Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter.
Maybe it’s the sixties again. The Democratic National Convention will open today in Chicago, and there will be protests. (It’s fair to say that the press has noticed the parallel, including us here at CJR.) Or maybe, as my sometime CJR collaborator Bill Grueskin suggested yesterday, it’s the seventies. The Republican candidate for president is labeling his opponent a communist, complete with hammer-and-sickle iconography, and seems obsessed with Time magazine. (This could all be out of the fifties as well, but there’s talk of “price controls” in the air, too, to go with all the communism.) Or maybe it’s the nineties. The DNC will open today in Chicago, and there will be… okay, there probably won’t be the Macarena. But we can dream.
But surely it’s more like the noughties are back? Invocations of Obama-like levels of political energy are in the headlines, as is Shepard Fairey, the artist behind the iconic Obama “HOPE” poster who is now the artist behind a similar poster featuring Kamala Harris. Ezra Klein is “a breakout media star” of this political cycle, in the words of Semafor’s Max Tani. (Bustle’s Maggie Bullock asked last week, “Is Everybody Horny for Ezra Klein?”) The actor Martin Sheen, a/k/a President Bartlet from The West Wing, was at the White House last week, then on MSNBC yesterday, tearing up as he was shown a scene that depicted him alongside his late costar John Spencer (who died in 2005, while The West Wing was still filming). As Jen Psaki, the host of the show on which Sheen appeared, put it, the scene in question featured a fictionalized DNC at which “the historically successful, but aging, Democratic president prepares to step aside from public life and throws his support behind a young, impressive, diverse, inspiring successor.”
But don’t be silly—it’s actually the 2010s all over again! As I scrolled Twitter (sorry, X) this morning, I saw a clip of the Psaki-Sheen interview, but not before I’d seen a post confirming the four celebrity hosts for the (real life) DNC this week, two of whom—Kerry Washington and Tony Goldwyn—starred on Scandal, a more recent (if still somewhat dated) political drama. I also saw a report from CNN confirming that Hillary Clinton will appear at the convention tonight; a source familiar with her thinking said that “she will talk about how many cracks have been put in the glass ceiling.” If Donald Trump depicting Harris as a communist felt very fifties/seventies, the fact that he did so on Twitter (sorry, X)—and that his post drove coverage in sections of the political press—felt very 2016. (Until last week, Trump had largely stayed away from the platform since he was banned by its old owners in the wake of January 6—even after its new owner, Elon Musk, invited him back.) The communism attack line “shows how terminally online Trump and his allies are,” the journalist Noah Shachtman argued (also on X).
But if this is true, surely it’s the 2020s? The media climate around the DNC further proves the point. Last week, Axios reported that the organizers plan to stream the event on social platforms that use (or allow) vertical video—TikTok, Instagram, YouTube—in the hopes of drawing in a young digital audience. To the same end, the organizers have, for the first time, credentialed hundreds of influencers and content creators as if they were old-timey journalists, while setting up a VIP “creator platform” occupying prime real estate on the convention floor and giving a handful of them formal speaking slots. (One, John Russell, is a self-described “dirtbag journalist” who says he is “biased for the working class.”) Semafor wrote yesterday that “the national media is old news” at the DNC, which is “all about digital.”
As the media historian Michael Socolow suggested to my colleague Kevin Lind recently, journalists often find comfort in historical references at moments that are otherwise uncharted or hard to explain with certainty. (“We all like history,” Socolow said. “We believe in it almost spiritually.”) Yesterday, CNN’s Jake Tapper put the perceived 1968 parallel to J.B. Pritzker, the governor of Illinois. “I know reporters like to harken back to ’68 because there’s a lot of good footage you get to point to,” Pritzker replied, but 2024 is “a whole different ball game.” (Tapper interjected that CNN had harked back to ’96 as well, by playing the Macarena.) In saying this, Pritzker echoed Socolow and other historians who find such comparisons inexact. As you might have guessed by now, I’ve been struck, in recent days, by how many nuggets in the pre-DNC news cycle have echoed media moments past—but the fact that they don’t recall any one moment in isolation itself testifies to the inexactness of historical precedent. And the meat in each nugget is new. The tagline on Fairey’s Harris poster is explicitly future-facing: “FORWARD.” The recent West Wing media tour has actually been a function of the show’s datedness, pegged to a book that is coming out on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its debut. As Bustle noted (emphasis mine), Ezra Klein “is not some breakout star”; indeed, “it’s hard to recall a mediascape without him.”
Two months ago, I explored the contours of the present media moment and concluded that it was a muddled one, of palpable disorientation and tiredness—the result of a wild political landscape, but also sharply declining finances and readership at various traditional outlets, and (as I explored more recently) growing claims of their obsolescence, including from those inside the fold. In many ways, the pre-DNC nuggets I included above—and many others—crystallize this sense, perhaps more clearly than those around any other single news event this year.
Going in, Harris has still yet to submit to a formal interview with a traditional outlet, a fact bemoaned as a bad sign for civic health by many journalists and media-watchers but openly cheered by others, including in some establishment-y precincts. As noted above, influencers appear primed to take over the DNC. (Ed O’Keefe, of CBS, told Deadline’s Ted Johnson that one convention “subplot” to watch will be how the Democratic Party “allows access for them versus the nonpartisan press corps.”) If Klein got his start as a liberal influencer of sorts—he was an early blogger, part of a pack known as the “juicebox mafia”—he now helps set the Democratic Party weather from inside the New York Times, that most establishment-y of precincts. But—at least according to Semafor’s Tani—even Klein’s growing profile and the attendant commercial success of his podcast poses a dilemma for the Times, which has been trying to steer its brand away from perceptions of progressive voiciness.
And yet, in some ways, it feels like a different media moment has come into focus since I wrote in June—or, at least, a more complicated version of the one I outlined. Here, too, the DNC helps us to see it more clearly. Harris’s dramatic ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket has provided political coverage with a jolt of energy. (“How to watch the Democratic National Convention?” the Arizona Republic media critic Bill Goodykoontz asked last week. “With about 10,000% more interest than a month ago.”) If envoys of the traditional media must share access with envoys of the new this year, there will still be an awful lot of the former in Chicago. Per Deadline, traditional outlets, which have already benefited from a spike in audience engagement amid all the recent drama, are expecting an uptick in interest around the convention, too. “The last few weeks have been something people will be reading about for the next 100 years,” Seni Tienabeso, the executive director at ABC News Live, told Johnson. We believe in history almost spiritually, including, apparently, when it is unfolding in front of our eyes.
What to make of all this, as we grasp to make sense of this moment, for our audiences and for ourselves? The best course, perhaps, is to embrace the muddle—or at least to avoid exaggerating our way out of it. We should listen to, even enjoy, historical echoes where they appear, without overstating their prescience. We should, of course, be concerned about the longer-term financial decline of the news business, but without buying into premature reports of our irrelevance. (We still have a lot of power, as I wrote recently.) Most immediately, at the DNC, we can bring an appropriately skeptical eye to proceedings; this, after all, is what separates the value of journalism from many other forms of “content creation.” The protests outside notwithstanding, this will be a stage-managed event, as all conventions are. We shouldn’t oversell the stagecraft.
Four years ago, the Democratic convention was a virtual affair due to the pandemic—itself a highly disorienting moment, for the media and everyone else. In many ways, of course, this was a radical departure from the normal, in-person convention—but as the historian Heather Hendershot noted at the time, it was perhaps less helpful to see the digitized 2020 proceedings “as a divergence from the regular way of doing business than a culmination of that approach, in which total control has finally, theoretically, been achieved.” (Separately, Hendershot appeared on CJR’s podcast The Kicker last week to talk 1968; you can listen here.) As I noted in 2020, some political reporters saw the lack of a real convention as an opportunity—to focus on substance over pageantry, and to interrogate whether conventions are valuable news events at all. To use a very 2020s word, maybe this was just “cope.” But it remains sound advice, even post-COVID. There will be plenty of substance to care about at the DNC, and in the streets outside, this week: stories that may echo the past, but are specific to the present, and look FORWARD.
Other notable stories:
- Perry Bacon Jr., of the Washington Post, weighed in on the debate over whether Harris should do more formal interviews, arguing that—while “many of the questions asked at the White House briefings and on the campaign trail aren’t particularly sharp”—engaging with the press is a democratic imperative, and that Harris can “speak to journalists who specialize in policy reporting.” The media “is not just campaign trail reporters,” Bacon writes, noting that Harris could sit down with journalists who specialize in foreign affairs, the economy, or immigration. “Reporters at Chalkbeat (which specializes in education), Capital B (issues affecting specifically Black Americans), Bolts (democracy at the local and state level) and the Marshall Project (criminal justice) would almost certainly not ask Harris about whatever Trump said that day if she sat down with them.”
- The New Yorker’s Stephania Taladrid spoke with Jorge Ramos, the legendary Univision anchor, about his career and journalistic philosophy. “When I’m talking with someone who has a lot of power, and especially those who abuse their power, I have to be intensely visible,” Ramos said. “It doesn’t mean that being invisible in certain situations as a reporter isn’t the right thing. I took that role when I was in Ukraine, and recently in Israel. But if I’m talking with Hugo Chávez or Carlos Salinas de Gortari, or Fidel Castro, or Nicolás Maduro, or Donald Trump, I have to take a stand. And that’s something that I understood late in my career as a journalist. For many, many years, I was concentrated only on the reporting side but not on questioning those who are in power.”
- On Friday, the Hollywood Reporter laid off four staffers including an executive managing editor; Semafor notes that the cuts followed a “messy breakup” between the Reporter and Lachlan Cartwright, a high-profile media reporter who joined the publication earlier this year. In other media-business news, CNN’s Liam Reilly explored the financial decline of local radio as a medium after one New York City station announced cuts last week and another said that it will soon sign off for good. And, in happier news, the Minneapolis Star Tribune is expanding its coverage beyond the Twin Cities area—and rebranding itself as the Minnesota Star Tribune to reflect its new, wider focus.
- The Post’s Will Sommer recounts what happened after Malcolm Harris—a “Marxist journalist with a sense of humor and three books critiquing capitalism to his name”—found a “Project 2025” duffel bag from the right-wing Heritage Foundation on the street in Washington. Harris found documents inside the bag; they were not “that crazy,” he said (they appeared to be part of a Heritage internship program), and yet, after he posted about the bag on X, a Project 2025 staffer reported to the police that it had been stolen. In the end, Harris returned the bag.
- And John Lansing—who served as head of the US Agency for Global Media, then as chief executive of NPR before stepping down from the broadcaster earlier this year—has died. He was sixty-seven. Lansing oversaw “a significant shift in workforce hiring and notable changes in demographics for NPR’s workforce and leadership team,” NPR’s David Folkenflik writes, though the network’s audiences have not yet diversified in the same way. Despite implementing layoffs last year, he won praise from the head of NPR’s union. “He did the best he could,” the union leader said. “Crisis after crisis—oh my God.”
ICYMI: Reflections on 1968—from journalists who were there
Has America ever needed a media defender more than now? Help us by joining CJR today.
