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Over the weekend, the first Fox News Sunday of the post-Chris Wallace era made headlines thanks to one of its guests: Joe Manchin, the Democratic senator from West Virginia. Bret Baier, in as a guest host, asked Manchin about the status of the “Build Back Better” bill, a package of social and climate spending that is a crucial part of President Biden’s agenda and already passed the House, but has stalled in the Senate as Manchin, the key vote, has dragged his feet. “I’ve always said this, Bret: if I can’t go home and explain it to the people of West Virginia, I can’t vote for it,” Manchin said. “And I cannot vote to continue with this piece of legislation. I just can’t.” Baier’s eyebrows visibly shot up. “You’re done?” he asked. “This is… this is a no?” Manchin confirmed that “this is a no on this legislation.” The political mediasphere quickly went into overdrive. As Niall Stanage, The Hill’s White House columnist, noted, the Fox hit was the third time that Manchin, “Democratic senator from one of the nation’s poorest states,” has used a right-of-center news outlet to punch a hole in Biden’s agenda, having recently also done so via the opinion page of the Wall Street Journal and an executive summit hosted by the same paper.
Manchin did not give Baier advance warning that he would be committing news on his show; nor, apparently, did he give the White House or top Congressional Democrats much of a heads up, informing them of his impending remarks half an hour before he went on air, and only then through an aide. A few hours later, Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, hit back in a blistering statement that was reportedly authorized by Biden himself, claiming that Manchin had been privately on board with a sizable spending package as recently as a few days prior, and effectively accusing him of lying. The Dem-on-Dem drama, inevitably, proved irresistible to political reporters, and multi-bylined postmortems of Biden and Manchin’s working relationship quickly ensued. At yesterday’s White House briefing, reporters barraged Psaki with questions on the same theme: What was the rationale behind her statement? Did the White House regret its treatment of Manchin? After “taking Senator Manchin to the woodshed,” would the White House now reach out to him? Had Biden done so already? Did Biden “feel betrayed by his friend?” (“I’m not going to relitigate the tick-tock of yesterday,” Psaki said, before repeatedly referring back to her statement.) Psaki was also asked if she’d read an op-ed by Steve Clemons, of The Hill, making the case that the White House’s “incivility” was to blame for “losing” Manchin. Politico splashed Clemons’s claim, referring to him as the “Manchin whisperer.”
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Not that the press really needed a Manchin whisperer—by this point, he’d spoken again for himself, not to Fox or the Journal, but on MetroNews, a West Virginia radio station where the host, Hoppy Kercheval, asked Manchin to explain himself to his voters. Manchin replied that while other Democrats had figured they could simply “badger and beat [him] up” to get his vote, “I’m from West Virginia—I’m not from where they’re from, where they can just beat the living crap out of people and think they’ll be submissive.” Manchin also seemed to suggest that, for all his hurt feelings, he was never really likely to vote through Build Back Better in the first place, and some media commentators have since suggested that his fellow Democrats were naïve to ever think that they could get him to yes; Elana Schor, Politico’s Congress editor, accused them of “magical thinking.” If this is the case (and it’s not totally clear if or how it is, more on which below), then some members of the press—who have spent months glued to Manchin’s every utterance, and centered him in political coverage to a (sometimes literally) absurd degree—might be guilty of the same. Manchin is a powerful figure, sitting as he does at the center of an evenly divided Senate, and his stances merit close media scrutiny. As I’ve written before, he also sits at the center of less obviously useful storylines that are nonetheless catnip to many journalists: intraparty drama and the appearance of inter-party dialogue.
As I’ve also written, recent coverage of Manchin reflects broader problems with coverage of Biden’s domestic agenda as a whole: too much of it has obsessed over personalities, topline cost estimates, and procedural jargon, while too little coverage has elucidated the crucial stakes of the policies Biden is proposing, not least to counter the climate crisis. There has been coverage of these stakes, including around climate—at the height of a previous Manchin-fueled news cycle, for instance, major news outlets reported on the effects of climate change in West Virginia and Manchin’s deep financial ties to the state’s coal industry—but climate has been nowhere near as central as it should be to coverage of Biden’s agenda, especially on TV. We’ve seen a similar pattern in the latest burst of Manchin coverage. Major outlets ran sharp stories, including around Manchin’s history of fighting key climate bills; even Baier, on Fox News Sunday, asked him about his coal interests. Elsewhere, the climate story has gotten woefully lost amid the media focus on mudslinging. By my count, across six hours of programming yesterday evening, Manchin’s name was mentioned nearly a hundred fifty times on CNN; the word “climate” was mentioned ten times. At the White House briefing, just one reporter asked Psaki whether, without Build Back Better, Biden can hit the climate targets he’s set for 2030.
Similar dynamics apply to coverage of the social-spending provisions in the bill, many of which have been largely ignored at the top levels of the news cycle, others of which—the extension of Biden’s child tax credit, for example—are often covered, in political journalism, more as sticking points or polling issues than real money that affects real families. It is important, of course, to cover sticking points because policies only have an impact if they become law. But coverage organized around legislative inflection points, and not the policies themselves, can drive a perception of the process that feels untethered and circular, which in turn can affect lawmakers’ incentives to act or not. And it can be easy to overreact to individual inflection points in isolation. Much of the early coverage of Manchin’s Fox interview was highly finalistic, but that tone has since given way to greater uncertainty, with reporters and opinionators debating whether Build Back Better is really dead yet, and Politico reporting that Manchin and Biden have now spoken and share a sense that talks will resume “in some form.” On MSNBC last night, Lawrence O’Donnell suggested that while the press heard Manchin say “no” on Fox, Biden, a former senator himself, will have heard Manchin say no “on this legislation.” (Emphasis mine.)
On Sunday, in the aftermath of the Fox interview, Politico’s Playbook newsletter concluded that Build Back Better “is dead. The only question is whether some new, more Manchin-shaped bill can be revived that salvages some key pieces of the Biden climate and social policy agenda.” This is actually a pretty crucial question—ultimately, “Build Back Better” is a slogan, and the death of a slogan isn’t really important. The huge scope of the bill has long defied media attempts to communicate its stakes in shorthand so it’s understandable that we fell back on its name, but the individual policies have always mattered most and that will remain the case going forward, whatever rubric they fall under. The bill’s ambitious sweep has often been lauded by its supporters, but it’s also true that the sweep is a consequence of America’s dysfunctional political system; in many other democracies, policy priorities get passed one at a time, which makes it easier for the press to scrutinize them in individual detail. The American press must do this work of disentanglement itself. Even if it’s easier to stick to what Joe Manchin said on Fox.
Below, more on Build Back Better, Manchin, and Biden:
- The stakes for the media: The Build Back Better bill, as passed in the House, contained a provision that would create a tax credit to support local news organizations, some of which stand to benefit to the tune of millions of dollars should the provision become law. As Marc Tracy, a media reporter at the New York Times, pointed out yesterday, the future of the tax credit is now uncertain. Poynter’s Rick Edmonds reported last week (before Manchin’s Fox interview) that proponents of the measure recently met with Manchin’s staff, who assured them that he “strongly supports” helping local news. Whether that translates into legislative action, of course, remains to be seen.
- Inflategate: In his Fox interview and elsewhere, Manchin has cited concerns around inflation for his opposition to passing Build Back Better in its current form. Reporters have sometimes failed to interrogate this rationale, even though, as Jim Tankersley writes in the Times, “economic evidence strongly suggests Mr. Manchin is wrong” to say that the bill would exacerbate rising prices. The Intercept’s Jon Schwarz argues that Manchin is “faking” his inflation fears, and takes issue with the headline on Tankersley’s piece—“The Path Ahead for Biden: Overcome Manchin’s Inflation Fears”—arguing that it “cannot be squared with Manchin’s words less than two months ago.”
- The “real president”: Last week, Vice President Kamala Harris appeared for an interview on Charlamagne Tha God’s show on Comedy Central. At one point, Charlamagne asked her whether “the real president of this country” is Manchin or Biden. “C’mon Charlamagne,” Harris replied, “it’s Joe Biden.” Charlamagne pushed back—“I can’t tell sometimes,” he said—but Harris went on: “Don’t start talking like a Republican about asking whether or not he’s president,” she said. “The reality is, because we are in office, we do things like the child tax credit, which is going to reduce Black child poverty by fifty percent,” she added, before listing other administration policies.
- Coming attractions: Today, at 2.30pm Eastern, Biden will deliver a speech to the nation as COVID surges again via the rapid spread of the Omicron variant. Psaki told reporters yesterday that the speech would not be “about locking the country down”; instead, Biden is expected to announce other interventions, including a federal effort to buy at-home testing kits and mail them to those who want one. Tomorrow, meanwhile, Biden will sit for a one-on-one interview with David Muir, the anchor of World News Tonight on ABC.
Other notable stories:
- For CJR’s new archival issue, celebrating our sixtieth anniversary, Amy Davidson Sorkin writes that “to look back at the coverage of crises in the pages of this magazine is to be reminded that trust is the product of a never-ending negotiation between the press, the public, and those in power.” She references CJR’s coverage of the Kennedy assassination and the violence around the Democratic convention in Chicago in 1968, as well as our interview with Walter Lippmann and review of Katharine Graham’s memoir. “Many events of the past few years—notably the response to George Floyd’s murder—have supported the belief that documenting makes a difference,” Davidson Sorkin writes, “even if the larger ecosystem of public trust is in a precarious state.”
- Yesterday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the Omicron variant is now by far the most dominant strain of COVID-19 in the US, making up nearly three quarters of confirmed new cases last week, up from twelve percent the week prior. In other pandemic news, Politico’s Erin Banco reports that the US is “still struggling to gather accurate and timely domestic data” on COVID, and is increasingly reliant on international figures. And Fox told staffers in its New York offices that they will soon need to show proof of vaccination against COVID, taking away an option for employees to test weekly instead. The move brings Fox in line with New York City’s new vaccine mandate.
- Yesterday was a bumper day for media-jobs news. The Associated Press named Anna Johnson as its Washington bureau chief. Mark Leibovich, of the Times, is joining The Atlantic. Susan Goldberg is stepping down as editor in chief of National Geographic to take an academic post at Arizona State University. Bina Venkataraman is stepping down as editorial page editor at the Boston Globe. And Michael Fanone—a DC police officer who was beaten at the Capitol on January 6 and has since spoken out about the attack, to the chagrin of his colleagues—is quitting the force and joining CNN as a contributor.
- For our archival issue, June Cross explores the evolution of “objectivity” over time. When Cross worked at PBS NewsHour, in the early eighties, she once complained to an editor about the show’s lack of Black and Latino guests. “He fixed his gaze on me and explained that the NewsHour’s job was to enlighten the public about policy conversations that took place behind closed doors, where important decisions were made. Since minorities weren’t in those rooms, I recall him saying, they couldn’t appear on our air.”
- Yesterday, a judge sentenced Robert Lemke, a Trump supporter who sent a barrage of threats to politicians and journalists in the aftermath of the 2020 election, to three years in prison. Lemke’s attorney said that he had succumbed to lies pushed by Trump and his boosters in Congress and right-wing media. CNN’s Don Lemon, who appeared in court as a victim, pushed back. “For people like him, it is never their fault,” Lemon said.
- The Marshall Project’s Keri Blakinger profiles The Tank, a prison radio station in Texas that “allows men on one of the most restrictive death rows in the country to have a voice that reaches beyond their cells.” Usually, Blakinger writes, people incarcerated at the prison aren’t permitted to write to each other, but the warden made an exception for The Tank, allowing them to pass along essays and poems to be read by the station’s DJs.
- For our archival issue, Sewell Chan reflects on the persistent struggles of the media industry. “What’s striking, when reading through the archives of the Columbia Journalism Review, is that this has always been a tough business,” Chan writes. Journalists like to trade “nostalgic memories of ‘the good old days,’ and yet the truth is that the old days weren’t all that good—or at least they weren’t very good for very many people.”
- For the MIT Technology Review, Sahar Massachi, a former staffer on Facebook’s civic integrity team, argues that we can save social media by treating it more like a real-life city. “Why don’t real cities see millions of citizens fall into cults in a manner of months?” Massachi asks. “Why don’t they have waves of Nazi recruitment? What does the physical city have that the virtual one doesn’t? Physics. That is, physical limits.”
- And Politico’s Nancy Scola profiles Ken Buck, a Republican Congressman and critic of Big Tech who has decided to boycott Google, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter as a “little personal protest” while the work of lawmaking plays out. “People who abstain completely from social media and other big-tech products are sometimes called ‘digital vegans,’” Scola writes. “Buck, by necessity, turns out to be more of a digital flexitarian.”
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