Political Media Are Making Themselves Obsolete

By Noah Rothman

Wednesday, May 24, 2023

 

The political press is seething. Florida governor Ron DeSantis has shunned its members, and they are jilted. Some reporters have had enough, even going so far as to imply their readiness to extort attention and respect from him. Feed the beast, they remind the governor, or the beast will feast on you. But legacy and mainstream media’s frustration is an outgrowth of the industry’s growing insularity, which has contributed to the obsolescence of its platforms and its reduced value to news-makers.

 

Political media’s simmering irritation with the governor’s media strategy boiled over this week when Puck News political correspondent Tara Palmeri became a willing example of the casual contempt the DeSantis camp reserves for the press.

 

Palmeri related her experience of attempting to question DeSantis: The governor “seemed almost to be running away from me.” DeSantis’s aides countered by posting a video of Palmeri’s inquiries. “I am Italian American too. Does that matter to you?” she asked. “Why are you against Disney characters? Which one is your favorite one?” DeSantis’s unwillingness to defer to ethnic chauvinism and elaborate on his favorite cartoons wasn’t all that Palmeri exposed.

 

The reporter answered the DeSantis camp’s video with her own, in which she peppered the governor with questions about his willingness to meet with Disney CEO Bob Iger, the box-office potential of a live-action version of The Little Mermaid, the political viability of Florida’s six-week abortion ban, and, of course, his refusal to speak with the press. At least in part, that final query is answered by the questions preceding it.

 

This ponderous, one-sided exchange piqued the ire of some of Palmeri’s colleagues. “DeSantis thinks he’s above engaging with the media,” The Daily Beast’s Matt Fuller fumed. “He isn’t.” His irritation is broadly shared across the media landscape, with some accusing the governor of contributing to America’s partisan divisions by icing out all but overtly friendly outlets.

 

This overwrought anxiety illustrates the changing relationship between reporters and the subjects they cover. It should not be news to the news media that this relationship is devolving in ways that undermine the traditional media’s relevance.

 

Barack Obama started the trend. The 44th president’s “under-the-radar alternative-media strategy” during his 2012 bid for reelection compelled the president of the United States to provide sit-down interviews with “the pimp with the limp” DJ Laz and pop-cultural outlets such as People magazine and Entertainment Tonight. After winning reelection, Obama continued to privilege venues atypical for a president, including YouTubers such as Bethany Mota, the Vlogbrothers, and GloZell Green, an entertainer with multicolored hair (when that was still unusual) who famously bathed herself in cereal milk.

 

As is often the case, the precedents Obama set that were lauded as innovative and revelatory at the time are denounced when his successors follow his lead. Although Donald Trump’s desire for validation from the mainstream press ensured that he was one of the more accessible presidents in modern times, Trump entered office determined to elevate unconventional media outlets to prominence. The New York Times and the Washington Post were out. In their place, the Daily Caller and Sinclair Broadcast Group found themselves in the president’s spotlight. Irritated, the Times speculated that Trump’s conspicuous evasion was attributable to his desire to avoid tough questions on the issues that consumed the Beltway press. Of course, the Times was correct. Beyond seeking access to more-diverse audiences, that was the essential value proposition of both Trump’s and Obama’s alternative-media strategies.

 

Under Joe Biden, the alternative-media strategy is transforming into a no-media strategy. The 46th president ran for the White House from the security of his subterranean “sanctuary,” where the candidate’s accessibility was tightly managed. As of April, Biden had held fewer news conferences than any president in the past century save for Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. He has broken with tradition by refusing to hold press availabilities while traveling abroad and has deigned to give only a handful of interviewers that offer one-on-one access to the most powerful person in the country.

 

The White House isn’t coy about what it’s doing. “They say it is part of a deliberate strategy to go around the traditional news media to connect with audiences ‘where they are,’” the Times reported, “without being subjected to the filter of political or investigative journalists.” That’s a euphemism for a communications strategy that shields the campaign’s principal from tough questions. Some reporters did, however, bristle over being cut out of the presidential loop.

 

“Despite promising ‘transparency,’ Biden has shut the media and public out,” CNBC anchor Brian Sullivan complained. Others such as Press Watch editor Dan Froomkin blamed Biden’s cloistering on the “a**hole questions” he gets from journalists. Regardless, the press briefly wrangled with the phenomenon, but its members have not yet drawn the obvious conclusion to which the preponderance of a decade’s worth of evidence should lead: Avoiding the mainstream press is becoming best practice.

 

For the GOP’s candidates in particular, there are few downsides to an alternative-media strategy, and not because Republican politicians live in abject fear of being exposed by adroit interlocutors on the other side of the camera. As former representative Peter Meijer’s chief of staff Kenneth Monahan recalled, the complaint he heard from Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s communications staffers was that holding a press availability is a profound waste of the candidate’s time. “Virtually [all] of the questions were about Trump, nothing about VA, nothing about policy, nothing about contrasting him with his opponent,” Monahan related. “They never held another press conference for the entire campaign. They won.”

 

Monahan’s assessment rings true to anyone who watched Donald Trump subject himself to CNN’s obsessions during the May 11 town hall. The questions the former president was asked were of objective interest to a national audience possessed of abiding civic virtue — the legal allegations against Trump, his role in the January 6 riots, and even some policy particulars about immigration and America’s sovereign debt. But these aren’t the issues on which the Republican electorate will base its votes. So, if a campaign’s objective is to disseminate its message to as many partisan but persuadable voters as possible, relying on CNN as its medium may be counterproductive. At the very least, there are many more-effective vehicles for that sort of thing in the information marketplace.

 

Reporters might find it cathartic to badger Republican politicians for being tight-lipped, but those Republicans are responding to changing incentives. So, too, are reporters. The covenant of “access journalism,” in which media professionals competed to court news-makers as a down payment on exclusive disclosures in the future, has been eroded by a campaign of shame directed from their colleagues at reporters who approach their subjects objectively. Meanwhile, adversarial coverage is increasingly perceived by those on its receiving end as hostile coverage. Combine these factors with the reduced upsides politicians associate with interacting with mainstream reporters, and the result is campaign reporters’ being stripped of their former relevance.

 

If this industry’s members resent that, they would be better off engaging in some introspection over the factors that have contributed to their reduced significance rather than yelling at those who merely notice it.