It was the first day of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and journalists covering it were annoyed. There were long lines to get into the main venue; according to Politico, various TV producers pleaded with security staff to let their talent skip ahead or they wouldn’t make it to air on time. (CNN’s Dana Bash, who had popped out for a break, was overheard saying, “Maybe this is a mistake.”) Inside, the internet was unreliable and there was less workspace for reporters than in years past—and also compared with the recent Republican convention in Milwaukee, which, some journalists suggested, was more welcoming, at least from a logistical standpoint. The broadcast suites at the DNC were smaller, too, and more expensive. Semafor’s Max Tani wrote that, while there may be no “lamer story than the media whining about access,” the “last days of the Biden administration—when carefully-managed access concealed a president’s waning capacity to campaign—served as a reminder that whiny-sounding complaints are one line of the defense of a free press.” A convention spokesperson countered, in a statement, that the Democrats “value a free press, and our convention is a reflection of that.”
Also reporting difficulty getting in: at least one DNC delegate with a Palestinian flag; he told Drop Site News, a politics- and war-focused newsroom founded recently by veterans of The Intercept, that when he tried to attend a reception on Sunday, a security guard found the flag and he was ushered away from the floor. Yesterday, however, a delegate from Florida did manage to sneak in a banner that read “STOP ARMING ISRAEL,” by hiding it under her dress; later, it was unfurled in the arena while President Biden was addressing the floor. According to reporters present, other delegates rushed to obscure the banner with pro-Biden signs and a light shining on that section of the arena was dimmed; as Ryan Grim, of Drop Site, and a journalist from the progressive news show Democracy Now! tried to film the scene, their cameras were blocked by delegates, one of whom, Grim wrote, showed “frankly impressive determination” in following him around and thrusting a “USA” placard in front of his phone. The banner was at one point ripped away. (Arunima Chaudhary, a high school journalist, captured footage of that moment and shared it with the Chicago Sun-Times.)
Ahead of the DNC, protest—particularly, but not exclusively, about the war in Gaza—was expected to be a big part of the story; as we’ve noted, various news organizations have played up the perceived parallels between this DNC and the one in 1968, which also took place in Chicago and was marred by a police crackdown on demonstrators protesting the war in Vietnam. Yesterday, as the first major protest of this convention got underway outside of the venue, major outlets sent reporters to cover it; when I checked the homepage of the New York Times this morning, a quintuple-bylined story about the scene was still in the second most prominent slot, with a headline attesting to “left-wing divisions” and an opening that situated the protest as a “thorny counterpoint” to the projection of Democratic unity inside the convention hall. At one point, a group of protesters breached a fence outside the venue; some threw things at the police. Per the Times, officers urged both protesters and reporters to leave the area.
While numerous headlines centered the disruption, those behind it were a minority, and the protest was largely peaceful; other headlines noted the thousands of people who showed up, or led with that fact. But various outlets and individual journalists reported that the turnout appeared to be much lower than organizers had forecast; my former CJR colleague Cameron Joseph, now a reporter at the Christian Science Monitor, tweeted a photo of a pile of unclaimed protest signs that was shared widely online. In the end, the Times wrote, “there were some clashes between activists and police officers, but nothing on the scale of 1968.”
Beyond Chicago, headlines about the war—and its global cultural and political ramifications—continued apace yesterday, competing in the news cycle, to varying degrees of prominence, with stories coming out of the DNC. Antony Blinken, the secretary of state, said that Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, had accepted a modified ceasefire proposal and urged Hamas to do likewise, characterizing it as “probably the best, maybe the last, opportunity” to reach a deal. When I checked the Times’ homepage earlier, this was in the fourth most prominent block, alongside a story about Hamas and Islamic Jihad claiming responsibility for a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv over the weekend; no one except the bomber was killed, but this was possibly the first such attack inside Israel since 2016, and Hamas and Islamic Jihad threatened more to follow. Al Jazeera published a story claiming that Israeli strikes killed at least thirty-five people in Gaza yesterday; Reuters published an interview with a mother who fears that her baby might contract polio, after the disease was confirmed to be present in the territory for the first time in twenty-five years. The progressive magazine The Nation published an article about journalists in Western countries, especially those from Arab or Muslim backgrounds, facing “retaliation” over supposedly biased coverage of the conflict. The Free Press, a site founded by the former Times columnist Bari Weiss, profiled John Fetterman, the hawkishly pro-Israel Democratic senator, who is skipping the DNC; Fetterman said that he’s spending the time with his kids instead, but the author concluded that it’s hard to imagine Fetterman being welcome at the convention. His own communications director told the Free Press: “I don’t agree with him” about Gaza, adding, “I have a sense that his international views are a lot less nuanced than my generation.”
The story of the war occasionally breached the bubble around the DNC and those who are attending it. Kamala Harris, who has rarely faced on-the-record questions from reporters since replacing Biden at the top of the Democratic ticket a month ago, did take a few during a campaign swing en route to Chicago, and was asked about the prospects for a ceasefire deal; yesterday, at the “CNN-Politico Grill” (where “political bigwigs talk about policy and politics” at the DNC), Sen. Gary Peters made “significant Michigan and Middle East news,” in the words of Politico’s Jonathan Martin, when he told Martin that Harris should publicly differentiate herself from Biden on Gaza. Apparently for the first time ever, an authorized panel on Palestinian human rights took place inside the DNC, and it got some coverage in mainstream and left-leaning outlets; the Associated Press reported that Harris allowing the forum represented an “olive branch” to pro-Palestinian activists, some of whom held a press conference yesterday and asked for an opportunity to speak from the main stage, too. Last night, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Raphael Warnock mentioned Gaza in remarks from that stage. (Also onstage last night: the basketball coach Steve Kerr, whose father, a preeminent expert on the Middle East, was assassinated by militants in Lebanon in the eighties. Various journalists pointed to this history, though Kerr himself didn’t bring it up.)
Still, per the Times, even Ocasio-Cortez “largely sidestepped painful fissures with her party” over Gaza (she mentioned it in the context of praising Harris for working toward a ceasefire), and this comment certainly wasn’t the main headline takeaway from her remarks. Similar could be said of Biden himself after he took the stage (significantly later than planned, occasioning more grumbling from reporters). Biden not only said that he wanted to end the war, but also gestured—charitably—to the protesters in the streets outside. “They have a point,” he said, adding that “a lot of innocent people are being killed on both sides.” This remark did make some headlines. But the topline coverage of the speech in various major outlets more often had a valedictory quality, with prominent references to late goodbyes and torch-passing.
This was understandable, at least atmospherically. But Biden’s allies had stressed before his speech that it would not be about looking backward—and Biden himself stressed that he still has “five months left in my presidency” and “a lot to do.” In the Middle East, a lot can happen in five hours, let alone five months. Not even that long after Biden had finished talking, Netanyahu announced that an overnight Israeli military operation had recovered the bodies of six hostages who had been held by Hamas in Gaza. And Gaza’s civil defense authorities said that Israel had just struck a school housing displaced families in the territory, killing at least ten people. (Israel claimed that Hamas militants had been using the school as a base.)
The delegates with the “STOP ARMING ISRAEL” banner also got inside the convention, of course, no matter how much some other delegates may not have wanted journalists to see it. In simple form, the message on the banner echoed a letter that over a hundred journalists and media groups—including the Freedom of the Press Foundation and Drop Site News—sent to Blinken last week, demanding an embargo on arms sales to Israel in light of the high number of journalists killed during the war. “By providing the weapons being used to deliberately kill journalists,” it said, “you are complicit in one of the gravest affronts to press freedom today.”
Other notable stories:
- Vinson Cunningham, a critic at The New Yorker, traced the evolution of Harris’s public persona, “from tough prosecutor to frozen interviewee to joyful candidate.” “It’s always been a mistake to think of Harris as a next-gen version of Barack Obama, as commentators who are fixated on color and on vibes sometimes do,” Cunningham writes. “If Harris has a televisual twin, it’s Clair Huxtable, of The Cosby Show, played by Harris’s fellow Howard University alumna Phylicia Rashad. Harris and Huxtable are both attorneys who sometimes get telegenically tough, and who portray upward mobility—in politics as in life—as totally compatible with the day-by-day dictates of justice.”
- Phil Donahue, the longtime TV talk show host, has died. He was eighty-eight. Donahue reinvented the genre “with a democratic flourish,” the Times recalls, “inviting audiences to question his guests on topics as resolutely high-minded as human rights and international relations, and as unblushingly lowbrow as male strippers and safe-sex orgies.” Later, he had a show on MSNBC, but it was swiftly canceled; the network cited poor ratings, but Donahue and other observers suspected that his vocal opposition to the Iraq War was the real reason. He told CJR’s Maria Bustillos in 2020: “I was naive.”
- ABC News announced that Almin Karamehmedovic, the senior executive producer of its flagship evening newscast, will be the next president of the network, succeeding Kim Godwin, whose tenure, the Times notes, “was marred by infighting and incessant leaks.” Per the Times, the appointment is a “positive omen” for David Muir, the newscast’s host. A former ABC executive told the Post that Karamehmedovic is a “great, great choice” who “cares more about the people, the journalism, and the organization than himself.”
- Earlier this week, the US journalist Masha Gessen—who was convicted in absentia in Russia recently for supposedly spreading false information about the country’s military—said that they had been “functionally denied” a visa to travel to Australia after reporting the conviction on an application form and being asked to provide documents from Russian police. Gessen’s visa application has since been granted.
- And The New Yorker’s Naaman Zhou investigated the mysterious case of newspapers going missing—perhaps stolen—after being delivered to the New York City neighborhood of Yorkville. The apparent thief has “particular tastes,” Zhou writes, in that they only seem to take copies of the Times and the New York Post. “I get Newsday,” one local resident said in an online discussion of the mystery, “so maybe I am safe.”
ICYMI: The DNC, and the context of all that came before
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic, among other outlets. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today. Find him on Twitter @Jon_Allsop.