The campaign, the influencers, and the press

A love triangle that needs tending

In one sense, the entire purpose of a political convention is media. You gather in one city, bring everyone who’s everyone in your party there, pack the place with supporters, and invite the media to broadcast to the world your messages, your symbols, your ideas, your enthusiasm. In the United Center arena, directly opposite the stage were the skyboxes given over to all the major news channels. Thousands of journalists were granted credentials, and you saw reporters from Japan to the Netherlands setting up outside in the parking lot, broadcasting to faraway citizens, whose lives, like it or not, will be altered by America’s choice.

Relations between the press that covers politics and political campaigns that need-loathe the press are never easy. But this time around, they were especially fraught because the campaign is conducting an affair out in the open. The kind of affair where you’re flagrantly dining out in restaurants, not furtively meeting in hotel rooms.

The affair is with the so-called “creators.”

The creators are independent citizen reporters and social media explainers and streamers and YouTubers (and, you could argue, newsletter writers like me, though I was credentialed as a journalist). The campaign put old-school journalists up in the cheap seats and rolled out a literal blue carpet for creators, opened a lounge for them with food and drink, and generally was seen as bending over backwards to make these new media folks, these influencers, comfortable.

Personally, I don’t have the problem with this that some old-school journalists do. But I also see on the horizon a growing rift between the Democratic Party and the traditional press that I think needs to be repaired and dealt with rather than ignored and left to fester. The affair isn’t the solution here. It’s time for the press and campaign to do couples therapy.

Relations are bad for many reasons. The press is angry that the campaign doesn’t seem to want to make Harris available for interviews. The campaign looks at the kind of bullshit questions the press too often asks, as in the well-publicized tarmac moment not long ago, questions hyperfocused on tit-for-tat reactions to Trump and silly clickbait, and feels it’s serving its own interest more than the public’s. Enter the creators, who are the hot new item the campaign can have a dalliance with. They are happy with whatever access they get, they reach millions of people, they don’t have inflated, moralistic expectations of what they are owed, etc. The press feels like the spouse and kids and play dates and lunchbox making and lawn mowing at home; the creators feel like deliverance from all of that.

I’m not going to adjudicate this conflict, but let me say that I think there is a lot of validity in the sense of hurt on both sides. I also think there are dangerous attitudes at play. The media need to realize that a lot of how a lot of it has covered these serious times and the rising threat of authoritarianism is flawed. That is real. Campaigns are right to be wary. And the campaign needs to realize that a streamer or a YouTuber, no matter how compelling their work (and I think their work can be incredibly compelling), is not the same as the press. You know this. You know the role that bona fide, big-time, old-line news organizations have played in investigating Trump and leading to the felonies that the campaign now touts; you know how they cover things like wars and insurrections in a way that individuals like me never could; you know that professionally honed skepticism may not feel good but is ultimately good for you, keeping you honest, and good for democracy.

As someone who is in many ways a very old-school journalist and also kind of, sort of a new media creator, I encourage repair. And a healthy amount of introspection.