancing through daily rundowns in political newsletters has often been to experience a profound whiplash, with leads in different states flipping in opposite directions from day to day; the margin of error has usually been sufficient to explain this, but the experience has still been disorienting. Muddling matters further, there have been various suggestions that at least some of the polls might be flawed this cycle, though it has, of course, been hard to know how exactly. (Have they generally replicated past mistakes in underestimating Trump’s support? Have they overcompensated for the same? Are they basically fine?) On Friday, Nate Silver made the case that “there’s more herding in swing state polls than at a sheep farm in the Scottish Highlands”—by which he meant that some pollsters appear to be leery of publishing results unless they match the neck-and-neck consensus. The same day, his fellow Nate—Cohn, of the New York Times—asked “so, can we trust the polls?” and concluded that the simple answer is “no.”
Cohn’s longer answer is that there’s room for “cautious optimism” that the polls will prove more accurate this year than in 2016 or 2020; even if they are somewhat off again, that won’t necessarily mean that they were useless, or even particularly bad. As ever, the real problem has been the way that many journalists and pundits talk about them—which is to say: often without nuance, and far too much. Such things are hard to measure, of course, but the political media’s reliance on polling has struck me as even more intense this year than in previous cycles, and stuck in what appears to be something of a doom loop: the outcome of the race is uncertain, so journalists stare harder at polls, which reflect back that the race is uncertain, and so on. As The Nation’s Chris Lehmann wrote last week, “as a form of prophecy or divination—which is what polling becomes in standard horse-race coverage—it seems not much better than a coin toss.” (Lehmann went so far as to suggest an embargo on all polling in the final weeks of election campaigns, as happens in some other countries.)
On a recent episode of the podcast Know Your Enemy, the historian Rick Perlstein (who I’ve interviewed before for this newsletter) argued that news organizations initially saw polls as an “easy way to move copy around [and] to fill screens”; during the 1980 election, he said, “it was considered a scandal…when media institutions started putting together their own polls, because they were creating their own news; they weren’t reporting the news.” If talking endlessly about polls is cheap, polls themselves cost money; apparently, news organizations have sponsored fewer of them this cycle than in years past, in no small part for this reason. The dire financial straits of the news industry have felt particularly acute this cycle in other ways. If national media types don’t seem to have a clear idea what the country is thinking, then they haven’t been able to lean on a healthy and ubiquitous local news sector to find out.
The usual caveats apply here, of course: generalizing about media coverage is perilous; there are still some excellent local journalists who have done excellent work about the election; various national reporters have themselves ventured out into the country to take its pulse; America is so vast and complicated that even an army of reporters couldn’t capture it in all its complexity. And yet, often, it’s been hard to escape the conclusion that our understanding of this race has been funneled less through actual voters’ mouths than what political elites—and the campaign consultant class, in particular—imagine those voters to be thinking. Last week, Astead W. Herndon, a reporter at the Times who has been speaking in depth with members of the electorate on his podcast, The Run-Up, took aim at one manifestation of this trend—an excessive flurry of stories about late nerves inside the Harris campaign—in an interview on The Ringer’s Press Box podcast. In the 2022 midterms, Herndon noted, there was a late “lurch” toward the narrative that “Republicans are gonna kick Democrats’ ass,” creating “wildly out of whack expectations” among the voting public. “Anything past you should be prepared for every form of result is irresponsible,” he added.
Herndon attributed the prominence of this type of story, in particular, to an “instinct to try to make sure your coverage points to the correct results”; drop enough campaign insiders are feeling nervous articles about both sides, and you can hedge against the uncertainty of the outcome. This, too, points to a broader problem with coverage not just of this election, but of elections in general—the over-allocation of journalistic attention to figuring out what’s going to happen, and how an outlet might preempt it, as opposed to what’s already happening. Throughout this cycle, I’ve written frequently about shortcomings in coverage of the latter, particularly when it comes to Donald Trump and his rhetoric. I won’t recapitulate here (and there have, in certain respects, been recent improvements in the urgency of such coverage), but paying these threats more heed was always a better use of our time than astrology.
Relatedly, if there’s one pathology of American political journalism that annoys me more than any other, it’s what I’ve previously called its “permanent election” mode: journalists treat the next presidential election as the most important story in the world, while undercovering whole chunks of the presidencies that they yield in between times. (The wall-to-wall coverage of Joe Biden’s age earlier this year was justified, at least in part, by the fact that he is arguably the most powerful man in the world—and yet, once it stopped being an election story, the media focus on it dissipated, like air shooting out of a balloon.) Lehmann wrote last week that “one of the only positive structural developments of the 2024 election cycle was the inadvertent discovery that a greatly truncated campaign season [produced by Biden’s withdrawal from the race in July] is a civic boon”—and the period between then and now has still been the equivalent of almost nine Japanese election campaigns, as the Washington Post’s Mikhail Klimentov noted yesterday. We should take the realization spelled out by Lehmann and turn it into a journalistic boon, too. Take it from this Brit: American elections are far, far too long. There is no obligation to cover them on a perpetual war footing.
Taken together, this year’s election story has felt like the product of staring—for a really, really long time—into a muddy puddle and concluding that, yep, it’s full of mud. It didn’t have to be this way; again, Trump’s threats, in particular, are happening now and are clear as day. Also, though, if election coverage this year has been a story of prolonged doubt, this has at least been exacerbated by factors related to the structure of the business within which journalists work: not just financial decline, but the fragmentation of the media landscape and audiences’ attention; it’s hard to build a clear, unified picture of anything if news consumers are only seeing one shard of it, and even then a different shard from their neighbor. As far back as last summer, Semafor’s Max Tani dubbed this the “fragmentation election”—a formulation that, as the Times media reporter Ben Mullin put it recently, turned out to be “incredibly prescient.” In media terms, this has also been dubbed “the podcast election,” for the growing influence of that medium (which my colleague Josh Hersh wrote about last week). But this in some respects is just a different way of saying the same thing, since different people listen to different podcasts. (When Tani wrote last year, even Joe Rogan—the wildly popular podcaster most recently seen interviewing Trump and trying to dictate the terms on which he might also interview Harris—had only a 5 percent market share.) CNN’s Brian Stelter wrote last week about the rising power of people who clip election-related footage and send it viral on social media—people who trade, in other words, on literal fragments.
Yesterday, Tani’s colleague Smith, in making his pre-election post-election media-discourse prediction, warned, in the context of his point about the media neglecting suburban women voters at the expense of young men, that if Harris wins, “we’ll be conducting internal investigations on why we spent so much time talking about Joe Rogan.” Whether or not this comes to pass, and even allowing for the structural factors I outlined above, what the media does choose to talk about during an election still matters. Even if we can’t set the agenda across the fragments, at the most basic level, it remains our job to explain what is true and important about the world, however people may receive that information. As I’ve argued here, too much coverage of this election has instead prioritized covering things that may or may not be true, while, in some cases, missing the things that were demonstrably important.
Other notable stories:
- For CJR, Masrat Zahra and Meghnad Bose traveled to Dearborn, Michigan, a city with a large Arab American population, to find out how residents are consuming election news. They “said overwhelmingly that the war in Gaza ranked at the top of their list of political concerns, a view informed both by personal connection and news consumption habits,” Bose writes. Also for CJR, Feven Merid reports on a new press credential, issued by the Institute for Nonprofit News and a press freedom group, aimed at helping reporters “to work freely in a more fragmented and hostile media landscape.” And Gary Miles, the editor and publisher of the Detroit News, pushed back on Jeff Bezos’s rationale for ending presidential endorsements at the Post, arguing that he has perpetuated “a mischaracterization about media trust.”
- In media business and jobs news, the conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt confirmed to Fox that he will no longer contribute columns to the Post after he stormed out of a Post webshow during a discussion of Trump’s rhetoric about election theft. Elsewhere, Katie Robertson, of the Times, profiled the Daily Beast, where staff seem deeply unconvinced by the plans of the site’s new leaders, Joanna Coles and Ben Sherwood. (One former editor at large said that the site has devolved of late into “tacky clickbait.”) CNBC reports that the Antenna Group, a Greek media company, is in talks to buy Time from Marc Benioff. And The Oregonian will be a broadsheet newspaper again, having previously switched to a more compact format.
- The US State Department told the Associated Press that it believes Iran has detained Reza Valizadeh, an Iranian American journalist who has worked for Radio Farda, a US government-supported international broadcaster; he was reportedly arrested several months ago after returning to the country amid threats to his family. In other international press-freedom news, Kristína Kövešová, a journalist in Slovakia, was attacked and seriously injured while reporting on gang-related violence last week. And better news out of Algeria, where authorities pardoned and freed Ihsane el-Kadi, a prominent independent journalist who was arrested nearly two years ago.
- Authorities in Israel arrested four suspects—including an aide to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—for illegally taking and leaking classified information that could, a judge said, have caused “significant damage” to negotiations aimed at freeing hostages held by Hamas in Gaza. Many of the details remain murky—and it’s unclear if Netanyahu is implicated—but as the Times notes, the probe involves “the publication and manipulation of real and purported intelligence information in media outlets abroad,” namely the Jewish Chronicle in the UK and Bild in Germany.
- And Quincy Jones, the music impresario, has died. He was ninety-one. Among many other accomplishments, Jones dabbled in the print media world, helping to found Vibe, a hip-hop magazine, and also copublishing Spin and Blaze. When Vibe shuttered, in 2009, the media critic David Carr wrote that the publication did not “sanitize rap so much as give it its cultural due,” adding that “if there were no Vibe, contemporary black music and culture would not be quite so writ into the mainstream.” Richard Prince’s journal-isms newsletter has more reflections on Jones’s media legacy.
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