The Tim Walz vibe shift

The president was on the line for Tim Walz. It was an early morning in May 2020, a few days after a white police officer in Minneapolis murdered George Floyd, and a matter of minutes after Omar Jimenez, a CNN journalist, was arrested live on air while covering the resulting unrest. The president on the line was that of CNN, Jeff Zucker, and he was “rightfully incredibly angry” about the arrest, as Walz, the governor of Minnesota, would recall at a press conference later the same day. “I take full responsibility,” Walz said, before addressing the press as a whole: “I failed you last night.” A few days later, Walz visited the site of Floyd’s killing for the first time and apologized personally to Jimenez in an emotional interview. The state needed to improve its media protocols, Walz acknowledged. “We have to create the space for you to tell the story.”

Yesterday, the vice president was on the line for Walz, and the circumstances could hardly have been more different: Kamala Harris, now also the Democratic presidential nominee, was asking him to join her ticket. “I want you to do this with me,” Harris told Walz in a video of the call that her campaign posted online. “Would you be my running mate?” Walz responded that it would be his honor. “The joy that you’re bringing back to the country, the enthusiasm that’s out there—it’ll be a privilege to take this with you across the country,” he said.

The call capped a remarkably swift—and, in many respects, remarkably joyful—ascent for Walz; when President Biden dropped out of the presidential race, just two and a half weeks ago, Walz was little known outside of Minnesota and did not figure among the early favorites to be Harris’s running mate. His rise was fueled in no small part by the media—or, at least, his deftly folksy appearances in it; indeed, he has enjoyed a breakout news cycle ever since he appeared on Morning Joe in the days after Biden dropped out and memorably referred to Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance, as “weird.” As that line caught fire among Democrats, pundits assessed its potency. Ezra Klein, of the New York Times, described Walz’s Morning Joe hit as “the interview heard around the Democratic Party,” adding that his initial reaction was, “Oh, that really connects”; Jay Caspian Kang wrote in The New Yorker that “weird” is “a catchall insult that allows liberals to slap back at years of similar aspersions from the right—connected to everything from trans rights to racial justice and abortion rights—and to normalize their personal politics through the imagined average voter, who, through this verbal sleight of hand, is now on their side.” Meanwhile, online, memes circulated that depicted Walz as a charming Midwestern dad: Walz with his cat; Walz with his dog; Walz with a piglet at the Minnesota State Fair.

The difference between sophisticated political analysis and workaday memesmithing shouldn’t mask the fact that, in this case, a lot of the same people were doing both. (“Who is normal and who is weird?” Kang asked, in his astute piece. “When it comes to those of us in the American media, it’s obvious that we are all weird and way too online.”) Indeed, in traditional and new media precincts alike, journalists and commentators hitched Walz to another buzzword—“vibes”—often while declaring that his are good, or at least meet this moment. “In a year when ‘vibes’ have been everything in politics—on the economy, on the campaign trail—that is exactly what Kamala Harris has gone for,” the BBC wrote yesterday; the New York Times concurred that “Walz, perhaps more than any other contender on Harris’s shortlist, was the vibes pick for a vibes election.” The word came up repeatedly on CNN yesterday, too. “Kamala Harris bets on vibes,” Abby Phillip said. Dana Bash declared “vibes” and “weird” to be two “words of the summer.”

Weber might have something to say about this; Brian Wilson surely would. While the word “vibes” feels omnipresent at the moment, the idea behind it—loosely, the atmospherics around a person or thing, and how people tend to feel about them—is not at all new. (CNN’s Jamie Gangel said of Walz yesterday that “you’d like to have a beer with him,” a time-honored political vibe check.) Vibes have long been an organizing principle for political media coverage, too, albeit under different labels, like “optics.” Still, the notion does seem to be enjoying a media moment, as I wrote earlier this year, amid the decidedly vibes-dominated reaction—bad, this time—to the Republican senator Katie Britt’s theatrically menacing State of the Union response.

Judging politicians on vibes is by no means illegitimate; sure, the term is subjective and imprecise, but so are lots of words journalists use as shorthand for phenomena that are observable and yet hard to concretely pin down. But letting vibes organize media coverage is an obviously perilous prospect. For starters, vibes, famously, can shift. Already, some journalists and pundits are unconvinced that the vibes of the Walz pick are as good as they seem, at least in an electoral sense—including, ironically, Joe Scarborough, the eponymous host of the Walz-breakout vehicle Morning Joe. (And this is before we get into the right-wing mediasphere, where Walz is being portrayed as a dangerous socialist with, erm, ties to ISIS?) Kang, for his part, predicted that Walz’s catchphrase might soon wear thin, arguing that if Trump starts attacking Harris on subjects like immigration and her identity, there could come a time “when ‘weird’ feels a bit small and juvenile, and will become a memento of a fun and energized period in the campaign.” 

The serious point to all this, as far as the press is concerned, isn’t that it’s our role to referee campaign energy levels, but that paying too much heed to (often fleeting) atmospherics is yet one more way that our coverage can come to feel reactive, short-termist, overexuberant. It can also contribute to a sense of amnesia. Walz may not have been well-known outside of Minnesota prior to the past few weeks—but he was a prominent character in the huge national news story that followed the murder of Floyd, a period whose prevailing mood was extremely different from that of this moment. Rewatching some of Walz’s pained interviews and pressers from back then can feel like viewing footage from a different planet. But it very much was, and is, ours. Many of the issues that surfaced during that moment are still issues now, even if they rarely seem to surface in today’s frenzied political news cycle.

This speaks to another problem with vibes-organized coverage: that even if it can be useful in illuminating atmospherics, it can blunt needed factual scrutiny of political figures’ rhetoric and records. (It was in this context that I criticized some of the coverage of Britt’s State of the Union response earlier this year.) We are, surely, about to see a lot of detailed coverage of Walz’s record from reporters who might still be catching up to his sudden explosion in national profile. Already, those who have had a front-row seat to his rise in Minnesota are contributing such coverage. “I think, actually, Governor Walz is good at politics and bad at policy. He isn’t a great executer,” Blois Olson, the publisher of a political tipsheet in Minnesota, said on MSNBC last night. “He has been seen as ‘not executive’ when the state needed an executive.”

An important part of Walz’s back story, of course, is in the area of press freedom. In 2020, after Jimenez was arrested on air, he said all the right things and pledged concrete improvements. And yet, the following year, Minnesota law enforcement repeatedly intimidated and even assaulted journalists covering another period of unrest, this time following the police shooting of Daunte Wright, a young Black man, during a traffic stop in a Minneapolis suburb; a Black photographer on assignment for the Times said that officers refused to accept his press credentials as real until a colleague vouched for him, while an Asian American producer for CNN was arrested and asked if she spoke English. At one point, a court issued a restraining order to protect journalists, and yet the threats reportedly continued. At a press conference, Walz said that he found the situation distressing, and once again pledged that the state would do better. “We have more work to do,” he said. That week, he acknowledged, “we have failed.”

Other notable stories:

• CJR’s Kevin Lind spoke with seven journalists about their experiences covering Kamala Harris’s political rise in California. “She is not impolite, she is not impenetrable, but she is guarded,” Joe Eskenazi, the managing editor of Mission Local in San Francisco, said. “And as much as her prosecutorial past is something that comes up, it’s also how she handles the media.” Bloomberg’s Erika D. Smith said that Harris is “very charismatic and she’s very nice, but I think that—this is my own speculation, conjecture, interpretation of years—she just likes to be seen the way she likes to be seen. I don’t know if that’s a reflection of the fact that as a woman of color and power, you’re going to be subject to all of these, like, taxes. It’s better to define your narrative before somebody defines it for you.” Dan Morain, Harris’s biographer, added, “she is just not a press hound.”

• Yesterday, Axios announced that it is instituting layoffs for the first time in its history; in a memo to staff (which was, many observers noticed, written in the site’s trademark “smart brevity” format) Jim VandeHei, the CEO, said that the company would thin its ranks by 10 percent, a figure equating to around fifty employees, citing a range of business challenges including the growth of AI. In other news about job losses, the Tampa Bay Times, which is owned by the nonprofit Poynter Institute, laid out plans to cut a fifth of its workforce; staffers will be offered buyouts for now, with layoffs to follow if deemed necessary. And Broadcasting & Cable and Multichannel News, two industry publications that cover the TV business, are shutting down; Variety has more details.

• For Verite News, a nonprofit newsroom in New Orleans, Richard A. Webster reports on a new Louisiana law barring anyone, including journalists, from standing within twenty-five feet of a law enforcement officer who has ordered them to stay back. “Police buffer laws, as they are commonly known, are relatively new; Louisiana is the fourth state to enact one,” Webster writes. Supporters of the law say that it is necessary to protect police and will not prevent journalists from documenting their activities—but critics have charged that it will make it much harder to hold officers to account. Recently, a coalition of media companies sued state officials, alleging that the law violates the First Amendment. 

• Yesterday, police in New York arrested Samuel Seligson, an independent videographer, on hate-crime charges linked to vandalism by pro-Palestinian protesters at the homes of leaders of the Brooklyn Museum earlier this year—an action that Seligson says he was covering as a journalist. “While the complaint described Seligson as a participant in the crime, a law enforcement official said he was not directly involved in the spray-painting or property damage,” the AP’s Jake Offenhartz reports. Seligson’s attorney said that his conduct was protected, and described the hate-crime charges as “appalling” overreach.  

• And the Trans Journalists Association weighed in on recent media coverage of Imane Khelif, an Algerian Olympic boxer who has been wrongly identified as transgender since an opponent withdrew from a bout with her last week, citing the strength of her punches. The episode “opens up larger questions about the unstated assumptions that underlie coverage of gender and sports,” the TJA writes. “Why are some genetic advantages considered fair, and some not? And how and when should the playing field be leveled?”

ICYMI: California journalists on covering Kamala Harris

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.