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In the run-up to the election, Clare Malone, a reporter for The New Yorker, was in Lackawanna County, a bellwether area in the swing state of Pennsylvania that also happens to be home to Scranton, where Joe Biden was born. She was looking to understand what it was like to be inundated with election information and misinformation, be it through ads, word of mouth, or something else. “I wanted to convey the perspectives of the Trump supporters that I spoke with, like Susanne Green, a person who’s very active in her community. She founded a local food bank; she’s a very sharp, organized person who’s grown disaffected with the government,” Malone told me recently. “Other Trump supporters I spoke to were very obviously down the garden path of you can’t trust anything but Trump media. A lot of the president-elect’s talking points make their way into conversation.”
Malone has been covering media and politics for a decade, including three Trump campaigns, two administrations, and the rise of “fake news.” She worked for five years at FiveThirtyEight, the polling analysis and data visualization website, where she wrote about the demographics behind the polls. In 2021, she joined The New Yorker as a staff writer focused primarily on the intersection of media and politics; ahead of the election she covered the fight over the truth in Lackawanna County, wrote about Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s campaign, and interviewed pollsters prior to President Biden dropping out of the race. Malone has often worked to add context to the apparent disconnect between the liberal media bubble and what we now know for sure is the majority of the country. She is well placed to answer a question everyone in the news business seems to be asking at the moment: Is the mainstream media dead to half the country?
On Monday morning, I spoke with Malone over Zoom about her reporting experiences leading up to the election, industry morale, the role of editorials, and her perspective on the crises facing mainstream media. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
LW: When you went to Lackawanna County, you spoke with neighbors on different sides of the fence, physically and politically. What was it like to have those conversations?
CM: Back in 2016, I traveled to different states and talked to people at Bernie rallies and Trump rallies. I wrote a big piece about what it was like to swing through America. We didn’t have the term “fake news” yet, but I talked about this interesting phenomenon of so many people showing me that they had done research, they had gone to the primary source, but the primary source they were using was misinformation. Fast-forward eight years to this election. I’m writing the story about Lackawanna, and it’s a three-part set piece of the way disinformation and misinformation have taken hold in society.
It’s not surprising at all; it’s just sobering as a journalist to watch, over nearly a decade of your life, as people fall further and further away from quality news sources. The media was already mistrusted—I talked to people who didn’t trust it during the Bush administration. It’s just a maturation from which we are detached. Covering the media and covering those people in Lackawanna was more like documenting sociological change in American life. These aren’t new things. These are things that are now baked in.
Do you find that any perspectives change at the end of your conversations with people—that they’re reevaluating their own allegiances to news? Or do you feel like you walk away and they’re still in the same place?
I think they’re still in the same place. I obviously have a point of view, which is that newspapers and magazines in the mainstream media are flawed human enterprises, but they’re the best source of information. I also have a point of view that we are not fake news. But I want New Yorker readers or people who come across that piece—who are going to be a very slim segment of the population—to come away with a respectful but clear-eyed view of how people in Lackawanna County think about news and information, and how they’re interacting with each other. I don’t think a Trump supporter reading my account of our interactions would disagree with that.
When I’m talking to people, I get them to talk to me at length about their views on politics and where they’re going. I don’t think when someone comes away from the story that they’re rethinking their views, and I think it’s a fool’s errand at this point to think that you’re going to change people’s minds. I guess it’s like an explanatory writer style, a documentarian—which has its limits. I’m sure that some people reading would say that’s bullshit. But I do think there’s something important about capturing views.
Now the outcome of the election is clear, what does this moment mean for you as a journalist?
I’ve seen a lot of stories about people who are disillusioned, and I very much get that—it is a pretty depressing story to cover in a lot of ways, particularly if you’re in the news media and experiencing people trust you less and less. But I guess, on Monday morning, I’m at the office, and this is my career; this is my job. I do feel like we have a job to do. We do the reporting. We call the people. You try to understand people. [Then there’s] the impact of the work, particularly at a place like The New Yorker. I’ve almost been thinking about the results of the election as the manifestation of a class war; even if you’re a Democrat and you believe that your policies are better for working people, middle-class people, they were rejected by a lot of working and middle-class people. And there’s a rejection of mainstream media, too.
Another thing I’m puzzling through is how to cover root causes. It was an election that was about economics in many ways; much to the Democrats’ chagrin, many Americans are pro-choice, but they maybe saw abortion care or miscarriage care as something of an abstract tragedy versus the very concrete thing of, like, my grocery bill is going up and immigration is an economic issue for me, I don’t want people taking my job. Local news, as we all know, is not what we want it to be, and national outlets have a real challenge to not just do economic stories that are budget stories in Washington. How do you cover root-cause and equality issues in a non–”eat your vegetables” kind of way, and make people actually care about it and want to read about it?
For someone like me, or people in elite media at the New York Times or the Washington Post, I’ve been thinking about how our stories will make an impact. Only a very small fragment of the population is going to read a ten-thousand-word piece, or even a fifteen-hundred-word piece. So it’s also important to think about how our stories are digested. Maybe we should be thinking more overtly and strategically about how that is disseminated to a five-minute cable news segment, a one-minute Instagram reel, or [a] thirty-second TikTok thing. We have to think about how it moves through the bloodstream of the media, because there are so many people, particularly those under thirty, who are just not subscribing [to], let alone reading, the traditional newspaper and magazine articles. Otherwise, we risk being public intellectual reporters just writing for each other, right? I don’t think any of us really want to do that.
There is obviously an economic imperative to serve your audience. That’s the media business these days: find your audience, serve them, stay in business, and hopefully your reporting gets out there. But it is a tricky question to think about how to get good, quality, impactful reporting to people who need it most, which is not our college-educated, relatively wealthy readership. Those people are getting good news from lots of places.
A couple of weeks ago, there was a New York magazine article by Charlotte Klein in which a TV executive was quoted as saying: “If half the country has decided that Trump is qualified to be president, that means they’re not reading any of this media. And we’ve lost this audience completely. A Trump victory means the mainstream media is dead in its current form.” Do you think mainstream media is dead to half the population right now? Or are we at the CPR stage?
No, we’re not dead. But that’s given me the biggest pause in the past week, and it’s a thing I don’t think I have an answer to. I’m not sure media executives do either. We’re definitely in the CPR stage. We covered Trump for a year leading up to his election, four years of the administration, and four intervening years when it was filled with criminal trials. You would be sort of an idiot to conclude that this reporting makes a huge difference; it makes a difference on the margins, but the tricky thing is that so much of the good work and good reporting that I think has an impact and gets into the bloodstream is sadly negated by our poor reputation with the American public in general. That’s a trickier question: How do you change perceptions of the media? How do you change media culture?
What was interesting about the Washington Post editorial scandal [when Jeff Bezos, the owner, blocked the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Harris] is that once you strip away its timing—which I think everyone agrees was really dumb—it’s not the craziest thing in the world to say that newspapers shouldn’t endorse candidates. I’d go a step further and say that there’s an interesting debate to have around whether a newspaper should even have an editorial page; some people would say you shouldn’t have them, which is also an interesting way to change people’s views on the news, because I think no one in the general public really understands the bifurcation between newsroom and opinion. If you’re going to have an opinion page, maybe there should be a different name for it: maybe it shouldn’t be “the Washington Post opinion page”; maybe you should just have an entirely separate site. There are things that are steadfastly clinging to certain forms. We are potentially still shooting ourselves in the foot, over and over. A lot of times I think people’s distrust in us is totally merited.
We have to balance the belief that we are doing the right thing and that we are getting the best information by also being self-conscious of whether we are communicating it in the best way. One of the great qualities of journalists is: You do your job and you just keep doing it; there is a stubbornness culture, which is good, but it also makes us scared of change. The changes are here. We just have to adapt. That’s going to be a huge question that newsrooms are grappling with in the next two months and the next year. The most difficult part of taking a deep breath and saying Okay, we’re gonna do this for another four years is: How do you make it different? How do you get over the psychological hump of saying, I don’t wanna do this same story that I did six years ago, and I know no one’s going to care? That’s a real morale problem in newsrooms that leaders have to address with specificity and a mission that goes beyond “We’re going to hold power to account.” A lot of journalists just feel bummed. We’re still going to be covering it. But—I don’t know, I’m sure there’s some business school word for it—there’s a lot of low morale right now in the mainstream media and a lot of crowing from people in independent media or conservative media. Every time there’s a layoff, the trolls get at people in the replies and say, “Learn to code!” You have to overcome that. A certain number of people just really hate us, and you just have to move through it.
Journalists are feeling a lot of things right now. With a disconnection from a huge segment of the population, is there a role for vulnerability?
This is my father’s line: “We are human institutions with divine intent.” We are institutions made up of human beings. We make mistakes. But we have very good intentions. We are not going to get everything right. We’re going to do our best not only to get the facts right but also to try to get perspectives right. We need to continue to center our work around other people. The stories are about them. We are trying our best to go to different places, and maybe there should be more audience engagement, asking, What do you think we need to cover more of?
I don’t think people want to know about the difficulties of getting a job in journalism, the difficulties of the business model; I don’t think people want to hear about that. But we should talk to people about what we are striving for. Unfortunately, in the era where everyone is a journalist, it falls upon you to be a straight shooter and to deal with people on the up-and-up. You just have to keep doing that over and over. It’s a difficult question about how to chip away at people’s distrust of us, and I don’t think there’s a simple, short-term, we’ll fix it by the end of the year solution. Maybe we’re not going to fix it. That’s also a disturbing thought that is very much within the realm of possibility.
What are you focusing on moving forward?
I had some stuff in the works, but like everyone else, I’m regrouping. On a higher note, I do feel better after the weekend. I wasn’t shocked at all by the results. I was just absorbing things. I’ve had a few coffees this morning, and I’m like, “Okay, well, this is my job; I’m too far in to go to law school, so I gotta know how to make it work.” That’s how I feel right now.
Well, that sounds cautiously positive.
It’s important to be cynical as journalists, but also important to know when you have to amp yourself up a little bit.
Other notable stories:
- For CJR, Paul Beckett, who led the Wall Street Journal’s push to free its reporter Evan Gershkovich after he was arrested in Russia last year, shares lessons learned from the effort. (Gershkovich was freed in August.) “Reporters are trained in how to avoid danger in war zones and protests, how to protect their communications in autocratic countries, and how to handle themselves if they are kidnapped. There are drills for fires and active shooters. Less attention has been paid to what to do when an American reporter is seized by a hostile government and falsely accused of a serious crime,” Beckett writes. “Yet it is safe to say that, based on the history of the past forty years, this will happen again. When that day comes, hopefully the Journal’s experience, spelled out in detail here for the first time, can aid those responsible for bringing their colleague home.”
- According to Politico, a “cadre of Palm Beach Instagram influencers and other MAGA keyboard warriors” are publicly lobbying for jobs in the Trump administration—though a strategist close to Trump’s campaign predicted that his advisers would “cut through this gaggle of Gucci-clad grifters like a knife through butter.” One media figure who is getting a job (if he can get past a seemingly skeptical Senate): Pete Hegseth, a veteran and Fox & Friends host who in the past lobbied Trump to pardon servicemen who had been accused of war crimes. (Ross Douthat described Hegseth as Trump’s “first complete ‘I like him on TV’ pick.”) And Elon Musk, the owner of X, and Vivek Ramaswamy will apparently run a new department focused on slashing the size of the government.
- This morning, The Guardian said that it will no longer post any of its content to X, after concluding that it “is a toxic media platform and that its owner, Elon Musk, has been able to use its influence to shape political discourse.” Meanwhile, several French newspapers, including Le Monde, are suing X, which they allege has violated French and European laws by failing to compensate them when their content appears on the platform. And, in other news about the relationship between news organizations and big tech companies, the Journal reports that Shailesh Prakash, an executive who served as a liaison between Google and publishers, has resigned. Google declined to say why.
- Today, the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars media empire will be sold in a court-mandated auction stemming from the rulings against him in defamation cases brought by families of victims of the Sandy Hook school shooting, which Jones repeatedly said was a hoax. According to CNN, an “ally” of Jones has entered a seven-figure bid, though liberal bidders who want to buy InfoWars to dismantle it are reportedly in the running, too, and the highest bid won’t necessarily win. Whatever happens, Jones has promised that he will retain a vocal online presence.
- And Olivia Nuzzi—the star political reporter who was revealed to have had a “personal relationship” with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., then left New York magazine and accused her ex-fiancé, Ryan Lizza, a senior journalist at Politico, of orchestrating a “harassment and blackmail campaign” against her—asked a court to dismiss her request for a protective order against Lizza. Nuzzi and Lizza accused each other of using the legal process to mount a public defamation campaign; Nuzzi’s lawyer said that she was disengaging to protect herself, while Lizza said he was pleased that the matter is closed for now.
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