Fall 2021: The Politics Issue

fall 2021

Reset The Politics Issue

A new way to cover America

Jon Allsop • Matt Bors • Clio Chang • E. Tammy Kim • Alexandria Neason Osita Nwanevu • Adam Piore • Sam Sanders • Stephania Taladrid • Hunter Walker

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EDITORIAL

DEAN, COLUMBIA JOURNALISM SCHOOL

Editor in Chief and Publisher Kyle Pope

Steve Coll

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Digital Editor Ravi Somaiya Senior Editor Brendan Fitzgerald Chief Digital Writer Mathew Ingram Delacorte Fellows Karen Maniraho Caleb Pershan Paroma Soni

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Contributors

Jon Allsop is a

Brendan Fitzgerald is a

Osita Nwanevu is a

Stephania Taladrid is

freelance journalist

senior editor at CJR.

contributing editor at

a contributing writer at

the New Republic. He is

The New Yorker. Before

whose work has appeared in the New

Shinhee Kang is a

a former staff writer at

that, she served as a

York Review of Books,

freelance journalist and

The New Yorker and Slate,

speechwriter for the

Foreign Policy, and

former CJR fellow.

and his work has also

Obama administration.

appeared in Harper’s, the

She holds a master’s in

The Nation, among other outlets. He writes

Ian W. Karbal is a

Chicago Reader, and In

Latin American studies

CJR’s newsletter The

former CJR fellow.

These Times. Nwanevu

from the Edmund A.

is the former editor in

Walsh School of Foreign

E. Tammy Kim is a

chief of the South Side

Service at Georgetown

Matt Bors is a

freelance reporter and

Weekly, an alternative

University.

cartoonist, writer, editor,

essayist whose writing

weekly covering the

and founder of The Nib.

has appeared in The New

South Side of Chicago.

He was a Pulitzer Prize

Yorker, the New York

finalist for his political

Review of Books, the New

Adam Piore is a

newsletter called The

cartoons in 2012 and

York Times, and many

freelance magazine

Uprising. Previously, he

2020 and drew the

other publications. She

journalist and the author

was the White House

graphic novel War Is

coedited 2016’s Punk

of The Accidental Terrorist

correspondent for

Boring, written by David

Ethnography.

and The Body Builders:

Yahoo! News.

Media Today.

Axe. His cartoons have

produces a Substack

Inside the Science of the

appeared in The Nation,

Feven Merid is a former

The Guardian, CNN, and

CJR fellow.

Engineered Human.

Kyle Pope is the editor

The Intercept and are

Hunter Walker

collected in the book We

Betsy Morais is the

in chief and publisher

Should Improve Society

managing editor of CJR.

of CJR.

Canada with his wife

Alexandria Neason was

Sam Sanders is a

and children.

CJR’s staff writer and

correspondent and host

Senior Delacorte Fellow.

of It’s Been a Minute

Clio Chang is a

Recently, she became an

with Sam Sanders at

freelance reporter based

editor and producer at

NPR. He was one of the

in New York. She writes

WNYC’s Radiolab.

original cohosts of NPR’s

Somewhat. He lives in

about politics, culture,

Politics Podcast, which

media, and more.

launched in 2015. His writing has appeared in the Washington Post and Politico magazine.

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Table of Contents

6 Editor’s Note

By Kyle Pope

Features

Field Notes

The New Guard

12 The Trouble with

Frictionless Briefings

By Hunter Walker

16 Out of Focus

By Stephania Taladrid 19 What Is Political Writing For?

By Osita Nwanevu 22 All of It Matters

By Sam Sanders

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Ten political journalists reflect on starting their careers in the Trump era and look ahead to what comes next

By Shinhee Kang, Ian W. Karbal, and Feven Merid

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OK, Seriously Teen Vogue’s complicated political transformation

By Clio Chang

COMICS

68 Back to the Drawing Board

By Matt Bors K I LL LI ST

90 Where Darkness

What we want to discard from political journalism

By Brendan Fitzgerald

32 Covering international elections

DATA

Surrounds Violence

in American political terms

108 End Note

44 Combative questions engineered to be TV “moments”

53 Hagiographic obituaries of defective leaders

62 Panels that flatten real ideological divides into entertainment

86 Breathless election night coverage before the polls close

98 Reporting on policy as strategy 104 Setting absurd expectations for ON THE COVER Illustration by Serge Bloch

complex problems

FA L L 2 0 2 1

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48

80

my life is about politics.”

A Seattle newspaper models how to cover unhoused people—and puts money in their pockets

“ Everything in

A conversation with Averi Harper, deputy political director of ABC News

By Alexandria Neason

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The Debater Mehdi Hasan’s challenging transatlantic rise

Retail Politics

By E. Tammy Kim

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Breaking Right The Wall Street Journal’s stubborn conservatism

By Adam Piore

By Jon Allsop

S E RG E B LO C H

Platforming disinformation in the name of “balance” During Donald Trump’s presidency, Chuck Todd, the host of Meet the Press, invited on Ron Johnson, a Republican senator from Wisconsin, and allowed him to spout a conspiracy theory about the origins of Robert Mueller’s Russia investigation. Two years later, Todd invited Johnson back, and he took the opportunity to claim there had been voter fraud in the 2020 election, implying the outcome was illegitimate.

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EDITOR’S NOTE

Our Damned Trump Fixation AUTHOR

Kyle Pope

F

OR THE PAST FIVE YEARS, MEMBERS OF

the media have blamed Donald Trump for hijacking the narrative of American politics.

His outsize threat to democracy drove journalists’ obsession; his personal dysfunction propelled an outrage machine. According to data from mediaQuant, a media tracking firm, Trump received the equivalent of $5.6 billion in “free media” during the 2016 presidential campaign—more than Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders and Ted Cruz combined. The Internet Archive logged every mention of every candidate for president on cable TV news in the seven months leading up to that election; Trump was mentioned 1,172,235 times, Clinton 623,325. The numbers were even starker heading into the 2020 race. And throughout his tenure in the Oval Office, Trump received breathless, around-the-clock coverage.

Last year, after the votes were counted (with scarcely a hiccup), political reporters looked ahead to the end of the Trump administration and a promised return of decency to the White House. The beginning of 2021 marked a chance for a reset and even, perhaps, redemption. Trump, the

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nihilist reality-TV star who had flown from Queens to Palm Beach, was being replaced

by Joe Biden, a plainspoken guy who rides the train from DC to Delaware.

But the insurrection at the Capitol on January 6, a deadly event stoked by Trump during his final days in office, warranted urgent, focused reporting. Journalists traced the lead-up to the attack and its aftershocks, including the congressional response. There were investigations into the communication between government officials and police, of the domestic terrorists at the scene and their networks across the country. As the weeks went by, when political reporters might have been covering Trump’s election loss—and impeachment—and then his slinking off to Mar-a-Lago forever, he instead remained front and center.

Damned if political journalism didn’t blow the opportunity to refocus. After Biden took office, coverage of January 6 soon devolved into an excuse for the political reporting class to sustain Trump-scorn content, even as they purported to be covering his successor. According to an April report from the Pew Research Center, which examined news coverage of Biden’s first sixty days in office, nearly half of the print, digital, and broadcast stories on Biden included a mention of Trump.

That trend turned out to be slightly more pronounced among left-wing outlets than their conservative counterparts.

If you’re a regular viewer of the primetime shows on cable, those findings may seem soft. Anchors droned on about Trump’s unwillingness to quash the insurrection and his conversations with the MyPillow guy; ­Jared and Ivanka distancing themselves from her father’s sins; the comings and goings in Palm Beach. This rote material may have appealed to core viewers but had little to do with producing valuable journalism.

Cynics, especially on the right, have tried to tie ongoing Trump coverage to the collapse of ratings and subscriptions that followed his exit. Since Trump’s ignominious departure, the big cable networks have lost between 30 and 50 percent of their primetime viewership; Web audiences for politics have plummeted. But I’ve never bought into the media-money conspiracies, in which producers and executives are determined

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to put Trump on the air to keep the ad dollars rolling in. Reporters don’t work that way; if anything, they tend to turn passiveaggressively from whatever the business side wants.

Besides, if it were that simple—corporate political journalism is broken because the business model skews toward the sensational—fixing it would be relatively easy.

Uncouple the money from the coverage.

Nonprofit political journalism would unfold into a golden age. The fact that we have not seen that—the good intentions and excellent reporting of newsrooms such as The 19th and ProPublica notwithstanding—tells us that the problems are more fundamental, ingrained into how individual political reporters see the story and how their managers decide which scoops to celebrate. And it’s rooted in who gets promoted and who cashes the contributor checks from MSNBC and

P R E V I O U S S P R E A D: S E RG I O F LO R E S / G E T T Y I M AG E S

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KYLE POPE

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Rote Trump coverage may appeal to core cable TV viewers, but it has little to do with producing valuable journalism.

CNN. In reality, key failings of the political press are not simply the fault of Trump. The blame also lies with us.

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f the insurrection foiled our initial shot at a new, Trump-free approach to covering politics, the instincts of the press doomed it. As the Biden administration got rolling, the pace of White House coverage eased, as did reporters’ fixation on the presidency, yet Trump remained a character in major stories. covid proved a prime example. During Biden’s first months in office, vaccines became widely available across the United States, but not everyone showed up to get one. A primary culprit, we were told, was Trump, whose hesitancy to take the pandemic seriously while he was in office continued to dominate well after he was gone.

As did his crackpot theories about how the virus was spread, including the notion that

migrants coming across the southern US border were somehow to blame for the summer covid surge. Yes, there were legitimate arguments to be made—about Trump’s influence on right-wing media and his role in amplifying disinformation—but the Trump family was out of Washington, poolside, and had been vaccinated. (“Everyone should go get your shot,” Trump told the Conservative Political Action Conference in February.)

Our national crises, hardly limited to inadequate healthcare and income inequality and medical-industry skepticism among people of color, were reported—for instance, in an MSNBC piece about attempts to tie low vaccination rates to mistrust of Biden—as the failures of Trumpism.

The sense of outrage hasn’t subsided in coverage of other subjects: the collapse of Afghanistan, the climate emergency, the faltering economy. Each of those stories represents a

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Political journalism has been listening only to the loudest voices for too long.

media opportunity to explore what it looks like when a global empire stumbles into retreat.

Yet political coverage has continued holding on to Trump, claiming that he hasn’t fully loosened his grip on us. “I’m for a post-maga America, with the Trump era residing permanently within a history book and not in a newspaper, but we don’t yet live in that America,” CNN’s S.E. Cupp wrote in the Chicago SunTimes. “Believe me, no one wants to be past Trumpism more than I do. It has been one of the ugliest eras of modern American history, the lasting effects of which are nowhere near complete. And it’s because the story is unfinished that we must continue covering it.”

There lies the central tension of political journalism today—in which Biden, the good, honorable son, operates in the shadow of Trump, the family fuck-up.

Conservatives and many centrists—nearly half the country—view that premise as absurd.

Since 2015, Republicans’ trust in media has dropped sharply; according to Gallup, by 2020 it had fallen from 32 to 10 percent. Thanks at least in part to Trump’s bullying of the press, anti-media sentiment has now become central to the GOP identity. People on the left are displeased, too, with a news ecosystem seemingly more interested in propping up the powers that be than in chronicling the fights for change in streets across the country. Many Black and Latino Americans are wary of a mainstream media that doesn’t look like them and doesn’t seem to care about their lives.

That leaves a narrower, more monolithic audience for major outlets—white, older, based in coastal liberal enclaves—which makes news organizations increasingly dependent on a single demographic.

Many people, especially those on social media, say they want to move on from Trump.

Yet news outlets carry forth regardless. By the

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late summer, political reporters were speculating about Trump’s prospects in 2024. The next race for the White House was underway.

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t the Columbia Journalism Review, we have sought since Trump’s early candidacy to pull our industry away from its worst tendencies. That effort continues with this issue, which takes stock of how the political press is meeting this crucial moment of transition.

We begin by looking back over the past five years through the eyes of political journalists who started their careers during the Trump era, in both local and national newsrooms. Their experiences reflect the intensity of political news of late, the shortcomings of so-called objective reporting, and the care that young people in our profession place on getting a story right.

Their peers at Teen Vogue have spent the past several years developing a strong political consciousness, transforming the magazine from a straightforward celebrity-filled fashion glossy to a voice of the far left, with pieces on Karl Marx and rent abolition that run alongside coverage of Gigi Hadid. As Clio Chang writes, Teen Vogue’s contradictions have jumped off the page recently, in conflicts public (see: Alexi McCammond’s ill-fated appointment as editor) and private (as the staff confront their corporate bosses at Condé Nast).

Adam Piore reports on tensions at the Wall Street Journal, which has always had a conservative opinion section, but has lately shifted to the right in its news pages, too. Top editors scrutinize story topics and language to ensure that the paper’s core audience—old white men—won’t be turned off; reporters struggle to rationalize the Journal’s defense of Trumpism.

Elsewhere in the issue, Mehdi Hasan, a host at NBCUniversal, has no trouble telling it like it is; Jon Allsop—who chronicles the journalism world every morning in the CJR newsletter The Media Today—describes a fierce debater in the classically British mold who has brought his combative style to an American audience. Hasan asks powerful guests how they sleep at night, then waits for an answer. Whether his appeal will last in the relative calm of the Biden era is another question, but it’s refreshing to see him make wellinformed moral arguments on TV.

Averi Harper, deputy political director at ABC, tells Alexandria Neason that the churn of politics has never stopped. “There is not a part of my life that I can say politics does not touch,” Harper says. “And as a woman, and a Black woman at that, that impacts me differently than it would some of my white colleagues or my male colleagues. And I think it is important that we acknowledge that.”

Stephania Taladrid describes the frustrations of following Latin America news that revolves mainly around Washington politics.

Osita Nwanevu gets honest about preaching to the choir when writing political screeds online. Hunter Walker observes the inertia of the White House press corps. Sam ­Sanders implores journalists to connect hard news with cultural analysis. Matt Bors looks to the future of political cartooning. And E. Tammy Kim turns to Real Change, an advocacy newspaper in Seattle that reports on inequity by drawing attention to unhoused people living in the shadow of Amazon.

Running through all these pieces is a sense that journalism is grappling with a shift in how news consumers engage with politics. Back in 2015, on the day after Trump announced his plans to run for president, Don Lemon—who would later become one of his most strident critics—highlighted how entertaining Trump was. “What’s not to like?” he said. “People want to see Donald Trump. You want to watch him.” Contrasting Trump with Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton— both of whom, Lemon observed, committed the cardinal sin of being boring—he declared: “At least there’s someone interesting in the race.” That ethos would come to define the next five years of our democracy, and our political press.

But now that Trump is out of office, as Julia Ioffe wrote in her terrific newsletter, Tomorrow Will Be Worse, “many feel a yawning sense of emptiness and disappointment at what the ebbing Trump tide left behind.”

Quoting someone she identified as a “prominent White House reporter” on the difficulty in weaning off Trump, Ioffe found that, after covering his White House: “Now everyone is exposed and everyone is dogshit.” For too long, political journalism has listened mainly to the loudest talkers. It’s time, finally, to hear from other voices. cjr

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Field Notes FROM THE ELECTORATE

WHIT E HOUSE

The Trouble with Frictionless Briefings

By Hunter Walker

ILLUSTRATOR

Kevin Whipple

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N JULY 9, THE WHITE HOUSE WAS

staring down a major story about President Biden’s son. The day before, the Washington Post had published a piece revealing that Hunter Biden’s artwork would be sold for “prices as high as $500,000.” Officials crafted an agreement aimed at keeping the identity of the buyers confidential, including from the artist, but the situation set off ethical alarm bells, particularly because Hunter Biden became an artist only recently.

As Walter Shaub, who used to run the White House Office of Government Ethics, put it to the Post: “What these people are paying for is Hunter Biden’s last name.”

So it was a bit odd when Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary, took the podium for the day’s briefing and received just one question on the subject, from Weijia Jiang, of CBS News. Psaki described the sale agreement as having “quite a level of protection and transparency.” Jiang pressed on the fact that it relied on the judgment of a gallerist and asked if the White House would do anything “to work with the owner to make sure there’s not impropriety there when it is ultimately sold.” Psaki insisted that the setup was ironclad. “It would be challenging for an anonymous person who we don’t know and Hunter Biden doesn’t know to have influence—so that’s a protection,” she replied. Then she dismissed Jiang and moved on to the next reporter.

No one else in the room followed up. Psaki managed to get the story off the table quickly, limited its reach, and kept the press corps’s focus elsewhere. (At the top of her agenda that

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day was an economic initiative.) Ultimately, on July 21, CBS published a report revealing that the agreement had a loophole allowing Hunter Biden to meet prospective buyers at his debut show; when that piece came up in a briefing, P ­ saki brushed it off. The episode was a stark example of the limitations of a White House briefing in which the press operation is polished. “They came in with a sophisticated view of communications,” Martha Joynt Kumar, the director of the White House Transition Project, a nonpartisan group of academics, told me. Biden’s West Wing press office comprises eleven people, who have “one message that they’re going to send out,” Kumar observed; briefings are held a few times per week; the president typically makes one appearance a day. Throughout, the team sticks primarily to prepared remarks and takes few questions. (Psaki did not respond to requests for comment on this piece.)

Tight coordination means that reporters are getting detailed breakdowns of policies. The existential threat to the briefing, which was eliminated for long stretches of Donald Trump’s tenure, has passed. We have also been relieved from the barrage of lies put forth by Trump and his staff. Yet the White House press corps has lost something from the Trump years: nearly unfettered access to behind-the-scenes drama and the presidential id, through freewheeling speeches and stream-of-consciousness updates on Twitter. Biden’s highly professional press shop makes it harder for the media to penetrate the depths of the White House—internal debates, developing ideas—and to locate pressure points that can take things off script. And Kumar’s team found that, even as he restored collegiality to the podium, Biden conducted far fewer interviews during his first months in office than Trump did: nine in his first hundred days, compared with fifty-one for Trump and forty-six for Barack Obama. The press has gotten the briefing back, yes, but we’ve lost privileged glimpses into the West Wing.

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covered Trump from his insurgent campaign in 2015 through his time as president. That included breaking stories on infighting among his team, fact-checking him at a press conference, and reporting live from the violence that consumed Washington during his final year in office.

As a White House correspondent for Yahoo News, I had claim to a coveted seat in the briefing room—at least, when briefings were held. The open fighting

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The press has gotten the briefing back, yes, but we’ve lost privileged glimpses into the West Wing.

that took place made them unlike the briefings of other modern administrations. (An exception might be those under Richard Nixon, who built the press room over the White House swimming pool; there was a running joke that his press secretary could, at will, hit a button to open the floor and release reporters into the water.) The briefing has only existed in its present, televised form since the Clinton administration; prior to that, reporters would have short, off-air meetings with the press secretary each day to cover the basics of the president’s plans and responses to major news items.

But even if the Trump era was unique in providing high drama and exciting copy, I still think briefings play a valuable role in American public life. Which is why it’s so frustrating when they fall short of their potential.

Over the summer, the White House Correspondents’ Association—which designates news organizations’ seats at the briefing, among other things—installed a new president: Steven P ­ ortnoy, of CBS News Radio. He views briefings “as an important demonstration to the world that a representative of the American president will submit herself on a daily basis to an independent free press to take questions.” For Portnoy, the “mission for this year is the continued return to normalcy.”

The virtue of “normalcy,” however, depends on the vantage of the beholder. Under Biden, many news organizations have seen their ratings and online traffic drop precipitously; the briefing has gone from must-see TV to often not being aired live. The WHCA has chided the president for holding fewer press conferences than his predecessors, but the organization, which represents a broad constituency, has historically seen its role as simply maintaining access. It’s done little to seize the opportunity, under a new administration, to fundamentally change the nature of engagement with the West Wing or create venues for substantive conversation with the president.

Portnoy, who is forty, doesn’t plan on shaking up the status quo. “I think the fact that we are present to ask the press secretary questions and that she’s present to take and respond to them is the essence of what we do and what we’ve always done,” he said. Correspondents in the traditional mold, as he is, care more about being in the room to get sound bites on top-line news— they risked their lives for it during the pandemic—than about springing surprise questions on officials. “For my journalism, the briefings provide a benefit,” Portnoy said.

H U N T E R WA L K E R

Absent a collective push for more, individual reporters are left to their own devices to get answers from West Wing sources. Shirish Dáte, a veteran White House correspondent with HuffPost, considers briefings of limited use to journalists outside television and radio. “Look at what airs—it’s the back-and-forth between a particular broadcast person and the mouthpiece of the administration,” he said. “I don’t care about that. I really don’t, and if I really need a question answered, I know how to get it answered, you know, from other people.” In 2019, fearing that the press wasn’t sending enough of a unified message to combat the Trump administration’s lies and attacks, Dáte campaigned to lead the WHCA. He lost that race; under Biden, he doesn’t plan to run again. As he told me: “While we beat reporters may not think the briefings are that important, the rest of the world watches it.”

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uring the Trump years, journalists in the briefing would have aggressively followed up if a colleague’s question were prematurely dismissed; when reporters kept mum on Psaki’s speedy dispatch of Jiang, they failed to use the strength of the room in the service of transparency. That’s not to suggest that journalists impose a false equivalence—Trump’s tenure was singularly destructive and corrupt, and culminated in an act of unprecedented violence that he fomented—but we should be able to maximize the value of the briefing by piercing a press secretary’s protective shell.

This spring, I left my post at Yahoo to launch a newsletter called The Uprising. In June, I became the first solo Substack writer to be granted a pass providing access to White House briefings and press events. In my new gig, I have a chance to pursue coverage with a real sense of independence. (There is also a physical difference, since the pass I’ve been issued doesn’t get me a chair; my coverage of briefings comes from the standing-room-only section.) From that position, my hope is to focus on stories that may be under-­ covered or that have fallen out of the mainstream news cycle, rather than follow the churn of world events or wait for the press secretary to serve up a daily message.

For me and more conventional outlets alike, it’s crucial to recognize that we can only deliver on behalf of the public if we’re forcefully challenging the White House. The press corps learned to be more combative in the Trump era. We can’t lose that friction now. cjr

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INTERN ATIO NAL

Out of Focus

By Stephania Taladrid

O

NE OF THE FIRST FLASH

points Joe Biden faced as president came over the United States–Mexico border. Talk of the so-called Biden Border Crisis, led

by Republican commentators, began even before inauguration. Everywhere from the Washington Examiner to the New York Times, journalists reported on a “new rush” of migrants and Biden’s “open-door approach” as GOP officials seized on opportunities to escalate the hysteria. A delegation of nineteen Republican senators led by Ted Cruz and John Cornyn toured the Rio Grande aboard a fleet of Border Patrol boats armed with machine guns; afterward, they held a press conference along the bank of the river, where Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, declared, “There’s a word for what’s happening at our border: it’s insanity.”

Days later, Cotton and other members of his party encouraged reporters to consider the political nature of their crusade, calling immigration “a central issue in the campaign, in 2022.”

There could be no denying that the number of migrant apprehensions had risen since the previous summer, when Trump virtually closed the southern border. But, in their coverage, many news outlets glossed over crucial context.

For one thing, consistently citing the arrests of people crossing told only part of the story; doing so did not reflect how many migrants were ultimately expelled. In March, when Customs and Border Protection reported having taken more than a hundred and seventy-two thousand

migrants into custody, most of them from Central America, the Biden administration sent back the vast majority under Title 42, an emergency health order that Trump had used to expel people en masse.

By April, the number of migrants seeking refuge at the border rose slightly, yet talk of the “Biden Border Crisis” largely subsided—and a brief moment of reckoning ensued. In “The Washington Post owes Biden an apology,” Eric Boehlert, a media critic, wrote, “In terms of the amount of border news coverage this year, it’s been eye-popping, as the press continues to take its cues from Republicans. During Biden’s first nine weeks in office, immigration was the third most-common topic of news coverage, according to a Pew study—and that coverage was overwhelmingly negative.” He added, “The press and the GOP have helped create the border ‘crisis’ this year.”

The sensationalism rife in immigration news over the past several months not only showed how political rhetoric can permeate journalists’ work, it also laid bare the episodic nature of Latin America coverage in the US. Immigration is too often viewed through the narrow lens of Washington politics, as stories ignore the roots and ramifications beyond the southern border. “Latin America is a blind spot for the US media,” Brian Winter, the editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, said. “And Central America is the blindest spot of all.” Before the headlines around the “Border Crisis,” there had been minimal coverage of the pandemic’s

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Immigration is too often viewed through the narrow lens of Washington politics.

ravages in the region or of two Category 4 hurricanes that, in two weeks last fall, devastated Northern Triangle countries. There had also been practically no mention of the fact that the countries migrants were fleeing have been grappling with some of the highest rates of violence and poverty the Western Hemisphere has seen. With Biden the central focus of Latin America–news reports, a reader could be forgiven for reaching the mistaken conclusion that his administration had provoked a sudden influx of migrants—and that this was the region’s biggest story.

KEVIN WHIPPLE

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hen it comes to international reportage, the American press has been reductionist since the early days: “If you look back a hundred years, you will find that ten countries”—whether longtime US rivals, countries where American troops have been deployed, or world powers—“have dominated 70 percent of the coverage in the United States,” Guy J. Golan, an associate professor at the Bob Schieffer College of Communication at Texas Christian University, said. In 2014, when Golan worked at the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications, he coauthored a study with Greg Munno, a doctoral student, “Framing Latin America in Elite U.S. Media: An analysis of editorials and Op-Eds.” Their research explored what they called “the newsworthiness of nations”; they argued that the coverage a country receives depends on whether it is deemed powerful, peripheral, or semi-peripheral. “Coverage of

most peripheral and semi-peripheral nations is limited to natural disasters, conflicts, and coups,” Golan and Munno wrote. Aside from a country’s position within the international arena, they found, its newsworthiness depended on its relationship to the US. Despite Latin America’s geographic and economic proximity, Golan and Munno observed, it has been among the regions least covered by the US press. Even back in the seventies, when Washington intervened directly and indirectly in the political affairs of countries such as Chile and Argentina, Latin America accounted for less than 6 percent of TV coverage. More recent studies suggest that figure rarely exceeds 11 percent. In the course of their research, Golan and Munno examined more than a hundred opinion pieces published in the Times and the Post; the large majority were written by men based in the US, which also happened to be the focus of their writing. “In essence, the framing of Latin America in the opinion sections of both newspapers presents readers with a domestic frame to an international story,” Golan and Munno found.

Of course, any region’s coverage is a reflection of how outlets allocate resources. For decades, media scholars have denounced the lack of voices to report on Latin America in all its complexity; as of 1991, Ralph E. Kliesch, a professor at Ohio University, counted two hundred and forty-one correspondents working there, more than half of whom were concentrated in seven countries. In the years since, as US newspaper

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employment has fallen sharply—since 2008, it’s dropped 26 percent—many outlets have opted to close or downsize their bureaus abroad. The Puerto Rico outpost of the Associated Press, for instance, is now down from about ten staffers to one—a reporter who is responsible for covering stories across the Caribbean. With fewer correspondents on the ground, news organizations are left to rely on what’s known as “safari” or “swat” journalism, which is quick, reactive, and more heavily reliant on government sources than independent observation.

When reporters have less time to develop stories in place, and instead chase breaking news wherever it leads, the resulting coverage frames narratives of Latin America in response to emergencies, especially political exigencies. These dispatches convey a sense of urgency—which may well lead readers to favor swift and temporary solutions to what are, in reality, long-­standing problems. “If immigration is always cast as a crisis, it will always be treated as a new phenomenon, unrelated to a structural issue which is directly tied to US foreign policy,” Alexandra Délano, the cochair of global studies at the New School, said. “It is from that idea of a crisis that more visible policies, such as the wall, the National Guard, or the border’s militarization, emerge.”

Once Trump kicked off his presidential campaign, in 2015, the most visible reports on Latin America were those that revolved around his talking points, often singling out Mexico, Cuba, and Venezuela. (“That was what drove clicks and drove traffic,” Winter said.) By the summer of 2018, news about the region had become a warped reflection of Washington political drama. It was no coincidence that journalists started referring to Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil, as the “Trump of the Tropics” and to Andrés Manuel López Obrador, the president of Mexico, as the “Mexican Trump.” That is a familiar trope, casting foreign leaders as doppel­ gängers of American officials. Yet as Carlos Bravo ­Regidor, a Mexican political analyst, recalled of the AMLO comparisons, “It was as if his similarities to Trump were all there was to know about him, as if invoking Trump were enough.”

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ith the White House in focus, Latin America often gets rendered in poorly drawn Manichaean extremes: countries are depicted either as vulnerable allies or as formidable enemies. “So

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When the “crisis” at the border magically disappeared, in the view of news outlets, so did the countries from which migrants came.

much of the way that Americans look at the region is—very tragically—through the lens of drugs and thugs,” Winter said. Readers are left with a series of falsities and clichés (“3 Mexican Countries”; “Border jumpers”). “There’s a certain kind of stereotypical coverage, which is after exotic stories,” Graciela Mochkofsky, the director of the bilingual master’s program at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism, said. “It’s as if everything in Latin America pertained to the realm of magic realism, or that of the ridiculous.”

The very notion of Latin America as a unit is questionable; the region encompasses thirtythree countries, where roughly five hundred languages are spoken. “This degree of homogenization obscures the nuances inherent to a region that is very diverse,” Bravo Regidor said. But unless media outlets recognize those nuances, and devote the reporting staff necessary to distill them, public debate will be as thin as the coverage. Katherine Vargas, who headed the office of Hispanic media at the White House during the Obama administration, complained to me recently that journalists have a “perverse incentive” to focus on negatives, such as diplomatic crises. It wasn’t until the middle of Obama’s second term, when he announced the restoration of diplomatic relations with Cuba, that Vargas started hearing from White House correspondents.

Recent events have brought to the fore more gaps in coverage of the region: little attention was paid to the state of democracy in Haiti before President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, in early July; Raúl Castro’s retirement as the leader of Cuba’s Communist Party wasn’t thoroughly examined until protesters took to the streets months later to demand lasting change. And even if Biden does not provoke the same level of panic as his predecessor, the White House remains the primary driver of Latin America news—as assigning editors still, apparently, determine its importance (whether it’s “powerful” or “peripheral”) on the basis of Beltway discourse. As a case in point: when the Biden-created “crisis” at the border magically disappeared, in the view of news outlets, so did the countries from which migrants came.

“Latin America is not seen by a lot of people as relevant to the US national interest,” Winter said. “I think they’re wrong, but it’s a lonely fight sometimes.” cjr

O S I TA N WA N E V U

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ONLI NE

What Is Political Writing For?

By Osita Nwanevu

KEVIN WHIPPLE

N

OT LONG AGO, THE prevailing opinion among political writers was that Joe Biden would probably never be president. Measured against the other candidates in the crowded 2020 Democratic primary field, it was said, he was too old, too personally and politically compromised, and too removed from the debates of the moment to mount anything more than a vanity campaign. Criticisms from Biden’s ideological opponents on the left and on the right could have been expected—but doubts about his viability as a candidate ran deep even among his natural allies in the centrist press.

The Atlantic ran anxious pieces about his debate performances and criminal justice record. Politico’s Charlie Mahtesian argued that Biden would struggle to gain traction in a newly “unsentimental and unforgiving” Democratic Party. “Biden’s competition wouldn’t be a lone independent socialist,” he warned. “The Democratic field is expected to be historically large and is likely to feature more than a few candidates with nearly pristine records on the issues that animate the party’s foot soldiers.” And at the New York Times, columnist Frank Bruni all but begged Biden to stay out of the race. “His

party can’t get enough of the word ‘progressive,’ but he’s regressive, symbolizing a step back to an administration past,” he wrote. “Don’t get me wrong: That’s infinitely preferable to the indecent present. But it’s a questionable campaign slogan.”

That consensus overestimated the extent to which the ideological and cultural arguments driving online conversation would matter to a majority of voters. While those discussions were influential among a highly engaged portion of the Democratic electorate, it should have been obvious to more analysts that a much larger share of voters would respond to the shock of Hillary Clinton’s loss to Donald Trump by opting for the most traditional and sociopolitically uninteresting candidate available.

The fact that I, recently a Web-first staff writer at The New Yorker and the New Republic, happened to gauge the priorities of the offline electorate correctly hasn’t been of much comfort to me in the time since. As with Trump’s victory in 2016, the outcome of the 2020 Democratic primary and Biden’s ascent to the presidency raise deep, existential questions about who and what political punditry—and online political writing in particular—is supposed to be for.

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Thirty years ago, the roster of newspapers and magazines offering political commentary to truly national audiences was relatively small. There were a few major papers with national followings, like the Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal, and the Post; the large general-interest publications like Time, Newsweek, US News & World Report, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker; and a handful of ideological publications like the New Republic, The Nation, and National Review. Today, though, a much broader array of political publications, from the far left to the far right, collectively draw millions of readers across America every day.

As much as the reach of political writing as a medium has expanded, however, dedicated readers of online outlets do not make up a dominant share of the public. According to the Pew Research Center, 45 percent of Americans still get most of their political news from television, while just 25 percent get most of their news from online news sites—a category that includes the highly trafficked websites of the major TV networks. (Only 3 percent of Americans report that they get most of their political news in print.) As for the 18 percent of Americans who report getting most of their political news from social media, that can’t be fully accounted for by the online press—our pieces share space in news feeds with television content, viral misinformation, and armchair punditry from ordinary people who have come to believe, rightly, that they can bloviate about campaigns and political happenings about as well as most pundits.

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e political writers are fond of telling ourselves that our readers matter more than most—they often include policymakers, base voters, and political activists uniquely placed to effect political change. But how reliably has that really made a difference? Day in and day out, readers from the center to the left are offered the same arguments about the state of the Republican Party and what Democrats ought to be doing, without much discernible impact. Many journalists in my particular corner of the political landscape have persistently high hopes for what progressive writing can do, and those hopes are grounded in some real accomplishments. It’s probably fair to assume that bold and strident left-wing punditry has intertwined with other factors—including on-the-ground work by activists and organizers and the socioeconomic realities facing key Democratic constituencies—to bring about some of the policy and electoral victories progressives have seen in recent years on issues such as criminal justice reform and drug policy, particularly at the state and local levels.

But at the federal level, where most of our energy and attention is spent, national political commentators have succeeded mostly in encouraging an impressive share of Democratic political elites, activists, and policy professionals to engage with important policy ideas— Medicare for All, a Green New Deal, the addition of new states, the expansion of the Supreme Court, and so on—that are unlikely to pass Congress. And the successes progressives have seen so far during the Biden administration—including the size and scope of the recovery and infrastructure packages, a new

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commitment to aggressive antitrust enforcement, and other policy pushes—can probably be credited less to posts and tweets than to the work of progressive policy researchers, academics, and advocacy groups, which policymakers can access directly, without journalists and their explainers as intermediaries.

It’s not clear, either, how much independent influence writers even have on the typical reader. Most people who read Jacobin or Vox or The Atlantic or The Federalist do so because they already share the ideologies and political sensibilities of those publications, to the point that they might agree with their articles before they’ve even read them. Anxiety about what that dynamic might be doing to our body politic has itself built up a prodigious subgenre of political writing. It’s true that the health of a democracy depends upon the state of its journalism. But the relationship also works the other way: the state of journalism depends upon the health of democracy, and not just in the sense that journalists depend on press freedom. Democracy gives journalism purpose; the journalist brings information and arguments to the public, and the informed public acts, or makes its preferences known to those in a position to act. But if our sclerotic political institutions are less responsive to broad public opinion than to the imperatives of major corporations and the wealthy—and if, as the political-science and social-psychology literature tells us, public opinion isn’t reliably responsive to argument and new information to begin with—what are the would-be shapers of public opinion to do? Even the act of making an argument becomes problematic. In implying, falsely, that the average reader’s opinion necessarily matters in the grand scheme of things, the journalist’s fundamental obligation to the truth is violated.

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f course, there was never a time when the world could be expected to move at the stroke of a hack’s pen. But we’re living in a moment at which the basic premises justifying conventional engagement with national politics no longer seem plausible, and our structural stasis has been belied by the unprecedented volume and intensity of our punditry. Certainly, the internet has had some positive effects on the industry and helped diversify it with more writers from under­ represented backgrounds. But that only makes

O S I TA N WA N E V U

it all the more surprising that online conversations feel as homogeneous and repetitive as they do. The tonal and stylistic differences between writers and publications are eroding; the dynamics of the internet have driven competing outlets to make similar judgments about what’s worth writing about and how. The morsels of rage and misery we offer might not have much political effect, but they do feed an online writing economy that rewards speed, quantity, and deference to algorithms designed for the profit of three or four tech companies—an economy that offers few incentives to generate writing that lingers in the mind longer than half a day or half an hour. Exploratory writing—ruminative, tentative—is simply a riskier bet than tidy, punchy, reductive, and nut-graph-ready arguments destined to be skimmed by a predictable subset of a subset of the public before disappearing into the Web’s ever-decaying memory. The whole system is one of the bleakest forms of entertainment imaginable.

But we can do better. Writers ought to be given the time, space, and opportunity to say not the first, second, or even third thing to come to mind, but maybe the fourth—a chance to write at an angle or with prose that challenges or surprises. If persuasive writing has any real independent power at all, we’ll likely find it in larger arguments with larger stakes: work from writers who break the rhythms of our most intractable debates by slowing down to gather context from historical material, scholarship, and, yes, reporting.

We should be encouraged by the work of online writers already traveling in this lane— including The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer and the New York Times’ Jamelle Bouie, to name just two—as well as by a key revelation of the newsletter wave: readers are willing to pay for writing that breaks the rules that obtain across most of online publishing. And while some of these readers subsidize rambling curmudgeons fixated on the same material as the rest of the Web, many others subscribe to writers who use their newsletters to deliver commentary with real style and personality, and to pursue interests that most outlets don’t consider worthy of sustained investment. That’s their loss. Ultimately, good writers will gravitate toward the platforms where they can do the work they find most meaningful. As it stands, most of the internet doesn’t have much to offer them. cjr

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Keep the conversation going with our weekly podcast, The Kicker.

Kyle Pope takes you behind the scenes on the latest stories and talks with leading journalists to analyze the trends reshaping media. cjr.org/podcast

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HARD AN D SOF T

All of It Matters

By Sam Sanders

W

HEN I WAS GROWING

up, in the nineties, my father subscribed to a couple of local newspapers in Central Texas: the Seguin Gazette and the San Antonio Express-News. The A section articles on politics and business didn’t interest me much. But every Friday, I’d flip through the pages in search of something more important, and I’d find what I was looking for in a small box in the entertainment section: Billboard’s list of the week’s top singles and albums.

I never talked about what I read with my dad, who was absorbed in the front pages. The music charts, even though they were printed in the newspaper, clearly didn’t qualify as real news.

“News” was serious. It was for grown-ups, made by men wearing suits and ties. It was boring. And mostly, it just didn’t feel like it was for someone like me.

Now, at thirty-six, I see that the Billboard charts nevertheless held vital information about my place in the world. Back then a very glossy kind of hip-hop and rap was rising, and Black voices were overtaking pop. Around 1997 and 1998, when I saw Puff Daddy and the Bad Boy Family doing victory laps on the charts, an integration of Black music into the mainstream that had started decades prior was reaching its zenith.

To put it in journalistic terms: the Billboard charts were a business story and an arts story and a race story all at the same time.

For years now, I’ve been thinking about why poring over the entertainment section of the newspaper didn’t feel like “news” consumption.

I’ve questioned the strange distinction journalists make between “hard” and “soft” news. Hard news is typically thought of in terms of important people, important issues, and important events.

(With “important” being defined by those in power.) Soft news is everything else—and so by definition the unimportant, inessential stuff of daily life. In comparison with hard news, soft news has often been defined as more cultural, personality-­ driven, and opinionated. In 2000, Thomas ­Patterson, a professor of government and the press at the Harvard Kennedy School, made a forceful argument against soft news, writing that it is “weakening the foundation of democracy by diminishing the public’s information about public affairs and its interest in politics.”

The obvious problem with this take is that for most of the journalism industry’s history, the leaders and institutions that “hard” news most valued left people like me out. Until very recently, hard news was designed to be exclusively for and about a certain kind of man: white, straight, well-educated. Things are somewhat better now, thanks in large part to the journalists of color and women journalists who fought for equal opportunities to provide coverage. Since 2013, Black Lives Matter activists have made stories about police brutality impossible to ignore; the same has happened through the #MeToo movement for reporting on sexual abuse. Those efforts have forced a shift in not only who hard news is written for, but also what’s considered hard news in the first place.

Still, white heteronormative maleness is the foundational legacy of major news institutions,

SAM SANDERS

in the same way that the US Congress wasn’t founded with the idea that women or Black or queer people would one day serve in it. And the distinction between hard and soft news, informed by all those historical disparities, is embedded in the very structures of America’s newsrooms. Compared with hard news stories, so-called “soft” pieces tend to be authored by a greater diversity of writers and contain a greater diversity of subjects. In the former category we get dutiful reports on the dominant figures of Washington politics; in the latter, we find stories classified under “women’s issues” and hear queer voices speak with autonomy.

The hard-vs.-soft framework not only perpetuates inequality in the industry, it produces journalism that isn’t as informative and edifying as it could be. People don’t, in reality, live within “hard” and “soft” categories. We don’t understand the world that way. Instead, it’s the connective tissue between hard and soft that helps us see the bigger picture. In 2016, Donald Trump rode to the White House on reality TV fame, taking many hard-news journalists by surprise. At the time, I was one of them. We failed to understand what soft-news journalists already knew: that Trump is a performance.

And to fully understand the power of the Black Lives Matter and police-abolition movements, we must consider the ways that entertainment— Paw Patrol, cops—influences how Americans view the police.

Consider, too, how channeling hard news as “breaking news” affects the health of news consumers. In an effort to make hard news

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For most of the journalism industry’s history, the leaders and institutions that “hard” news most valued left people like me out.

unmissable, journalists feed an unhealthy addiction to anxiety-inducing content. If all the news is breaking all the time, then we are broken, too.

When our industry approaches the news this way, particularly with the stories we deem the “heaviest,” we may keep our audiences coming back, but we aren’t enriching their lives. What would a better approach look like?

Each week, my team on It’s Been a Minute, an NPR show, tries to take a holistic view of the news. We attempt to convince our listeners that all of it matters. All of it can be taken seriously and examined critically. Most of it is connected, in fact, in all the complex and unexpected ways that disparate lives are connected. A celebrity’s admission that they don’t take showers is a chance to talk about the racially coded history of soap and hygiene. The Fast and Furious film franchise is a way to talk about the changing nature of China’s soft power. By examining ratings for the Tokyo Olympics and Bennifer 2.0 we can have a critical conversation about the death of monoculture. I believe in making a show that takes Whitney Houston’s Super Bowl rendition of the national anthem as seriously as the infrastructure bill. Because neither matters more than the other.

Journalism should blur the lines between hard and soft, high and low, serious and trite— not reinforce those boundaries. I don’t know if my father would like every part of my radio show if he were alive today. But I do think that I would have persuaded him to read all of the paper, and to talk about it with me. We’d both enjoy that. cjr

KANG, KARBAL , AND MERID

25

Ten political journalists reflect on starting their careers in the Trump era and look ahead to what comes next OR AL HI STORY

The New Guard

AUTHORS

Shinhee Kang Ian W. Karbal Feven Merid ILLUSTRATOR

Nate Kitch

F

or political journalists who began their careers in the Donald Trump era, stories unfolded with such stunning celerity that reality could be hard to distill and contextualize. What used to be “the norm,” and what was it now? The task before young reporters was tremen­ dous. Recently, ten of them reflected on their entry into journalism, the influence of Trump, debates over objectivity, and their outlook on their beat. They described being inspired and exasperated, getting locked out of briefings and heckled at rallies, at both the national and the local level. “There have been plenty of times when I’ve tried to talk to people or get comments from somebody, and they’re like, ‘Well, I don’t like CNN,’” Stephen Fowler, a public radio reporter in Georgia, said. “And it’s like, ‘Well, I’m not CNN.’ We do two different things, but people can’t differentiate.”

In recent years, the job of political journalist may have seemed impossible, or at the very least thankless—but for this group it has been well worth the effort. As Oma Seddiq, a junior reporter at Insider, observed, “When a story reaches an audience that may be under­ represented or a minority community, and they feel that their stories are being told on a national level, then I think political journalism is doing a good—it’s working.”

The following interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

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The Beginning MULLINGS I actually did not want to be a political journalist. I didn’t even want to do local news. I’ve always wanted to do editorial; I always wanted to do music journalism or some kind of opinion-related column or even something investigatory. My track at school was print, and so I ended up doing the college’s newspaper because of that. But as I got more and more involved in the college newspaper, I got more and more interested in local news. And that kind of, I guess, changed my mind.

There was a lot of, in terms of student government, kind of—I don’t want to say drama, but, you know, there were allegations of cheating and stuff like that. There were a lot of protests on my campus. There was a lot of animosity between student organizations; there was animosity between the student organizations and my paper. It defi­ nitely just radicalized me to the local journalist’s job, and the need for local reporting, and just how big the lack of media literacy there is in terms of local journalism.

SAMUELS I went to school at the University of Texas at Austin. So the same city as the Texas Capitol. And being here, it was really hard to avoid politics—it’s all around. And so I came to realize the importance of all the decisions being made just a few miles away. And from there I went on to cover the state legislature for the Texas Tribune, and then expanded my purview to covering race and everyday people affected by the policies.

MERCADO I was a senior in college when President Trump was elected.

I don’t remember a specific point in time, but I do remember we started

having conversations about hostility towards the press, how to carry ourselves as profes­ sionals, and to make sure that we could still do our jobs professionally while also looking out for ourselves.

CLÓ I was born and raised in Brazil. I moved to the United States about four years ago, the summer of 2017. I remember that the first week that I got here, Charlottesville happened, and right after that, as soon as I started grad school, there was a Trump rally in downtown Phoenix, which was where I was living. I had a really hard time, as a foreigner. I got my first job out of college in Ohio, where I was a digitalcontent producer, but I did a lot of political coverage. On March 1, I started at the Arizona Republic as a Scottsdale beat reporter.

I love local journalism. I think not a whole lot of people give value to it, but there’s only a few reporters in all of the state really paying attention to Scottsdale. I think that it’s impor­ tant to pay attention to the local elected officials. Their decisions have a much more direct impact into the lives of residents than a lot of decisions that are made on the national

KANG, KARBAL , AND MERID

27

The journalists Renata Cló, 28 Scottsdale watchdog reporter at the Arizona Republic

Stephen Fowler, 27 Political reporter covering local and state politics for Georgia Public Broadcasting Meridith McGraw, 30 National political correspondent for Politico; previously at ABC News Melody Mercado, 26 Eastern suburbs reporter for the Des Moines Register

Morgan Mullings, 23 Most recently at the Bay State Banner covering the Massachusetts legislature

or state level, and I do think we should be serving as their watchdogs. It’s fun for me to know things that no one else does. I just get into these rabbit holes of information that really do help with my reporting. It might not be relevant to the public, but to me, knowing those little details is just really fun.

MCGRAW I worked on Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. I was twenty-one, right out of college. And then I did a brief stint at a think tank, hated it, and then that’s when I started applying to law school, decided I don’t want to be a lawyer and wanted to be writing, then went to J-school.

Right as things were ramping up for the 2016 election, I got a political-reporting fellowship with ABC News. So I moved to DC. I started as a desk assistant and then worked my way up at ABC over the next five years. I joined ABC’s White House team. So for the majority of Trump’s time in the White House, I was covering him. And then I joined Politico in November of 2019.

I’ve always been really neutral with poli­ tics. It’s fun getting to talk to different people

Ella Nilsen, 28 Washington reporter for CNN’s climate team; previously at Vox and the Concord (NH) Monitor Eliza Relman, 30 Politics reporter at Insider

Alexandra Samuels, 26 Political reporter at FiveThirtyEight; previously at the Texas Tribune Oma Seddiq, 23 Junior politics reporter at Insider

Katherine Sullivan, 33 Reporter and radio producer who worked on Trump, Inc. with ProPublica and WNYC

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“As much as the Trump White House said, ‘Fake news, lamestream media, you’re puppets of the left,’ they would be a resource to the press, even if publicly they were calling us names.”

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about policies or motivations. It can be cutthroat—and juicy and gossipy—but at the same time, there’s always a policy motivation behind what people are doing, too. Power is a part of it. Power in politics is always a part of things. But also, why do people get into it? They saw something that they wanted to change, or they have a really strong belief system.

SULLIVAN I was not one of those people who was on the school paper and knew from childhood that I was gonna be a reporter. I basically got into journalism when I was in Rwanda and started working for an English-language newspaper there. I was in J-school when Trump was elected. After grad school, I wasn’t in the press pool. I wasn’t doing the breaking news on Trump, which I think would be really, really difficult.

One lesson that I learned was that when he said something really crazy and dangerous, you should take it seriously, because he’s the president and he could make it happen. It sounded totally farfetched and kind of funny, and I think there was this attitude of sort of mocking Trump. He was really written off like this clown. I don’t think that was helpful, because even though nothing he said was true, often what he was saying was dangerous. Maybe we should have been taking him seriously the whole time, refuting his false claims the whole time.

RELMAN I remember having overwhelming feelings—I couldn’t under­ stand why the media didn’t do a good enough job of explaining where Trump came from and why there was so much support for him. I think the media didn’t do a good enough job of investigating why he was so appealing and what it is about, you know, our civic education in the country—and education in general—and distrust of government and institutions that could lead to him.

FOWLER Georgia has been at a political crossroads for a couple of years. And the intersection of those changes and how they affect people and the policies intrigues me. It’s a big responsibility to make sure that you can accurately reflect what these politicians are saying—and hold them accountable for what they’re saying—but then also make sure that you’re asking the right questions, to not just be a stenographer of what an official says or does, and think about the impacts of what’s happening and how different policies and posi­ tions and statements affect people. Georgia is a state that has a large urban and suburban population, but also a large rural population.

And so balancing the needs and concerns of both of those somewhat conflicting constituencies is exciting.

NILSEN In New Hampshire, there’s just always political stuff happening. So when you’re a young reporter and it just becomes part of your beat—it was very exciting to see. I feel small newspa­ pers were still really treated like royalty by the campaigns. And so I sat in on an editorial board for Hillary Clinton and a bunch of the Republican candidates just in our little newspaper office. I was assigned Trump because no one else in the newsroom wanted to cover it, basically. No one was taking it seriously.

KANG, KARBAL , AND MERID

29

The Pushback SAMUELS I covered a couple of Trump rallies. And at the rallies, he would be like, “Oh, look at the fake news here.” And then everyone would start booing you. I’ve had people ask me, “How can I know that you’re an objective journalist? How do I know that you’re going to tell me the truth?” Et cetera. You know, obviously it’s frustrating as a journalist to have to convince people that yes, I am telling the truth, I’m being accurate. But I have definitely had a few experiences where I have to justify that what I’m doing is telling the truth and that I don’t have this “agenda” when it comes to covering politics.

As much as Trump and his advisers were talking about fake news and all of that—like, a lot of my White House sources, you’d hear them say “fake news” on TV or on a Sunday panel—they would pick up the phone and answer questions, and would be giving you quotes on background, and they would be really eager to give their own perspective of what was going on behind the scenes. So there was kind of this public disconnect. As much as the Trump White House said, “Fake news, lamestream media, you’re puppets of the left,” and all of those things that they would say, quite a few of them—very high-ranking ones— would still pick up the phone and answer questions. They would talk on background. They would provide guidance off the record. They would be a resource to the press, even if publicly they were calling us names.

N AT E K I TC H

MCGRAW

CLÓ Compared to Brazil, there’s more interest in political coverage, even if it’s the local level or national level, in general, in the United States. You get more viewers if you’re on broadcast, or if you’re

working with print, you also get more readers.

I just think people are more engaged in the news cycle. But people are suspicious of us, and they are suspicious of our intentions. A lot of people think we have an agenda. My impression is that this comes, more often than not, from the public more than it actu­ ally comes from sources.

FOWLER There has certainly been a falloff in people’s trust of the capital-M media, as much as I dislike the way people describe it and lump it all in one category. But it felt like—with voting and with the elections and the results of the elections—that there’s no convincing people of the truth. And it’s a very hard place to be. It’s also a very hard line to not seem like you’re being overtly biased, but there is no bias in the truth.

I had my credentials denied to cover a Senate runoff watch party for Republi­ cans. They claimed it was because of covid concerns, even though it was in a packed ballroom. But it came after coverage that the chair of the Republican Party was lying about different parts of the election.

30 MERCADO Sometimes people would come up to you and say, “Make sure you get the story right. Make sure you get it straight. You aren’t fake news, are you?” I probably got those questions at every single event that I covered—especially relating to the caucuses.

In 2016, I was covering a Trump event that’s always stuck with me, because there was already that very anti-media sentiment. At the beginning of his events, reporters were allowed to roam free. There weren’t any restrictions. But halfway through the campaign came the metal barrier, when he did the whole thing where he would point to the reporters in the back of the room and call us fake news and scum until the crowds turned around and booed us. And it was really jarring, because I was a local reporter— his beef was with national reporters.

When I was working for Vox—Vox obvi­ ously has more of a reputation as being a left-wing publication. And so Republicans in Congress sometimes didn’t want to talk to us.

But at the same time, I think Republicans in NILSEN

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general cared less about what Vox was going to say, the negative things about them, poten­ tially. I feel Democrats care way more about what Vox says, so I feel I got more pushback from Democrats.

MULLINGS I will say a lot of the reporting on politics—it doesn’t just involve talking to elected officials. It also involves talking to a lot of activists, a lot of people who are just very heavily involved in the commu­ nity: leaders and nonprofit organizations, that kind of thing. So building relation­ ships with them, I feel, is a little bit more difficult, partially because they have more of a stake in what’s happening. They’re going to be directly affected, and their people are going to be directly affected, and they’re very passionate about specific issues that they’ve been fighting for over a long time—you know, sometimes longer than the terms that these legislators hold. And so I have gotten push­ back in that area. Not in a horrible, negative way, but more so in the way of skepticism, which I absolutely welcome.

Is Objectivity Possible?

RELMAN It’s been a hard time to try to abide by this “objective journalism” standard, you know? We were just reporting on a really unusual administration and president, and you get a lot of hate mail, as a reporter, from readers accusing you of being biased. I hadn’t really faced that before. I’d never done this kind of reporting—and particularly in such unusual circumstances, where you couldn’t trust that the most basic alleged facts coming out of the White House were true. So we had to approach everything with a very critical lens.

I think there’s totally a role for advo­ cacy journalism and for reporting that is very close to a specific ideological perspec­ tive. I think there’s also a role for traditional “objective” reporting, where you are getting all the different sides of the issue as you can, and not injecting your own opinion, as much as possible. Of course, it is impossible; we’re

all subjective, we’re all human beings, and everything we write is going to be shaded by our own potentially subconscious biases, and that is inevitable. But I do think there’s a difference between advo­ cacy journalism, for example, where you’re coming from maybe a socialist perspective, or a very conservative perspective or liberal perspective. I just think that everyone should just be straight up about what they’re trying to do.

SULLIVAN It was only four or five years ago when the New York Times was like, “Do we use the word lie?” In the very beginning, it felt like people didn’t know how to cover Trump, because he was so unordi­ nary and you just couldn’t cover him like regular presidents. It took a while for everyone to catch up and realize how to report on him without just promoting what he was saying when it was totally false.

It seems like newspapers and editors decided that they were more comfortable with calling out Trump’s misinformation. I think it took too long to get there, but it’s not like I can fault anyone, because we didn’t know what was happening.

No one’s objective, but I think that transparency is really impor­ tant. I don’t mean that you tell your reader everything about yourself,

KANG, KARBAL , AND MERID

N AT E K I TC H

but being aware of your own biases, and what you’re preconditioned to believe, and being transparent about that with your editor. If you’re covering the White House, I don’t think you should be really good friends with the people in the White House. I think there has to be a little bit of distance. But at the same time, you have to talk to these people.

SAMUELS My idea of objectivity has changed. Especially during the Trump era, I noticed that the Republican Party, in particular, was bashing journalists for being biased against the GOP or being “fake news.” And I think some journalists tried to correct for this by making kind of forced comparisons between members of the two parties. But I think what myself and other journalists came to realize, maybe too late in some instances, is that we can’t let this idea of both-sides-ism come at the cost of reality-based, evidence-steeped reporting, which is the job that we all signed up for. So we’re covering a politician, for example, who constantly lies. And we should cover that at face value.

Also, as someone not based in New York or DC, I found that a lot of political journalism is written with this East Coast slant. So that’s

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to say: There’s a lot of unnamed sources on Capitol Hill. Or x person who won’t talk on the record because he or she is a member of x administration.

FOWLER Telling the truth is not objective.

My job is not to get approximately 1.5 Repub­ licans and 1.5 Democrats in every story. There are some things that inherently don’t come neatly down the middle. But there is such a thing as fairness, and there’s a thing as truthfulness, and transparency. And I think, sometimes, these journalistic entities try to conflate objectivity with transparency—and the two aren’t the same.

For too long, it’s been white upper-class men who have been in positions of power in the media. And that’s not how journalism works anymore. That’s not the way the country works anymore. And it’s not the way it should

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work anymore. I think the future of political journalism is centered around people. And people are not objective. Everyone has biases; everyone has their own perspectives on how things work. It’s our job as political journalists to make sure that those perspectives are heard and accurately told and accurately contextualized.

SEDDIQ As journalists, we still do a good job, for the most part, of trying to remain objective. At the end of each story, I make sure every single word I’ve written, I can fully stand by it as accurate and fair and truthful. I would say that, to be objective—if I am fully comfort­ able with what I ran, then I think that I’ve achieved objectivity in that piece.

Covering international elections in American political terms In July, Jair Bolsonaro, the president of Brazil and a far-right firebrand, threatened to cancel the nation’s elections. American outlets compared the situation to Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud in the United States.

But in Brazil, a country with a recent history of dictatorship and a leader whose cronies imprisoned his political rival, the threat to democracy is far more acute.

MERCADO I am a woman of color. And I know that I bring a certain perspective and value to the team. I think about ways that we can cover things in relation to our local communities that maybe my other colleagues won’t necessarily think of. And I think that now we’re seeing more of those conversations take place in newsrooms, and seeing the different perspectives that myself or other people of color on our team bring, and how we can incorporate that into our reporting, objectively.

I take objectivity very seriously, especially with my sources. I have a lot of sources in the community of color; I have a lot of sources in BLM. I get questions: “What do you think about this?” or “What do you think about that?” And it’s not my job to tell people how I think about things. It’s my job to tell people how it’s affecting you, or what you think about it. It’s my job to make sure that I don’t cross that line, so that I can continue to do reporting that people can trust in and see as valuable.

CLÓ I try to get a variety of opinions. I hate just having one side, because I think that the same way the press serves as a vehicle for public officials to communicate with the public, putting the public’s voice there is also a way of sharing the public’s thoughts with the people who are in charge or making decisions, or legislating. What I sometimes take issue with—just gathering opinions to have different sides—is that a lot of opinions are just sharing hate. I really believe in maximizing truth and minimizing harm. Some thoughts are just so hateful, so why would I give that person a voice?

S E RG E B LO C H

K ILL LIST

MCGRAW There is a greater chumminess between the press corps and a Democratic White House, at least from what I’ve seen with Biden so far. A lot of these people have been in DC for a long time.

They know a lot of the reporters. They know how it all operates.

I think it’s really important to just acknowledge both sides of the argument, and don’t let your own personal passions get in the way of a story. I think you see that play out far too often, where people let that get in the way of just telling the story and doing their job. It’s not about you. It’s not about what you think, or what you think the right answer is. It’s about telling the news. When you see people really editorialize stuff, it’s frustrating, because you’re alienating a lot of readers that way. They’re looking at it and they’re like, “This comes across like an opinion column.”

KANG, KARBAL , AND MERID

Especially after all the protests that followed George Floyd in Minnesota—I think a lot of outlets started looking at how we cover race, and started having a more open mind towards calling out racists. Even if you look at the AP style change of capitalizing Black, which I think was important to do, I think journalists in general right now are growing.

They are realizing that the way they cover the issues matters, and calling out something for being racist does not necessarily mean a lack of objectivity.

When it comes to political journalism, I think, generally speaking, the public—and maybe that’s on journalists—the public has a hard time understanding what’s commentary and what’s news. I think sometimes journal­ ists make those lines blurry, and I think that the public gets confused: Is this an article, or is this an opinion piece? I think there is a need for journalists to be more transparent on what’s opinion, what’s commentary, and what’s news.

MULLINGS Journalism is built on—you know, it’s still very, um, white. I like that we’re having a new conversation about objectivity in the wake of, I don’t know, taking Black journalists

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seriously and taking journalists of color seriously when it comes to covering really traumatic news and traumatic stuff going on in politics.

Objectivity for me is a pair of glasses that I put on so that I can look at my article and say, you know, “Is this going to serve the community properly? Do they have all the information they need to make a subsequent decision off of this article?” Whether they will or not, that’s how I’m thinking about every article. My editor says: look at every fact and say, “How do I know this?” You can challenge yourself, too; it’s like an inner fact-check kind of thing.

So for people to say all reporters are objective and a reporter has to be objec­ tive—I don’t think that makes a lot of sense.

Because naturally you’re going to have bias. When a Black man dies at the hands of police, that’s going to upset me because I have two Black brothers who are, you know, in their late twenties, and it could just as easily have been them. When a woman is assaulted I feel horrible about it, and I feel personally like something should be done about it, because it could just as easily have been me.

Onward SULLIVAN The hardest part of the Trump administration was, honestly, keeping up with what was happening. News was breaking so fast. We were often working on these long investigations, and trying to get somewhere with an investigative piece, or just a longer enterprise piece—it was so hard to focus on one story for even a couple of weeks or days. Explosions were happening everywhere.

By the time you’ve finished figuring out what was going on with one story, five stories had already passed you by and people were moved on to something else.

When Biden first took office, I was like, “Wow, everything’s so calm. What’s happening in the news?” And I realized that, well, a lot is happening, but crazy stuff doesn’t happen. We’re not about to start a war with Iran every single day. There are really important account­ ability and corruption stories to do that aren’t about porn stars that we can now dig into. Maybe they take longer to work on, and maybe aren’t as flashy or exciting, and not as many people are gonna read about them, but they’re still really important.

MCGRAW The Trump White House leaked like crazy. You could always get somebody to talk trash or, you know, dish on another adviser or another aide in the White House.

They were eager to do things like that. But Biden’s team, it’s more buttoned up. They’re very careful with what they say to the press.

You could argue in a lot of ways they’ve been too careful. Biden has not interacted with the press as much as he should.

Political journalism, I still think, serves a really important function and role. I don’t think it’s broken, per se, but I think there are some serious cracks in it. I think it just goes back to trying to play it straight. Every time somebody doesn’t, it ends up alienating certain people.

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“For people to say all reporters are objective and a reporter has to be objective— I don’t think that makes a lot of sense.

Because naturally you’re going to have bias.”

CJR NILSEN After January 6, after covid, after just the whole Trump era—I think that that has changed politics forever. You can just look at the Republican Party, at the people that are successful—Marjorie Taylor Greene and people that are saying wild stuff—raising a ton of money and getting a lot of press coverage. I don’t think there’s a “normal” to go back to.

The Trump era showed that there are very, very real consequences to all this stuff. He actively fomented an insurrection and spouted a lie that the election results were false and tried to overturn them. I do feel, at least at the beginning, Trump was just a sideshow and was not taken seriously. I do think that the industry is getting a little bit more cognizant.

SEDDIQ With the 2020 election, headlines were: “Trump falsely claims that the 2020 election was rigged.” I would say before Trump, I don’t think you would see that sort of forceful language in headlines; instead you might see somebody writing what Trump said, and then an expert would push back against that statement, or whatever. But now it’s just the journalists sort of telling the reader directly: this is false. I think that’s a hard thing to navigate. Is it more important for journalists to tell the readers themselves, or is it still more reliable to hear it from a health expert or an election expert?

I just want to emphasize, you know, what may be important to us as political journalists may not be important to the rest of the country— and so we have to let that be what’s guiding us.

RELMAN I don’t really know what it means to “go back to normal” at all, because I wasn’t a reporter on an administration before Trump.

And I feel like things have definitely changed under Biden. But I don’t know how to define normal. I think what we need is a lot more certainty and a lot more truth coming from government.

SAMUELS I’m not really sure what normalcy entails. But there are a lot of things that can improve. And I would like to see those things improve before we go back to a “normal.” Moving forward, I’d love to see less scoop journalism. I’d love to see more politics reporters covering policy, and I’d love to see more diversity in this field. And I think if that’s not part of the new normal, then that’s a detriment to this industry.

CLÓ Saying that things “aren’t normal” has always been the norm. I don’t think journalism changed after President Trump was elected.

Because he managed to have a lot of firsts, it felt that way, but I think that overall, CNN has always focused on the president, and so has Fox News. National outlets have always felt focused a lot on the pres­ ident, and when the president is responsible for a lot of first-time events, or first-time attitudes, or whatever it may be, that’s news. It will always be news.

In Scottsdale, I don’t think there has been a press conference since I started. But sometimes what I see in a lot of news markets is that there are a lot of press briefings where the reporter doesn’t learn anything from it. So I think that there are valuable press releases, there are valuable press conferences, but something new has to come out of

KANG, KARBAL , AND MERID

it. The reporter has to learn something from it; otherwise it’s just a waste of everyone’s time. I also think that all reporting should go beyond the scope of press releases and press briefings. There’s always a bigger story to be told than just the ones that officials want you to tell.

N AT E K I TC H

MULLINGS Political journalism does bother me. A lot of times we’re just covering, like, the mayor said a thing that made somebody mad, or the attorney general said a thing that made somebody mad. And it’s like, jeez, they’re just people—they are very regular people, and they have families, and they have their own shortcomings and their own biases. And to me—even though, being a resident of a place, you do look up to them—they’re really not that different from us. And so it does feel a little silly and gossipy sometimes.

FOWLER I think a lot of times political reporters act like goldfish—like, intelligent goldfish—where they’ll be really, really good at covering that particular story, and that

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particular event in that particular context, and then forget it ever happened when the next thing comes along. So I think good polit­ ical journalism is a constantly evolving story.

To me, good political journalism is acknowl­ edging that nothing ever happens in a vacuum and connecting the contextual threads.

It’s up to you as the reporter to make sure that people can listen to your piece and read the digital story and come away knowing everything that they need to know about not only what happened, but the why. I think, too, one of the things that is often missing from political journalism is the why. I think the fact that I’m twenty-seven and a giant moron when it comes to how most things have worked is an advantage. Because I, in many ways, don’t have expectations about how something is supposed to go or how some­ thing is supposed to work. And so basically I get to be the conduit for all the dumb ques­ tions people might have about how different parts of government work, or what different bills or policies or things mean. And so we kind of get to go on this journey together. cjr

TK CREDIT

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CLIO CHANG

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Teen Vogue’s complicated political transformation

WINTOUR L AN D

OK, Seriously

AUTHOR

Clio Chang ILLUSTRATOR

Marysia Machulska

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n March, Anna Wintour, the editor in chief of Vogue and global content adviser at Condé Nast, selected Alexi McCammond, a twenty-seven-year-old political reporter for Axios, the Beltway-insider publication known for covering the news in bullet points, to run Teen Vogue. The hire was controversial; soon after it was announced, readers began circulating antiAsian and homophobic tweets that McCammond had posted when she was seventeen. It was also a surprise to the magazine’s staff, who suddenly found themselves fielding online blowback to McCammond.

Many were frustrated that they had not been given a heads-up about her appointment, and found McCammond—who had no magazine experience and was dating someone from the Joe Biden administration—a confusing pick to lead Teen Vogue, which, alongside celebrityfashion photography, runs rabble-rousing articles claiming that Biden and the Democrats represent a “ruling class.” Lindsay Peoples Wagner, the outgoing editor, had not included McCammond among her list of potential successors, and she cautioned Condé Nast that the tweets might pose a problem. Soon, a rumor went around, one that aimed to explain how Wintour had arrived at McCammond in the first place: perhaps, it was suggested, she’d sought recommendations from Biden.

It may come as little surprise that no one was able to confirm whether the gossip was true. (Wintour declined to comment. A Condé Nast spokesperson said, “It was a rumor that ran around last spring and

is totally false.”) But like all good rumors, it was extraordinary only in its banality; the fact that it was believable was telling. Wintour— who has hosted fundraisers for Biden and Barack Obama, and whose daughter-­in-law worked for the Biden campaign—might have had the access and, conceivably, the inclination to turn to Biden for advice on personnel. And yet the notion of a referral from the president-elect posed a stark ideological conflict with the antiestablishment sensibility of Teen Vogue. As the backlash to McCammond exploded, and ­Condé Nast failed to assuage the public or employees, the magazine’s staff took steps to distance themselves from their new boss. On Twitter, they published a note condemning her offensive statements.

Drafting the message was an exercise in both collective action and anxious restraint: “One thing that got lost in those edits,” a staffer told me, “was that this is about Condé management and our concerns as to what they think Teen Vogue is and what it means to lead a publication like this.”

The question of what Teen Vogue is has become the basis of escalating conflict in-house as, over the years, the magazine has changed considerably. When it entered the scene, in 2003, Teen Vogue was conceived as a high-fashion alternative to Seventeen and CosmoGirl, an outlet for aspiring upper-class socialites featuring mostly white, thin celebrities like Mischa Barton, Mandy Moore, and Ivanka Trump.

The audience skewed more toward college-age readers than young teens. Amy Astley, the founding editor, said upon its debut, “We are going to do what we do well, which is fashion, beauty, and style.” Kara Jesella, the magazine’s first beauty editor, told me recently that Teen Vogue strove to be apolitical: “We were trying to make the content not not feminist. That was about the extent of the kind of activism we were doing.”

Since then, Teen Vogue has retained its passion for style, but transformed into a charmingly unholy, strangely coherent mix of explainers on Karl Marx, op-eds calling for prison abolition, and on-the-ground protest coverage from teens—all of which sit beside profiles of Jari Jones, a transgender model; a guide to oral sex; and the latest on Zayn Malik and Gigi Hadid. It’s a curious evolution for a publication within Condé Nast, a media conglomerate better known for being an institution of power than for challenging it. The contradictions are obvious: Teen Vogue maintains a socialist bent while trying to commodify its brand for advertisers primarily in the fashion and beauty industry.

Yet its peculiar position in media has seemed, somehow, to work; the magazine has attracted bona fide leftists to its ranks as well as praise from unlikely admirers. In 2019, Jacobin, the socialist publication, ran a piece that declared: “Teen Vogue Is Good.”

Not everyone reads Teen Vogue—its website averages roughly seven million monthly unique views—yet it seems as if everyone has an opinion on it. The McCammond debacle proved no exception.

Within a week, Ulta Beauty suspended an advertising campaign with Teen Vogue; McCammond, who would have been the magazine’s third Black editor in chief, was caught in a high-profile disaster. She apologized for her old tweets and announced her resignation before having started her first day. (“After speaking with Alexi this morning, we agreed that it was best to part ways, so as to not overshadow the important work happening at Teen Vogue,” Stan Duncan, Condé’s

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chief people officer, wrote in an email to the company.) The staff were rattled; they were soon inscribed into a narrative—first within right-wing media, then more broadly—of having organized to push McCammond out, despite the fact that they had no say in her hiring or departure. It was, critics claimed, an example of cancel culture run amok. People well outside of Teen Vogue’s demographic threatened to cancel their subscriptions.

The anxieties that Teen Vogue seems to awaken in the general public have proved to be analogous to how America sees teen girls, so frequently flattened into either Greta Thunberg–­like saviors or overly woke children who need to be saved. Even when the response is praise, the tone tends to be patronizing. “I do think women’s media is often looked down upon in terms of politics, and that only gets further magnified when you add the teen girl to it,” Samhita ­Mukhopadhyay, a former executive editor of Teen Vogue, said. “It’s our constant denigration of young women and their ability to be intelligent political actors on their own.” Lately, as publications across Condé Nast have unionized, and there has been a rise in class consciousness across the journalism industry, the staff of Teen Vogue have been making increasingly bold efforts to carry the values they’ve instilled in the magazine off the page; organizing now continues apace. But in taking the political power of girls seriously, Teen Vogue presents a paradox, as its employees find themselves at odds with Condé Nast, a bastion of corporate media that sells ads to young women.

I

t was March 2016, just a few weeks after Beyoncé performed “Formation” at the Super Bowl, when Nancy Reagan died.

Vogue paid tribute with a piece by Hamish Bowles, American Vogue’s international editor at large, who wrote of Reagan’s “brisk, polished, and generally faultless American high style.” Glamour, another Condé Nast magazine, published a similar homage, compiling a “most notable looks” slideshow of Nancy Reagan slow-dancing in a Galanos gown and walking alongside Princess Diana in a red Adolfo suit. Everything went the expected way of glossy coverage. That is, until a few days later, when Teen Vogue took a different

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“Women’s media is often looked down upon in terms of politics, and that only gets further magnified when you add the teen girl to it.”

tack, publishing a piece with the headline: “Former First Lady Nancy Reagan Watched Thousands of LGBTQ People Die of aids.”

“That was when a sort of bomb went off internally,” Phillip Picardi, who had been hired the year before as Teen Vogue’s digital editorial director, told me. He had been brought in at the age of twenty-three to grow the online presence of the magazine—which still ran on a decade-old content management system—and to connect with actual teenagers. Picardi, who is gay, said that there was no way Teen Vogue was going to run a puff piece on Reagan. The price of the criticism was a torrent of hate mail that flooded the inboxes of Condé’s top executives. Picardi got a message that Wintour wanted to see him. He braced for a scolding—not only had Teen Vogue pissed off conservatives, it had also gone against its parent publication. But the meeting was suddenly called off. Later, he learned that he had been saved by an unlikely source: “Someone from Elton John’s aids

Foundation emailed Anna, saying, ‘Thank you so much for Teen Vogue’s bravery in covering the truth of the story,’ ” Picardi recalled.

“Long story short, I was not reprimanded for the piece.”

Picardi had been pushing for bold political coverage since before he started; when he interviewed with Astley, he presented a fortyfive-page deck on how Teen Vogue was underestimating its audience. He highlighted news stories he thought teenagers cared about that Teen Vogue had neglected to cover: Black Lives Matter protests, Indigenous rights, representational wins in Congress. “Amy was like, ‘You think teenagers would click on this?’ I said, ‘Yes, there’s a chance we can make real waves here.’ ” Astley brought him on and gave him her blessing. Elaine Welteroth was the beauty editor at the time; soon, at the age of twentynine, she was promoted to run the print magazine, becoming the youngest and second Black editor in chief in Condé Nast history.

Along with Marie Suter, the creative director,

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the new guard at Teen Vogue prepared to take on the emergent Donald Trump era.

One of Picardi’s early hires was Sade Strehlke, who came from the Wall Street Journal and was put in charge of Teen Vogue’s budding political coverage, along with that on wellness, home decor, and campus life— essentially everything aside from the core fashion, beauty, and entertainment fodder.

Early posts on the Republican debates were largely ignored or slammed by commenters on social media, who told Teen Vogue to stay in its lane. But the magazine kept trying. ­Strehlke described the sense of reinvention in the office as akin to working in a startup within a legacy institution. The team became one of the most diverse at Condé Nast; its political coverage grew more ambitious. Teen Vogue produced videos interviewing Native American girls about Standing Rock and published an advice essay by Hillary Clinton (“Vote, and inspire others to vote too”).

At the same time, Teen Vogue, like most publications chasing BuzzFeed-style virality, fell prey to some of the worst compulsions of the clickbait era; the magazine was publishing as many as seventy posts per day, with a staff of around fifteen people. Most of those

pieces focused on classic girl-glossy topics (a makeup hack listicle, “runway inspired” prom looks); many of the political takes were basic-liberal (“You’ll Get Chills When You Listen to Hillary Clinton’s 1969 Wellesley Commencement Speech”). But by one metric, the content strategy proved successful: in its first year, the My Life vertical, which included politics, rose in traffic by 400 percent. “The evolution of wokeness from 2015 to 2016 across American culture was huge,” Strehlke said. “We just jumped on that bandwagon, and the audience came. They were always there—they just didn’t know we were there for them.”

The higher-ups at Condé Nast paid attention mainly when something broke through the news—like the Nancy Reagan obituary or, that December, a column called “Donald Trump Is Gaslighting America.” Written by Lauren Duca, who was working on contract as a Teen Vogue weekend editor, the piece was seen more than a million times and boosted by celebrities. (“Donald Trump is our president now,” Duca declared. “It’s time to wake up.”) Many readers expressed their surprise that a magazine for teenagers could be so incisive; others pointed out the condescension of

Who’s the Boss?

Teen Vogue’s leadership has changed frequently in recent years, creating “confusion and chaos” for the staff.

Anna Wintour

Elaine Welteroth

Phillip Picardi

As the editor in chief of Vogue and global content adviser at Condé Nast, Wintour presides over Teen Vogue from behind her signature sunglasses.

From May 2016 to January 2018, ­Welteroth served as editor of Teen Vogue; she was known to run a tough shop. She resigned after Condé Nast killed the print edition.

As digital editorial director, Picardi established Teen Vogue’s hard-charging political coverage at the start of the Trump era. He remained until August 2018.

F RO M L E F T: N OA M GA L A I / G E T T Y I M AG E S FO R AS M E ; L EO N B E N N E T T / G E T T Y I M AG E S FO R E SS E N C E ; J O H N L A M PA RS K I / G E T T Y I M AG E S ;

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that view and noted that Teen Vogue had been covering politics for more than a year. Duca became a star—even more so after a combative appearance on Tucker Carlson’s show, on Fox, in which he told her to “stick to the thighhigh boots.”

“All of a sudden,” Picardi told me, “Vogue’s PR was all up in our business.” Condé’s communications machine, notoriously heavyhanded, loomed large. When the New York Times magazine profiled Welteroth, the author noted that a Condé publicist was constantly present. Here was a campaign to be carefully managed: the publication that had once featured Ivanka Trump was suddenly on the map as the center of the #Resistance against her father. As Welteroth told the Times: “We’ve come to stand for something, and it has resonated.”

The buzz proved to executives that Teen Vogue’s political branding was popular, and thus monetizable. In 2017, Picardi was given a budget to hire a dedicated politics editor; he brought in Alli Maloney, who had just spent over a year reporting on institutionalized racism in the Columbus Police Department.

Maloney, to whom many staffers attribute the magazine’s sharp left turn, worked with

columnists like Kim Kelly, a labor reporter who wrote a widely read explainer on unions, and brought on Lucy Diavolo, who published hard-charging political columns. The site continued to elevate teen voices through interviews and commissions, including an op-ed

by Emma González in the wake of the Parkland shooting. “I wanted the mission to be reflecting the intelligence of young and marginalized people whose perspectives were being dismissed,” Maloney said. Teen Vogue’s traffic shot up exponentially, from two million monthly unique views in mid-2015 to twelve million less than two years later.

For the most part, staffers who worked on Teen Vogue’s political coverage felt free to set the site’s direction without interference from above; most were doubtful that Wintour or other executives read much of the site or fully understood the political changes as they were happening. Wintour seemed more hands-on when it came to Teen Vogue’s fashion and beauty coverage, which mattered most to the advertisers on whom Condé Nast relies. (Peoples Wagner told me that, at least during her tenure, Wintour was “incredibly involved” with all aspects of the publication, including politics; they met weekly. “She

Lindsay Peoples Wagner

Alexi McCammond

Versha Sharma

Hired as editor of Teen Vogue in October 2018, Peoples Wagner brought a focus on fashion; the pace of Trump coverage eased. She left in January 2021.

McCammond was named editor of Teen Vogue in March 2021. A whirlwind of controversy ensued, and she resigned before her first day.

Appointed in May 2021, Sharma, the current editor of Teen Vogue, inherited some baggage from her predecessors. She has promised be a supportive leader.

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After Biden’s inauguration, Wintour sat down Teen Vogue staffers and asked them whether the magazine should continue covering politics.

had a lot of opinions on where our coverage was going and read the site.”) But what was overlooked, amid the magazine’s ideological transition, were the many ways in which the politics of its fashion coverage could be just as controversial as the politics section itself—Teen Vogue would call in broad terms for capitalism to be dismantled without anyone batting an eye, yet the magazine placed less emphasis on reporting that scrutinized the labor conditions of garment workers.

The same tension could frequently be found in Duca’s writing; the spectacle around her “gaslighting” piece belied the fact that her takes (obvious at best, reductive at worst) were actually behind the times. (“Duca exemplifies a trend typical in contemporary feminist thinking: the belief that any woman in power must be a good woman,” as Haley Mlotek wrote in a review of Duca’s book.)

The superficiality of the pussy-hat moment was already being drowned out by Teen Vogue’s sharpening political voice.

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een Vogue received national acclaim for its political journalism, yet profit did not immediately follow. Picardi recalled the frustrations of working with a revenue team inside a behemoth media company that he felt was “stuck in its ways” and unable to capture Teen Vogue’s sensibility.

“They were scared because the tone of the publication was just a lot more aggressively progressive than they were used to,” he said.

“It was hard to convey that to the right advertisers and right marketers.” By November 2017, when Condé Nast laid off eighty people across the company, it announced that the print edition of Teen Vogue would be eliminated. Staff found out about the cuts through a Women’s Wear Daily article. In her book More than Enough: Claiming Space for Who You Are (No Matter What They Say), Welteroth writes that she was given only last-minute notice of the closure: “I knew on a gut level that pulling the plug on the magazine this abruptly after a year of record growth and with promising

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new ventures on the horizon was ill advised.”

She met with the CEO of Condé Nast to make a case for keeping print, and asked: “If the company is not prepared to invest in the future of Teen Vogue, would you consider allowing me to help find an investor who is?”

The answer was no.

In January 2018, Welteroth resigned from the company. (She wrote of the decision: “My mission at Teen Vogue was to make young people whose voices had been marginalized feel seen, centered, and celebrated. Anna had given me the space and permission to fulfill that mission. I did what I came to do.”) Picardi turned his attention to launching them, a Condé-branded LGBTQ title, but left later that year to run Out magazine. Wintour signaled a return to Teen Vogue’s fashion roots by hiring Peoples Wagner, then the fashion editor at The Cut, as the magazine’s next editor in chief. As the months went by, in a churn of layoffs and reshuffling, employees began to lose patience. “The management changes constantly meant there were new labor experiences that differed from the last, so the ways that we had to work shifted, and that created total confusion and chaos,” Maloney said. In two years at Teen Vogue, she had five bosses.

Under Peoples Wagner, the pace started to become more humane, slowing down from the clickbait days. “Being a newsroom where every single thing that Trump says has to be something we report on is exhausting,” Peoples Wagner said. “It felt like we needed to get to a place where we obviously would pay attention to the news but have a bit more of a curated perspective.” To pull in new sources of revenue, she placed an emphasis on events, like the Teen Vogue annual summit, backed by companies such as Victoria’s Secret and Google; during the pandemic, the magazine hosted a “virtual prom” sponsored by Axe and Chipotle. The publication became sustainable and profitable. (As Peoples Wagner told me, she was “intentional in choosing stories, themes, and people that still aligned with what we wanted to do, but were also exciting to certain advertisers and helped sustain the health of the brand. Because ultimately, if we don’t have a place to do this work, then what was the point of this all?”) All the while, Mukhopadhyay, who had recently started her tenure, steered the politics section along with an

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editor named Allegra Kirkland; the team covered climate strikes and advocated abolishing landlords. “Teen Vogue had pivoted to covering more politics, but they had yet to fully integrate it into the brand,” Mukhopadhyay said. “I was hired to help do that, and my interest was in deepening the reporting and analysis and showcasing the real force young people were emerging as in the political landscape.”

Peoples Wagner was also political in her way, pushing Teen Vogue to feature those who were not traditionally found in the pages of Condé Nast glossies. “When you talk about the traditional fashion industry, it’s often based in European beauty standards,” she said.

“For me, it was really important to make sure that if I’m a young person reading Teen Vogue that I feel seen and heard on this site every single day.” Sammie Scott, a former social media manager at Teen Vogue, said that when she started, in 2017, around a third of the staff were Black, which was unusual—and exciting—for a major publication. “We were politically forward,” Scott said. “Mainstream Black publications wouldn’t have been able to do the same things that I was able to do at Teen Vogue.”

During the same period, a boom in labor organizing reverberated across the media world; staffers grew more vocal about diversity, fair pay, and editorial standards. Within Condé Nast, The New Yorker, Pitchfork, Wired, and Ars Technica unionized. At Teen Vogue, a sense of collective energy percolated through the staff, who at times made their frustrations with management public. Last year, when the site published a glowing article about how Facebook was “helping ensure the integrity of the 2020 election,” without a byline, and Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, shared the piece on social media, the story began trending; as it turned out, the article was a paid advertisement—and most of the staff had no clue. A reader tweeted, “What is this Teen Vogue?” Scott composed a reply from the magazine’s official account: “literally idk.” Wintour sent down a directive to delete the tweet, which Scott did, while executives scrambled to respond to criticism; in the end, the article, which Facebook claimed was a “misunderstanding,” came down. When I asked Scott about the tweet, she said, “Here’s the thing—it was a good idea. I stand by it.” The episode may have been an embarrassing misfire for the company’s corporate-sponsorship strategy, but for the staff it was an opportunity to punch up, in keeping with their vision for the Teen Vogue brand.

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n discussions about Teen Vogue and its discontents, it’s often forgotten that teen magazines have always been political— that was true as far back as the Victorian era. “The magazine has always been a space way more for girls than for boys,” Natalie ­Coulter, an associate professor of communications at York University, told me. “It’s something that can be done in private spaces, because girls can’t take to the streets the same ways that boys can— there’s safety issues boys don’t have to face.” Publications for teen girls can provide a forum for self-actualization; they have also, historically, been colonialist—the conservative contradictions of teen mags started early on.

So it makes a certain sense that Seventeen, the prevailing teen publication of the modern age, was founded in 1944 by Walter Hubert

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Combative questions engineered to be TV “moments” In June, after Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin had their first meeting, each held a press conference. Kaitlan Collins, CNN’s chief White House correspondent, posed a question: “Why are you so confident he’ll change his behavior, Mr. President?”

Biden stuck a finger out and replied, “What the hell?” He later apologized for being “short.” But in fairness, the question—a projection of the president’s thoughts—was intended to be provocative, and succeeded mainly in generating a day’s worth of meta-analysis on cable news.

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Annenberg, a Republican media tycoon and close friend of Ronald Reagan’s. Under Helen Valentine, the magazine’s first editor, Seventeen forged a lucrative business in an untapped market, filling its pages with more advertising than any other women’s outlet before.

To help advertisers visualize the demographic, the magazine invented “Teena, the Prototypical Teenage Girl,” a white sixteen-year-old from a middle-class family with a penchant for spending, whose favorite thing to read was, of course, Seventeen. The original influencer, she was “within a few years of a job . . . a husband . . . a home of her own,” per the pitch. “Open-minded, impressionable, at an age when she’s interested in anything new, Teena is a girl well worth knowing— surely worth cultivating.” Articles advised on how to diet and keep a boyfriend; Seventeen prescribed a traditional view of young womanhood. Other publishers spawned their versions—YM, CosmoGirl, Elle Girl—but it was Seventeen that lasted through the years, albeit now in pared-back form.

While Seventeen remained dominant, Sassy, which debuted in 1988 under the editorship of Jane Pratt, became beloved for being political in a different way: a feminist alternative to the usual glossy teen fare. With a staff that averaged twenty-four years of age, Sassy ran pieces on losing your virginity alongside roundups of the best cheap makeup—because, as the editors wrote, “even though a certain president with the initials G.B. says the recession is over, we know better.” The magazine cultivated community; as Jesella and Marisa Meltzer write in their book How Sassy Changed My Life (2007), Sassy’s draw was how it “questioned all the tenets that other teen magazines held dear.” It understood that fashion, beauty, and politics were not separate categories.

Sassy shuttered in 1994, but its ethos went on to influence online publications—among them Tavi Gevinson’s now-defunct Rookie, notable for being staffed and led by teenagers. Sassy’s progeny also included Jezebel, The Hairpin, Worn, Feministing, Bitch, and Bust.

Kate Dries, a former Jezebel editor, has compared these sites to “consciousness-­raising circles,” crediting them with expanding the scope of women’s magazines. “One hopes we reach a point where they’re no longer a necessary antidote to a flawed system, but simply a cohesive part of an improved landscape,” she wrote in 2014.

Teens blogging on Tumblr, and now posting on Instagram and TikTok, carry the torch, demonstrating an audience for inclusive, queer, and Marxist storytelling.

Now, as one of the last teen publications standing, Teen Vogue has surpassed even Sassy’s political chutzpah. When I spoke with Coulter, she acknowledged a tension between the way Teen Vogue at once politicizes teen girls and markets to them. But, she said, “one of the only places they have a voice is in consumer commodity capitalism, particularly because they’re kids—they’re not working, they’re not in halls of power, and there’s not a lot of spaces for them. These kinds of media spaces are often where girls can be political.”

Being editorially assertive can, however, pose challenges to a publication’s bottom line. “Teen magazines have always been known to be extremely beholden to advertisers, particularly because advertisers have particular feelings about teenage girls,” as Jesella told me. In the first year of Sassy, right-wing religious groups called for a boycott

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over the magazine’s sex positivity; advertisers began to withdraw. Teen Vogue ignited a similar conservative firestorm in 2017, when it published a guide to anal sex. Right-wing mommy bloggers and members of pro-life organizations began tweeting a campaign to #PullTeenVogue. Skittish companies canceled their ads; staff members received violent threats. Scott said that some angry readers even called the FBI. “What’s the FBI going to do?” Scott said.

“They’re like, ‘Let me know if any of them are communists for real.’ ” Sarah Emily Baum, who was a Teen Vogue reader before she became a contributor, at the age of seventeen, told me that the magazine made her feel valued as a participant in the political discourse. “A huge amount of the op-eds are written by students, compared to other national news outlets,” she said. Commentary that trivializes Teen Vogue’s political coverage tends to downplay the importance of personal knowledge, she added. “It begs the question: Who would more authentically or accurately report on, say, queer experiences? A seventeen-yearold queer reporter, or a fully grown adult reporter who is straight and cisgender and doesn’t have any queer friends but has a master’s in journalism?”

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f leftist ideals have become a defining feature of Teen Vogue’s coverage, they have not always been reflected in the workplace. During Welteroth and Picardi’s era, the publication’s staff became one of the youngest and most diverse teams at Condé Nast; those employees—now eleven people in editorial, and around twenty in total— have been responsible for elevating the magazine’s inclusion and class consciousness. But company-wide, Condé Nast has remained a largely white place (according to an internal report, 77 percent of the senior leadership and 69 percent of the editorial staff are white), with vast gulfs in compensation between high- and low-level employees. Maloney recalled that, when she asked a manager to address pay disparities at Teen Vogue, she was told, “You all shouldn’t be talking among yourselves about how much you make.” There is a pervasive sense, staff members told me, that one should feel lucky just to be there.

That dynamic has, at times, presented a conflict of principles: while the magazine’s articles have promoted mental health at work, employees have been pushed to the limit. A former Teen Vogue employee, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, told me that she worked from her grandmother’s wake—the one day she’d taken off all year. In the office with Welteroth and Picardi, people said, it was common to see colleagues cry at their desks. Twice, medics were called to assist people who had fainted in the bathroom, which their colleagues said was caused by stress. “All of the voices we were saying we stood for were run bone dry in that office,” Maloney told me. “I got so used to being at my desk at night. The motion sensor lights would turn off, and I’d wave my arms so they’d turn back on—and I wouldn’t be alone in the office. When I got home, I would continue working. It became so intense that I would preschedule my emails so they went out at 8am—at a normal time—but I was writing them at three or four in the morning.”

Most of the employees I spoke with, past and present, blamed the dysfunction primarily on Condé Nast’s corporate bosses; some believed that Teen Vogue’s managers—often young, of color, and underresourced—were at fault, too, but had been set up to fail. Welteroth writes in her book about being underpaid and overworked; she found herself up against “ever-­tightening budget constraints, a shrinking staff, and some of the same systemic issues that made work feel like an uphill battle.” Picardi wrote last year about his “ferocious ambition” at Condé Nast, which mingled with a fear that he “would be revealed as an impostor.” To prove himself, he worked from seven in the morning to ten or eleven at night; weekends, too. When I asked how he may have contributed to a toxic office culture, he told me that he had a “multiplicity of regrets.” Feeding the clickbait economy had grown Teen Vogue’s brand, but it was complicated. “I wish I didn’t look at corporate KPIs as a metric of success and had looked at how my employees were feeling coming to work every day,” he said. It was a tough balance. “I never would have kept my job if those were the metrics of success.” Peoples

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Wagner told me, “We didn’t have the same resources as a lot of the other publications, and that can be frustrating as an editor when you have really big ideas and want to create an amazing body of work.” She was proud of what the magazine accomplished, she said; still, “it is no secret I wanted Teen Vogue to be able to do more.”

In the past year, Condé Nast has been forced to acknowledge racism in its workplace and in its coverage. The most obvious example: Adam Rapoport, the editor in chief of Bon Appétit, resigned after a photo circulated of him dressed in brownface; employees of color at the magazine then revealed how much less they’d made compared with their white counterparts. During last summer’s protests against racist policing, Wintour apologized to Black members of her staff, writing: “I want to say plainly that I know Vogue has not found enough ways to elevate and give space to Black editors, writers, photographers, designers and other creators. We have made mistakes, too, publishing images or stories that have been hurtful or intolerant. I take full responsibility for those mistakes.” When I reached out for an update, Condé Nast provided a statement: “It’s been a top priority for our People team to evolve our compensation processes and systems over the past year, including a new and uniform job architecture with standard levels and ways of ensuring consistency and equity across our organization.”

Many at Teen Vogue said that the situation there has been especially complicated.

Since the start of this year, both Peoples Wagner and Mukhopadhyay have left their jobs. Around Inauguration Day, with Trump gone, Wintour sat down with members of the Teen Vogue staff and questioned whether the magazine should continue covering politics. There was the McCammond controversy. Right-wing media dug up tweets from a Teen Vogue social media editor who had used the N-word. In April, Condé Nast promoted Danielle Kwateng, Teen Vogue’s entertainment and culture director, to become the new executive editor. “We at Teen Vogue have read your comments and emails and we have seen the pain and frustration caused by resurfaced social media posts,” Kwateng wrote in a statement published on the

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magazine’s site. “While our staff continued doing the groundbreaking and progressive work we’re known for, we stopped posting it on social media as we turned inward and had a lot of tough discussions about who we are and what comes next.”

Rather than stick around, some Teen Vogue employees have opted to give up on their media careers. Scott, who quit at the end of 2020 to work for a beauty company, told me that her mother once asked if she would ever return to Condé Nast—if, say, she were offered a top role. “A lot of things would have to be different,” Scott said. “Anna would have to be dead or something.” (That was mostly a joke, though Wintour’s power can feel so immense to employees that it seems to have grown beyond her.) Scott continued: “I can’t imagine being a Black person in a leadership role at Condé—if you aren’t already a terrible person, it’s going to make you a terrible person.”

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n May, after the dust from McCammond’s ill-fated appointment had mostly cleared, Condé Nast announced that V ­ ersha Sharma, the managing editor of NowThis, a video-news platform, would be the new editor in chief of Teen Vogue. Sharma—who is thirty-five, with long, swooping black hair and a sense of style that is more approachable-journalist than high-fashion maven—was eager for everyone to move on from what had just transpired. “It’s not my place to comment on that,” she told me.

“The team is in a good place right now, where everybody’s excited to focus on our work.”

That work appeared to be continuing on with the magazine as she found it. The June digital cover story profiled Marie Newman, a Democratic member of Congress, and Evie, her transgender twenty-year-old daughter, in their fight against anti-trans legislation. In August, Sharma unveiled the first cover she’d commissioned, on Maitreyi Ramakrishnan, which she described as “brown girl vibes + back to school all in one.” She also pointed me to an interview Teen Vogue ran with a Texas valedictorian who went viral when she switched out her graduation speech to talk about abortion rights. “Nobody else in the industry who interviewed her can do it the way that Teen Vogue can,” Sharma said,

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“because it was a young person talking to another young person who really understands what we’re up against.”

Sharma didn’t want to mess with what made Teen Vogue appealing. Even with Trump out of office, she told me, she saw no reason to change the political sensibility— and besides, the fact that socialist politics have become both a practice and a trend has implications for the currency of the magazine. “I’m excited to show that, regardless of who the president is, young people want to hold them accountable,” she said. She was pleased with an op-ed calling on Biden to sign an executive order canceling student debt. (“So far Biden has offered nothing but stall tactics,” it read.) Over the summer, the magazine published an obituary that harked back to Nancy Reagan’s: “Donald Rumsfeld, Former Defense Secretary and Accused War Criminal, Dead at 88.” (Picardi tweeted the piece approvingly, with a note: “Aaaand they’re back!”) Sharma’s ambitions for growth focus on video, drawing on her background at NowThis. “That was one area of improvement that I saw, coming into this role,” she told me, “because young audiences are the biggest audience for video, social video, YouTube, TikTok, whatever it may be.

So I think there’s a lot more we can do there that will hopefully lend itself well to revenue as well.”

When it comes to the office environment at Teen Vogue, Sharma said that “work-life balance is incredibly important.” She had heard the complaints of the past. “I’m very sensitive to the fact that people are burned out,” she said. “I’ve gone through burnout myself, and I completely understand that—just like I want to emphasize young people’s mental health, I want to make sure we’re doing that internally, too.” The mood today, it seems, teeters between positivity and nihilism; Teen Vogue staffers are fully aware of the strange tension in producing justice-oriented and socialist coverage in the service of a historically racist and classist company, even as they are proud of the work they’ve been able to accomplish within those constraints. I asked Sharma how she felt coming into that dynamic. “I have a very outspoken background on all of those issues, including in the journalism

industry,” she said. “I’m brand new, but so far executive leadership has been really receptive to these conversations. I think my hiring is kind of like the proof in the pudding that they’re listening—they’re listening to staff, they’re listening to the audience.”

Thus far, Sharma added, Wintour has been “really supportive.” (A Condé Nast publicist was present for our call.)

Around the time I spoke with Sharma, union organizing at Condé Nast was heating up. In June, during protracted contract negotiations with staffers of The New Yorker, Pitchfork, and Ars Technica, the company narrowly avoided a strike: they ratified their first union contract, which included a base salary of fiftyfive thousand dollars that would rise to sixty thousand by 2023, a cap on healthcare cost increases, and defined working hours. The deal applied only to those three publications but set a precedent for employees across the company. “This agreement sets a great example for the rest of the industry, and I’m excited to see that put in practice,” Sharma told me.

She’s likely to hear more about union organizing plans soon.

In a sense, the fact that Teen Vogue still exists is a feat; for years now, there has been a looming sense that Condé Nast might decide it’s more of a hassle to keep the magazine running than to deal with the public relations nightmare of shutting it down. A union battle could complicate matters. But if the company wants to stay relevant and retain talent, it will need to find a way to support the people and politics able to carry it into the future.

Recently, Maloney told me that she remembered a speech Wintour gave during an office party—a gathering to celebrate Peoples Wagner’s hiring along with the promotion of top editors at them and GQ. “Anna’s introducing these new editors and explaining what a group of visionaries they are and what a moment it is in time,” Maloney recalled. Then, she said, Wintour ended her speech with a request to the staff: “So please don’t leave.”

Maloney went wide-eyed. “I was shocked that she said that, because she must know,” she said. “She knows why the talent leaves.”

Within a month, Maloney resigned from Teen Vogue with no job lined up. cjr

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“Everything in my life is about politics.”

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Alexandria Neason talks with Averi Harper, deputy political director of ABC News

ALEXANDRIA NEASON

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C O U RT E SY O F A BC N E WS

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or much of its history, political journalism has trained its cameras, recorders, and notebooks on the most powerful players: politicians and bureaucrats, along with the businesspeople and lobbyists who influence them. But the constituents who elect public officials, and to whom they are meant to be accountable, are often invisible in news coverage. The 2016 election and the Trump administration made those deficits glaring, as fault lines in neutrality and “objectivity” cracked before the eyes of the public. Journalists collided with a White House prone to lies and cruelty. Since then, reporters have been tasked with the challenge of self-evaluation: What mistakes did we make? In what ways were we reactive, instead of forcing politicians to engage with questions important to the American people? What have we learned, and how can we do better with Joe Biden and whoever comes next?

In March, ABC News promoted Averi Harper, who is thirty, to deputy political director. Harper has covered local politics and national elections, including the presidential campaigns of Bernie Sanders and Kamala Harris, now vice president. Recently, I spoke with Harper about her new role, the need to grasp the complexities of diverse communities, and how political journalism can realign itself post-Trump.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

AVERI HARPER

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How are you?

HARPER Can’t complain. I just ran to get coffee. I’ve been up since five o’clock in the morning.

NEASON

Do you have fixed hours?

HARPER Hopefully I’ll be done after World News Tonight, which ends at seven o’clock. But it’s really whatever the news cycle demands, right? So there are days when I am working from sunup to sundown, especially when it comes to election time. I’ll be working around the clock. And I think that just has been normal for me—for all of us. Sometimes I get a break here at seven o’clock at night on a Friday, and, you know, the entire news division and all of our resources go to covering that big story. That’s just the name of the game.

NEASON Since the inauguration, what have you spent your days doing?

HARPER Well, I get up and I’m reading every bit of political news that I can before I hit morning meetings. Or I’m talking to our reporters about what they’re working on for the day, or to the heads of different platforms at ABC News to figure out what they are covering for the day—how they’re planning to approach coverage. And then one of the great things about my role is that it’s not only a management position, but I still contribute editorially. So I am making source calls. I am talking to lawmakers. I’m talking to different folks within the political world in order to get their read on what’s going on. Some days there’s presidential remarks. We’re always keeping our eyes on what’s happening on Capitol Hill. And then I spend a lot of my afternoon writing. We have a political newsletter that goes out every day that I contribute to. I’m also thinking of ways to stay ahead of the news cycle and figure out how I can get all the great minds together at ABC News to make sure that our coverage is inclusive, that our coverage is strong, and that our coverage is differentiated from what other people are doing. So that’s kind of my day-to-day.

NEASON On that note, about differentiating ABC from what others are doing: How do you do that when—particularly for political

journalism, which has traditionally revolved around the White House press corps, press gaggles, campaign events—all the reporters from all the outlets go to the same event?

HARPER Right. There is a tendency—the term is pack journalism—to try to just match everything with what everyone else is getting and not necessarily generate your own ideas. And I think that’s where diversity sometimes comes into play. I am very proud that ABC News had one of the most diverse broadcast teams covering the last presidential election. And because of that, we were able to kind of pool our ideas and figure out: What are the questions that I should be asking, that I know that my colleagues at the other large networks are not going to be doing? For me specifically, in the coverage of Kamala Harris—Kamala Harris is the daughter of a Jamaican immigrant.

I am from the West Indies. My mother is from Jamaica. My father is from Trinidad and Tobago. And so I leaned into that specialized knowledge that I knew that no one else who was covering her had, to generate stories, to generate content, and to put out some understanding about where she comes from and why she might appeal to different segments of the electorate.

Sometimes it’s just as simple as geographically where I live. I covered Bernie Sanders during the primary, and I’d lived in Northern California as a reporter for a local station there. So I knew how important the AsianAmerican vote was to California. About 15 percent of the electorate in California is Asian American. And Bernie Sanders, at the time—he was printing campaign materials in so many different languages, Asian languages. It wasn’t just Mandarin. It was Japanese and Korean. It was all these different languages that other campaigns just were not doing. And so I had been there for a campaign event in Oakland, and I had gone to the farmers’ market that I would frequent when I lived there, in Chinatown, in Oakland. And I noticed that the only campaign materials that I saw at that farmers’ market were from Bernie Sanders. And so I said, Well, that’s a story.

That’s how you differentiate. It’s just leaning into who you are and where you come from and your experiences in order to find ways to highlight communities and people who

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“It’s about finding a way to present the fact that there’s common ground in stories in order to reach the broadest amount of people.”

are not typically included in the conversation when we’re talking about politics. I think when you look at political journalism as a whole, it’s very white and very male. And I am not any of those things. So I bring a different perspective.

NEASON You mentioned being at the farmers’ market. It wasn’t just that Bernie Sanders was the only candidate placing material, making an effort in that location. But also that you were there, and that you were asking questions other reporters weren’t. That brings up the question: What is a political news story? There are the traditional routes to what has been considered a story for a political reporter. We know where we go to get those, and that perhaps doesn’t include the Chinatown farmers’ market. Are we broadening our ideas of what political news is to better fit the reality, that basically everything is politics?

HARPER I think there is a tendency in political journalism to cover things in the abstract.

What I’ve said to the team of reporters that I manage is that politics is about the people. It’s about how policy is impacting people at home.

You don’t necessarily start with Capitol Hill.

So for example, for voting rights in Georgia, I encouraged our reporters to find the people who were impacted. It’s not just talking about or listening to the committee meeting in the statehouse, in Atlanta. It’s about who’s outside the statehouse, who cares enough to be outside the statehouse to protest, who’s going to be impacted if and when those restrictive voting bills pass. And so across our network, I’m always going to be encouraging folks to find the character-driven story, to bring life to these issues that can be really hard to digest in the abstract.

NEASON When you talk about characterdriven stories and turning our attention away

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from politicians and toward the people who are affected by the work that politicians do—I think certainly there are a lot of outlets and a lot of reporters who have tried to do that, with varying degrees of success.

But a general criticism is that political journalism, particularly in the Trump era, has been so obsessed with our figureheads, to the detriment of the people who are materially affected every day by their decisions. So I wonder, who do you see? Are there particular segments of the public that you’re especially interested in focusing the camera on?

HARPER I think that covering Latino voters in the midterms and in 2024 is an imperative. The AAPI community is an imperative. Black voters continue to be very important to the outcome of elections, particularly for the Democratic Party. This country is growing more diverse, and it behooves us to ensure that we are covering these communities appropriately and thoroughly, because these communities are going to be the margins in elections. I also think rural voters—you know, we’ve been talking a lot about climate justice. I have a colleague who has spent a lot of time focusing on water issues in places like South Carolina, among those who are poor. And it’s not to say that any one community is more important than another, but it is to ensure that we see all of these communities.

NEASON I want to kind of zoom out a little bit. In your view, just as a Black woman in America, what is your conception of what we even mean when we say “politics”?

HARPER When we say politics, I think of policy—any sort of legislation that impacts the way I live my life every single day. So it is how much money is taken out of my paycheck. It is where I can afford to live. It is if I can afford to go to school or if I can afford to send my children to school. It is how good those schools are. It is if I can afford to go to the doctor; it’s if I feel comfortable about going to the doctor, as a Black woman. There is not a part of my life that I can say politics does not touch. And as a woman, and a Black woman at that, that impacts me differently than it would some of my white colleagues or my male colleagues. And I think it is important that we acknowledge that. I say often, as a Black woman, how much of everything in my life is about politics: how I wear my hair is about politics, the clothes I wear when I go out in the street, how I talk to you versus how I would talk to my mom versus how I would talk to my boss. That’s politics. Oh, that is politics. And so it is finding ways to illustrate that, and make it understood to our viewers. A lot of times people think that, Well, politics is something that happens far away, in Washington, DC. That’s not it. It is every single thing.

NEASON Given that, do you think that the center of gravity in political journalism is in the right place now?

HARPER I think it’s people’s tendency to look at the very biggest picture, the biggest figurehead, which is the president of the United States, and think that is the person and that is the office that does the absolute most for them. Not knowing, necessarily, that it is their county commissioners, or their city council person, who’s making

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decisions that are the closest to them, that impact them every single day. I mean, that’s not to say that the president doesn’t have power and the president is not important. But it is all of those offices, it’s all of those things.

So I think we are kind of seeing a whole recalibration after four years in which everybody was focused on the president, because the Trump presidency was inflammatory in so many ways. Now, because we’re not focused on the erratic behavior that we saw coming out of the White House, we have more time to focus and say, Hey, what’s going on in statehouses? and What’s going on locally? How are our rights being eroded?

NEASON You can tell me if you agree or disagree with this, but I think that there’s a perception that, at national outlets in particular, the people who cover politics treat the presidential election as the most important and the most newsworthy event. How do you address that with a viewer who maybe has this idea that, like you said, politics is a thing that happens far away?

HARPER For national news outlets, because there’s so many states, it’s about tying together trends. So that’s why I keep coming back to the curtailing of voting rights, because that’s a trend we have been seeing for some time. We identify that Republican lawmakers in several states are putting forth legislation that holds back access to the ballot box.

We’re continuing to tell our viewers that, and continuing to talk to state lawmakers.

We had on Park Cannon, from Georgia, who was arrested after she knocked on Governor Kemp’s door while he was signing that very restrictive voting bill. When George Floyd was killed at the hands of police in Minnesota, we had leaders from that area come on our air. So it’s not just the president—it’s the governor of Minnesota, it’s folks who come from the city council in Minneapolis.

NEASON When it comes to social media, how do you consider the merits and pitfalls of focusing attention there?

HARPER This arose as we were covering the pandemic—when there was no campaign coverage because everybody was at home, for the

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most part, unless you were an essential worker. We couldn’t be on the ground and cover stories in the way that we normally would, because we couldn’t get close to people. And so we started to rely on social media to find characters for stories, to get information from folks, and to get information from our politicians. But you have to have access to the internet to do that, right? And so that counted out a swath of the population, because you couldn’t reach them. Everybody’s not on Twitter. Twitter is not the entirety of this country. And sometimes I have to remind myself of that, and we remind our reporters of that as well. When we see something trending on Twitter—that’s not official polling. That’s just a composite of what folks think who are using Twitter. Especially if you talk about politics with people who tend to be a little more educated—they tend to be a little more liberal. And you can’t use that as the basis of reporting. And so it is important to consistently remind yourself of that.

NEASON Certainly we saw the danger in focusing on Twitter, what people are saying on Twitter, during the Trump administration—and even before he was in office, during the 2016 campaign. What have we learned in political journalism coming out of the Trump era and transitioning into the Biden era?

HARPER I think it concerns the ways that information is passed, as we’re seeing misinformation influence large swaths of the population.

Be it in relation to politics and campaigns, or conspiracy theories about all kinds of things—the backgrounds of politicians, or the behavior of politicians. Be it things like the vaccine, or covid: How do you keep yourself from getting sick? I think that all of us are paying attention now. And the politicians are paying attention now. It’s kind of funny, because sometimes we watch some of those congressional hearings about social media and disinformation, and it is very clear that a lot of our lawmakers have no idea how some of these platforms work. So identifying the immense power that these platforms have, while also at the same time understanding that not everybody is on these platforms, is something that I think has become very clear since 2016.

We have conversations all the time: Do we give our air to someone who is going to spout conspiracy theories? Are we going to write about the event in which so-and-so politician spouted conspiracy theories?

How we’ve dealt with it is, we run a lot of fact checks.

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NEASON Do you see it as part of your responsibility to figure out what to do when the fact check isn’t enough?

HARPER That’s totally part of my job. It’s a layered approach, and I’m lucky that we have so many platforms, because it’s about reaching people where they are and giving them the information that we know is true. You know, there is a saying that you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. Well, I’m going to try my darndest. I am going to make sure that we are saying the correct information over and over and over and over again.

NEASON How are you thinking about your audience in terms of who your work is for?

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Hagiographic obituaries of defective leaders After the death of Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense under Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, some journalists depicted his legacy in a false glow; a few deployed the vague word “controversial.” The AP went so far as to suggest, in an early headline, that Rumsfeld was a victim of the Iraq War—even though he’d orchestrated it—calling him “a cunning leader undermined by Iraq war.” (George Packer got it right in The Atlantic: “Rumsfeld was the worst secretary of defense in American history,” he wrote.

“Being newly dead shouldn’t spare him this distinction.”)

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“To me, raising a question—I don’t think that is a violation of any notion of objectivity.”

HARPER This is the largest audience that I have ever been in charge of providing content for, because it is everyone. ABC is one of the largest news organizations in this country. And that’s why it’s so important to have a newsroom that is skilled in finding different ways to reach different segments of the population.

Our audience in the morning—we know that’s an overwhelmingly female audience; a lot of moms are watching in that audience. That’s a different audience from our World News Tonight audience, which is the most serious audience. On our streaming platforms, those audiences might be a little younger, right?

Because the folks who are streaming, they don’t have cable. All of our platforms have different specific demographics. The entirety of ABC News—the audience is very broad. And so sometimes it’s about finding a way to present the fact that there’s common ground in stories in order to reach the broadest amount of people, especially when you’re dealing with a

story that doesn’t affect a large amount of people. And if it’s a narrow segment of the population that your story is covering, it’s about finding ways to pull people who might not necessarily click on that story or watch that story or watch that documentary—pulling them in so that they can learn something new. That’s the beautiful thing about working for a news organization that reaches so many people. You have the power to expose your audiences to things and people that they’ve never thought about and stories that they never thought that they would hear. Especially when things are really important, you have the power to reach everybody and give them the information that they need to know.

NEASON

So what’s on your radar?

HARPER For me, after the past election cycle, it’s really about covering the Biden administration and making sure that they’re

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following through on a lot of the promises that they’ve made. This is the first time we’ve seen a president directly confront the notion of institutional racism in a way as plain as Joe Biden has. But it’s about making sure that that’s not just lip service. It is making sure that we are holding his administration accountable every single day. So, for example, I wrote about police reform.

They decided that they were not going to do a police oversight commission. And that was one of the promises for his first one hundred days. That’s fine. They said they were going to focus on passing the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Well, what are the actions that you are taking to ensure that the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act gets to the president’s desk to be signed into law? I raised that in the newsletter that I write. It’s sometimes just the idea of raising that question and putting it into folks’ minds, to effect a whole news cycle.

Biden talked about the Daunte Wright shooting. But before he acknowledged the pain and the anger within the African-­ American community, he talked about looting. And I raised the idea of, you know, there are so many people who are out there who would wish that the Biden administration would address police reform with the same urgency that the Biden administration addressed looting. That’s how my friends and my family are thinking. That’s how people I know in my neighborhood are thinking. But it’s not necessarily how the folks who are in the White House press corps are thinking.

So that’s why it’s important to have folks that come from a variety of viewpoints and different places and different backgrounds, in order to raise those ideas.

NEASON That’s sort of a deviation from really ingrained ideas about what the role of the journalist is. We’ve been having this conversation across journalism for years, about notions of objectivity: what we mean when we use that word, what it looks like in practice and in coverage. What it sounds like you’re describing is a reporter taking an active role—that it’s not just showing up to the press gaggle or whatever, hearing what whoever is speaking says, and then writing the story about what they said.

Like you were saying, if what you’re hearing

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in your neighborhood and in your family is reflecting one thing, and that’s not necessarily what’s coming out of the mouths of politicians and reporters, you’re saying, Hey, what about this? As opposed to just being there to sort of receive.

HARPER I’ll push back. To me, raising a question—I don’t think that is a violation of any notion of objectivity. I’m not going to advocate for one politician over the other. I held President Trump just as accountable as I hold Joe Biden. But, you know, journalism, just like politics, is about the people. And, you know, you write for your audience. If there’s a question that you’re hearing people ask, it is your duty to ask that question. These are the things that I raised to our team: It’s not that I have a personal agenda in asking this question. But I know that there are frustrations within the Black community in the way that the Biden administration is addressing police reform. There’s folks who are out on the street protesting about it every single day. So it is our duty to hold folks accountable. And it’s not just the Biden administration. It is state leaders and local leaders in our domestic coverage, looking at police organizations and holding their leaders accountable.

It’s about asking the questions that folks want the answers to. That’s what our job is. And the notion of objectivity—I think we all come from different places, right? So I think as long as you are not in a newsroom advocating for any certain policy—I’m not advocating for any policy.

I’m asking a question because that’s what folks want to know. And I’ll continue to do that.

NEASON How we experience the world is different based on these different characteristics that we have. So what does it look like for you, as a newsroom leader, when people on your teams are not all experiencing things that perhaps are faced by the communities they are reporting on—and on behalf of?

HARPER It’s important to work for a news organization where you can have those conversations. I’ve had those conversations with folks across our network, where I can talk about the way that I experience the world as a Black woman. And what can we glean from those experiences to strengthen our coverage? Sometimes there’s just nuance when we’re covering these different areas, when we’re covering these issues, and if you don’t necessarily come from those communities, you might not get that nuance. It makes our coverage the best it can be when we have folks who come from all kinds of places.

NEASON

What do you see as your main challenge moving forward?

HARPER I mean, I think the way that we cover news, just logistically, because of the pandemic, has changed things. The world has changed. In terms of the content of coverage, I think the challenge is to find ways to take topics that can be considered very dense and make them digestible and easily understood for audiences. It’s hard to talk about an issue that’s big, like climate change, right? And to cover things that are state or local issues, and find through lines. We are always trying to find a through line to get people to understand that topic’s significance. cjr

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Mehdi Hasan’s challenging transatlantic rise

CA BLE N EWS

The Debater

AUTHOR

Jon Allsop ILLUSTRATOR

Jing Li

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ast October, Mehdi Hasan, a British journalist who lives in the United States, interviewed John Bolton, Donald Trump’s former national security adviser, on Peacock, the NBCUniversal streaming service where Hasan had just debuted a nightly show.

Bolton had been a regular news guest since the summer, when he published a book excoriating Trump; he sometimes faced awkward questions about his work for the president, but the focus of interviews was usually on Trump’s threat to America. On Peacock, Hasan asked Bolton about the prospect of Trump refusing to accept the election result, should he lose. Then the questions took a turn. Hasan pressed Bolton on his refusal to vote for Joe Biden. And he went back in time, to Bolton’s encouragement of the George W. Bush administration to invade Iraq.

“Verbal abuse is the president’s strong suit, of course,” Hasan said.

“But then again, when he says in response to you and your book that you’re a, quote, ‘warmonger’—that all you, quote, ‘wanted to do is drop bombs on everybody’—is he correct about that?”

Bolton tried to deflect the question—it was “about as simplistic as Trump’s criticisms,” he said. But Hasan would not be waved off.

“What I’m wondering,” he asked, “is all those thousands of people who died in Iraq, all of those innocent Iraqi civilians—men, women,

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children, killed by US air strikes, some of them in massacres, at Haditha, M ­ ahmudiyah, Balad—none of those weigh on your conscience? None of those deaths ever keep you up at night?”

Bolton didn’t answer directly, so Hasan asked again, and then a third time; at one point, he also asked whether Bolton fears one day being brought to justice for war crimes.

As the barrage continued, Hasan moved on to grill him about Iran. Bolton grew flustered.

“I have never said anything other than what I believe,” he told Hasan, “and we are now, sir, twenty minutes into this interview, which you said was for fifteen.” (Less than fifteen minutes had gone by.)

Hasan, who is forty-two, with stubble, piercing eyes, and thick, perpetually skeptical eyebrows, has built a global reputation on conducting devastating interviews—first at Al Jazeera English, now at NBCUniversal.

In late November, Hasan gave both barrels to Chris Ruddy, the CEO of Newsmax, a conservative network that was then cresting in popularity thanks to its sycophantic coverage of Trump and his election denialism; Hasan played Ruddy a conspiratorial clip from Newsmax and asked, “Do you feel embarrassed to be running nonsense like that on your network and calling it ‘news’?”

In late February, he added to his schedule a prime-time Sunday-night show on MSNBC, and invited Dan Crenshaw, a Republican congressman from Texas who had recently called him a “fake partisan ‘journalist.’ ” On air, Hasan pulled up a chart showing that, contrary to the Republican narrative about immigration, apprehensions at the border had already been rising when President Biden took office, thanks to a law through which Trump had effectively shuttered the US to most migrants without allowing them to apply for asylum. (The Biden administration has kept the policy mostly in place.)

Crenshaw said he didn’t know where Hasan had gotten his data. Hasan said it was sourced from Customs and Border Protection.

In addition to these bouts, Hasan has delivered more typical MSNBC fare: segments with network contributors, public health experts, anti-Trump Republicans, and Democratic lawmakers and officials. Hasan often challenges these guests, too. He attacked the

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border crisis from a different angle with Ron Klain, Biden’s chief of staff. (“This isn’t family separation,” Hasan said, of the administration’s treatment of migrant children, “but it’s still an outrage and unacceptable, is it not?”)

In a monologue about Barack Obama’s memoir, Hasan eviscerated the papering-over of his use of drones. Hasan has been scathing about the centrist senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema for their support of the filibuster; at one point, he asked, as he did with Bolton, how they sleep at night—albeit rhetorically, since, unlike Bolton, Manchin and Sinema have yet to subject themselves to the Hasan treatment. Frequently, he goes off on breathless rants timed against the clock. He also convenes thoughtful, substantive discussions on topics as varied as vaccination, the war in Yemen, and Palestine. In April, he interviewed Noam Chomsky, the veteran left-wing academic—a unicorn sighting, by ­MSNBC standards.

Hasan’s approach can be seen as an explicit rebuke to outdated journalistic norms in general and complacent coverage of Trump in particular. At the top of his first show on MSNBC, he laid out a mission statement: “People sometimes say journalists shouldn’t be biased,” he said. “No. Journalists should have a bias: a bias toward democracy.” He has called out Trump’s lies and racism—even his fascism—when many journalists still felt squeamish about doing so. “Mehdi saw immediately what was at stake, for media and democracy as a whole, partly because he comes from outside the US,” Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a scholar of fascism at New York University who has appeared on Hasan’s program, told me—enabling him “to make that leap to say ‘Yes, it can happen here.’ ” Hasan’s sensibility presents a hybrid, of sorts—part MSNBC, part The Takeaway, part Democracy Now!, part something else. Genuinely tough interviewers are rare on American TV, as are strong progressive voices; Hasan is both. “He has a very clear point of view,” Jay Rosen, an associate professor of journalism at NYU who has appeared on Hasan’s Peacock show, told me. “Nobody’s gonna accuse him of being a ‘he said, she said,’ phony-­ neutral journalist. But I think he very smartly includes being critical of liberal politicians— from the left—as part of his mission.” In an

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Hasan has shown that you can scrutinize “both sides” from a place of unabashed moral clarity.

era that has exposed the failings of triangulation and false equivalence, Hasan has shown that you can scrutinize “both sides” from a place of unabashed moral clarity.

Phil Griffin, who hired Hasan while president of MSNBC, was impressed by his interview style and saw him as the kind of talent who could help anchor his network’s push into streaming. “He’s very polite, but he’s tough,” Griffin told me. “He doesn’t let you get away with the thing that we hate most: talking points, or generic statements. It is good television, and it is thoughtful television, and you know the guest better prepare if they’re gonna come on that show.” I asked Griffin whether a desire for greater ideological diversity had factored into the decision to hire Hasan; the progressive left, including Bernie Sanders, has often criticized MSNBC as a bastion of the Democratic establishment. “I would disagree with the sensitivity of the Bernie Sanders campaign,” Griffin

replied. “Our best interviewers are gonna hold you accountable whether you’re a Democrat or a liberal—or whatever. I knew that Mehdi would hold everybody accountable.”

Laura Conaway, who heads The Choice from MSNBC, a news streaming channel under the Peacock umbrella, told me, “My first impression about Mehdi was that he’s what I’ve heard referred to sometimes, in different contexts, as a lot of horse—he’s just a really, really strong performer.”

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asan was born in 1979, in Swindon, a town in the southwest of England, to Hyderabadi Muslim parents who immigrated to the United Kingdom from India. His father was always argumentative about politics; in the eighties—amid widespread disavowal, across the Muslim world, of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses—he bought a copy, telling skeptical friends that one should always read the other side of an

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argument. When Hasan was a child, his family moved to North London, where Hasan attended what he has described as “a posh white-majority private school which was switching to become very brown.” He then went to Christ Church College, Oxford, where he studied philosophy, politics, and economics, or PPE—a degree that is a long-standing rite of passage for the British political elite.

As a student, Hasan appeared in a school play alongside Riz Ahmed, who is now a major Hollywood star. Recently, Ahmed appeared on Hasan’s MSNBC show. “I remember even then you being the debating champion—the vicious debating king,” Ahmed said. “No one wanted to go toe to toe with you. So I think it’s no surprise what you’re doing right now.”

That remark appears not just to have been guest-to-host flattery. In interviews with a dozen people who know Hasan, I heard repeatedly that he was made for the screen— a live wire who dominates every room he enters, and who is the same off the air as he is on it. Not that there was anything inevitable about his trajectory to cable. As he prepared to graduate from Oxford, he applied for media jobs out of a “process of elimination,” he told me. “I looked around and said, ‘Well, I can’t do any of the other, normal jobs that people would do. I’ve got a big mouth.

I’m interested in politics. Maybe this’ll work for me.’ ” Hasan landed an entry-level freelance position at ITN, a British production company, then worked at various networks in off-air roles. One of them was with Jonathan ­Dimbleby, a prominent British broadcaster who employed Hasan as a researcher and producer. Dimbleby recalled that, during preparation sessions for interviews, when Hasan was supposed to be role-playing as an upcoming interviewee, he would share his own opinions. “He wasn’t, as it were, trying to persuade me about what I should do so much as he was irrepressible,” Dimbleby told me. Dorothy Byrne, Hasan’s boss at a different network, Channel 4, remembered him inhaling political news and blogs. “I thought I would get worn out if I had as many passionate views as Mehdi Hasan has,” she said.

In 2009, Hasan went to work at the New Statesman, a progressive magazine, where he covered Britain’s Labour Party and wrote

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features and rapid-fire, trenchant blogs attacking austerity economics and Western military intervention in the Middle East, among other targets. (That wasn’t quite Hasan’s first gig in print: in a curious turn, he briefly interned at The Spectator, a conservative magazine that was edited, at the time, by Boris Johnson. Hasan recalls helping Johnson sign Christmas cards while Johnson sang carols.) Soon, Hasan found himself in high demand as a pundit on TV and radio shows.

Jason Cowley, the editor of the Statesman, tried to prep him for his debut appearance on Question Time, a prestigious weekly debate panel on the BBC. “We said, ‘Look, just be calm. We don’t want to be represented by a left-wing firebrand—we want to show people that the New Statesman is more nuanced,’ ” Cowley said. “Of course, he was a left-wing firebrand.” Hasan “dominated” the panel, Cowley recalled. “The next day, when we came into the office, we’d had a surge of subscriptions from people who had seen him.”

As in the US, voices of the left have traditionally been underrepresented in the British media. Many of Hasan’s stances from his Statesman days are unexceptional by today’s standards—since Hasan covered the Labour Party, it has shifted leftward—but at the time he was a rare, staunchly progressive voice in the mainstream forum. Not that his positions followed a formulaic script. “With a lot of commentators, you know exactly what their line is going to be, because their various views fit in with each other,” Byrne said. “Mehdi isn’t like that.” Once, he sparked a ruckus on Twitter—where he was, and remains, active— after he wrote a column opposing abortion, calling it incompatible with his worldview.

“Isn’t socialism about protecting the weak and vulnerable, giving a voice to the voiceless? Who is weaker or more vulnerable than the unborn child?” he asked. “Yes, a woman has a right to choose what to do with her body—but a baby isn’t part of her body.”

(Hasan stressed to me that then, as now, he supported laws guaranteeing a woman’s right to choose, and that he said as much in the column; he also said that he wouldn’t make the point in the same way today. “I upset a lot of people, and I regret that,” he told me. “Looking back, it was unnecessarily provocative and gratuitous.”)

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“He wasn’t trying to persuade me about what I should do so much as he was irrepressible.”

In 2012, Hasan moved to HuffPost UK, where he worked as political director. (The Statesman continued to copublish his columns.) The same year, he became the host of a show on Al Jazeera English called The Cafe, in which he moderated topical debates, then piloted a program that would later become Head to Head—his breakout long-form interview show, which he hosted until last year and which featured Hasan challenging public intellectuals, senior global politicians, and military leaders whose values and records typically conflicted with his own.

Eventually, Hasan left HuffPost and, in 2015, decamped for Washington, DC, to host another Al Jazeera show called UpFront, a weekly program that incorporated elements of his other formats. The move was prompted in part by his wife—also of Indian descent, and who grew up in Texas. When she told Hasan that she wanted to relocate, his response, at first, was to ask what

“a lefty, Muslim, British journalist is gonna do in the United States.” Still, he was fascinated by American politics and media; on trips to visit his wife’s family, he’d seen Keith Olbermann’s show on MSNBC. Plus, he said, “there is that Beatlesesque, can-you-­ conquer-America aspiration.” Hasan became a US citizen last year, just in time to vote in the presidential election.

Hasan sharpened his voice as a commentator on American politics at The Intercept, where he signed on as a columnist in 2017; he later hosted a podcast and online videos there. His hiring was championed by Glenn Greenwald, with whom Hasan remains friendly, and by Betsy Reed, The Intercept’s editor in chief, who credits Hasan with bringing a “refreshing” outsider’s perspective to the site. “He was one of the first people to start talking about this idea of court-­packing,” Reed told me. “Initially, I thought, Okay, come on. This is just a British person’s fantasy that

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Panels that flatten real ideological divides into entertainment The lofty conception of panel debates— guests from either side meet for a civil exchange—is of no use. Democrat A spars theatrically with Republican B on contrived controversy C while reporter D and pundit E split the difference. On an episode of the “Powerhouse Roundtable,” on ABC’s This Week, guests squabbled over William Barr’s supposed U-turn on Trump, which conveniently allowed the host, Jon Karl, to plug his book on the subject. Sarah Isgur, a pundit who worked in Trump’s administration, claimed that the Mueller report largely “exonerated the president.” That wasn’t true. No one pushed back.

this would happen and this would actually be talked about in the US in a serious manner—but, lo and behold, they’re actually really talking about it.”

Hasan’s interviews at The Intercept were framed as a corrective to mainstream media narratives. Since his days at the Statesman, Hasan has incorporated more media criticism into his work than perhaps any other journalist who is not on the media beat. In the UK, he lashed out regularly at right-wing pundits (“If he could provoke more established commentators into responding to him, that’s exactly what he wanted,” Cowley said); after moving to the US, he often accused major outlets of deferential coverage, and of normalizing Trump. In his Intercept column, he shredded interviews he found unimpressive—Norah O’Donnell on Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman (“a crime against journalism”), Margaret Brennan on Ivanka Trump (“makes O’Donnell’s sit-down with MBS look like an interrogation”). On his podcast, he took aim at “guests from corporate-funded think tanks who run their mouths day in, day out on corporate-owned cable channels,” and slammed White House reporters for defending Sarah ­Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s press secretary, after Michelle Wolf, a comedian, mocked her at a White House Correspondents’ Dinner.

“Andrea Mitchell, of NBC News, even suggested that the White House press secretary was owed an apology by the White House Correspondents’ Association,” Hasan said. “I mean, seriously? What is wrong with these people?”

Now that Hasan works for the same corporate-owned cable channel as Mitchell, it seems his perspective has changed. “I definitely get the access issue,” he said, of the need for shows not to alienate potential guests. “Not everyone has to have the same style; not everyone needs to do what I do.” He has praised Chris Wallace, of Fox News, and Jonathan Swan, of Axios, for eventually subjecting Trump to tough, on-camera interviews. He also likes CNN’s Jake Tapper and Pamela Brown, who is one of Hasan’s competitors in his Sunday-night slot. But he has continued to criticize rivals: assailing “lazy, unhelpful, ‘both sides’ media coverage” that equates progressive Democrats, including Ilhan Omar, with QAnon-adjacent Republicans like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and scolding Politico for granting credence to Stephen Miller, Trump’s immigration adviser.

Hasan finds media criticism fun; he enjoys reading “gossipy media pieces.” His main motivations, though, are serious. “Race is a big part of it,” he said. “I am a Muslim journalist. I am an immigrant journalist.

I am a brown journalist. That’s not how I define myself, but it is part of who I am, and therefore I’m not going to hide the fact that in an era where race is very much dominating most political stories, I’m gonna have a strong view on how we’re covering it.”

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n 2018, Hasan hosted Ahmed, his old schoolmate, on his Intercept podcast, and brought up something that Ahmed had said in an interview with the New York Times magazine, about his identity as a child of immigrants in Britain: “We are the inheritors of the scars of empire but also the spoils of empire, and that kind of inside-outside state is totally ingrained in us, which is why, at a time like now where everybody’s being asked to pick a side, everything is binary.” The quote, Hasan said, resonated with him. He added, “Isn’t it the case

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that it’s not just that we’re asked to pick a side, but both sides—both parts of our identity, call them East or West for simplicity—are insisting we pick them and are suggesting that we would be betraying our identity if we don’t pick one?” Later, Hasan discussed how he feels when people call him a “Muslim journalist”: “Sometimes I am, sometimes I’m not,” he said. “It’s easy to say you don’t want to be pigeonholed by your race or your religion— but when there’s so few people like us around in public life, we can’t help but pigeonhole ourselves. Can we?”

Hasan is a practicing Muslim and has covered Islam and Muslim communities around the world ever since his first article for the Statesman, which was about the growth of Sharia-compliant finance. He emerged from “the first generation of incredibly assertive Western Muslims,” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, a veteran commentator in the UK, told me recently. “He certainly was the first of many who then emerged—very confident of themselves, and very able to take on Western prejudices and push themselves into the public space.” Hasan has spoken out often against Islamophobia—including in the media industry—and has quoted the Koran and Islamic history in columns debunking stereotypes about his faith. He has also challenged his community, calling out, for example, anti-Semitism in its midst. Despite that, right-wingers have sometimes sought to tag him as a radical Islamist, often by recycling a speech he once gave in which, quoting the Koran, he referred to close-minded nonbelievers as “cattle.”

Hasan has pointed out, in response, that he also referred to some Muslims as cattle, but in 2019 he apologized unreservedly for the comments. (He has also apologized for using homophobic language as a young man, writing on Twitter: “Growing up in a conservative faith community, where you didn’t interact with *actual* gay people, I ended up making insensitive remarks.”) He told me that his apology was “everything that needs to be said,” but added that he does get “annoyed” that his old comments still follow him around—“Muslims and brown people,” he told me, “get held to account twice as heavily for the things we mess up on as everyone else.”

Hasan came of age professionally at a time when Islam was a subject of intense global

interest. He was a week into his job at Dimbleby’s show when the twin towers came down, and he spent the next few months trying to book “Great Muslim Guests” at the behest of his bosses. (“You can count on one hand the people you were able to book,” Hasan said.)

He vehemently opposed the subsequent USled intervention in the Middle East. The need to prevent a war with Iran remains one of his major journalistic preoccupations. So, too, is Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. In May, after Israeli police raided a mosque and fired rubber-tipped bullets at Palestinian protesters, Hasan called out euphemistic US media coverage. “These are not ‘clashes,’ ” he said on his Peacock show. “There is an asymmetry of power here: one side is the occupier, the other side is occupied, and media coverage, political commentary, international interventions that don’t reflect this central fact— yeah, the fact of illegal occupation of the West Bank, of East Jerusalem—are all, I’m sorry to say, part of the problem.” The Daily Beast noted that Hasan—along with Ayman Mohyeldin, also of MSNBC—had done “something practically unheard of on an American television outlet . . . devoting substantial airtime to the Palestinian point of view.”

Hasan has also pointed his arrow at Trump, who launched his presidential bid a few months after Hasan moved to the US. Hasan likes to say that, as a Muslim immigrant journalist, he represents “the trifecta on the Trump hate list.” Nevertheless, he initially laughed off Trump’s proposed Muslim ban as the ravings of a candidate who would never win. “Hey @realDonaldTrump,” he tweeted after returning from an overseas trip, “I’m back baby!” After Trump won, Hasan’s mother urged him to keep his head down. But he felt obligated to speak, just as he had done in the UK in the long aftermath of 9/11. As we talked, I asked Hasan whether he finds it tiresome to have to say so much about his faith; overall, he told me, he does. “I don’t think any Muslim wants to write about how Islam isn’t a terrorist religion, how Muslims are not fifth columnists.” After he became a public figure in the UK, Hasan regularly fielded calls from TV bookers asking him to be a Great Muslim Guest; he didn’t always want to say yes, but “you watch TV and you watch someone screw up a defense of your community, and you’re

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CJR

Arguments only work if the participants operate within a shared reality—no guarantee these days.

like, ‘Argh!’ You’re shouting at the TV. And I was one of those people who used to shout at the TV. Now I have an opportunity to be on TV and fix those issues. I felt like that was a burden I had to carry.”

The TV appearances could be physically grueling, requiring overnight trips and unsociable hours at a time when Hasan was starting a family. He and his wife have two children; they now live in the DC area. (He declined to say much more about his household, citing the abuse he gets for his work.)

“My wife jokes—not in a good way—that I end up working twenty-four-seven,” he told me. Since January, he has had more free time, which he likes to spend on “mindless action movies,” including the Fast and Furious series. “When all you do all day long is think about the news, and think about human suffering, and think about how the world’s gonna end in one way or another, the way you relax is not to then do highbrow stuff.” Still, when

called upon for his opinions as a talking head, he’ll answer. “I am a disputatious person,” he said. “I enjoy going on a debate and rhetorically beating someone up, or taking apart bad arguments. Do I enjoy the process? Yes, I’m not going to deny that. That’s who I am.”

I

n 2019, on an episode of Head to Head, Hasan interviewed Erik Prince, the Trump-allied founder of a private military contractor formerly known as Black­ water. For nearly fifty minutes, Hasan raked Prince over the coals with excruciating dexterity. He started with Blackwater’s complicity in civilian deaths during the Iraq War. Then he pilloried Prince for suggesting that private contractors be sent into Afghanistan, too. He referenced Hamid Karzai, the country’s past president, who called the proposal a nonstarter. Prince said he thought Karzai might have changed his mind; Hasan replied, “I literally asked his office on Friday, and they said

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they’re dead against it.” The studio audience applauded. After a break, Hasan brought up Frontier Services Group, another Prince company, and its plan to establish a training center in Xinjiang, where the Chinese government has committed human-rights abuses against ethnic and religious minorities. Prince suggested that Hasan had mistranslated an FSG press release; Hasan countered that his company had posted the document in English.

More applause. Finally, Hasan asked Prince about his ties to Trump, including a meeting Prince took in August 2016 with campaign officials and other characters at Trump Tower. Hasan wanted to know why Prince didn’t disclose the meeting in testimony before Congress. Prince squirmed and eventually said that congressional record-keepers may have made a mistake on the transcript. Neither Hasan nor the audience bought it.

The Prince exchange was a testament to the depth of preparation—with researchers compiling hefty dossiers on guests, then role-­playing as them in rehearsals, as Hasan learned to do on Dimbleby’s show—that the team at Al Jazeera put into big interviews. (“He knows how to frame a question, and he does so with precision,” Dimbleby told me.) The Prince encounter also illuminated a blurry line, in Hasan’s work, between interviewing and debating—the porous boundary between probing a subject and eviscerating him. Initially, the producers of Head to Head had discussed a format where Hasan would debate his guests while a third party moderated; in the end, they used Hasan as an interviewer, but his debater’s spirit became part of the show’s DNA. Head to Head was filmed at the Oxford Union, Britain’s most prestigious debate hall.

“He was a star at debating at Oxford,” James Macintyre, who worked with Hasan on Dimbleby’s show and at the Statesman, said. “It’s amazing how he’s managed now to make a living out of what he loves doing best.” Sophie Elmhirst, another former Statesman colleague, told me that Hasan “had this extraordinary debater’s energy,” and that being in editorial meetings with him was like being in “a kind of uni debating society.” (She added that, although Hasan’s TV career hasn’t surprised her, she partly expected to one day see him in Britain’s Parliament.) Ryan Grim, the DC

bureau chief at The Intercept, told me that he “gave up” debating Hasan. “Even if he were arguing that the world was flat, and I was arguing that it was round, he would win the debate,” Grim said. “It was kind of pointless and hopeless for me.”

Hasan’s part-interview, part-debate approach is distinctive but not unique; it is, in fact, decidedly British. Not all British interviewers are like Hasan; some use subtler techniques to get under a subject’s skin. But a combative style has come to define British interviewing in the eyes of the world, incarnated not just by Hasan but also by the BBC’s Jeremy Paxman—who, in 1997, asked an evasive Conservative politician the same question twelve times—and Andrew Neil, whom Boris Johnson conspicuously dodged ahead of the 2019 UK elections, and who, the same year, chewed up Ben Shapiro, a right-wing American pundit. Hasan has suggested that Paxman is so tough that he wouldn’t last “even five minutes on US cable news,” and describes Neil as “probably the toughest interviewer on British TV.” When I reached Neil recently, he praised Hasan as a strong interviewer in the British mold. It’s been good, he said, to see him break through in the US, where interview subjects have traditionally been “allowed to tell their truth as opposed to the truth.” Yet when I asked him to compare their methods, Neil described himself as an “equalopportunity beater-upper”; Hasan, by contrast, comes at every subject from a leftwing vantage. “There’s probably no market in America for somebody like me, who, when faced with a left-winger, would come at them from the right and test their views— or, faced with a right-winger, would come at them from the left.”

As Trump rose to power, many American media critics, not to mention news consumers, expressed frustration with the established TV journalists who pitched softballs at his lying surrogates, then continued to invite them back on their shows. Over the course of his presidency, there was, it seemed, an expanding appetite for British-style maulings. Hasan’s sit-down with Prince went viral, as did a 2018 interview in which he nailed Steve Rogers, a Trump campaign adviser, with a handful of Trump lies. (“Let’s go on,”

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Rogers said, to avoid having to answer for one of them. Hasan shot back: “You want to go on because you know it’s a lie.”) Hasan cites the Rogers appearance as a breakout moment: celebrities retweeted it; Seth Meyers invited Hasan on his late-night show and described the interview as “the template for talking to people within the Trump sphere.” The Rogers exchange has remained pinned to the top of Hasan’s Twitter feed, with the message: “Hey US media folks, here, I would argue immodestly, is how you interview a Trump supporter on Trump’s lies.”

Still, Hasan has often made the case that deferential American journalism traditions— even those he finds absurd, like reporters standing up when the president enters a room—channel deep-rooted cultural norms.

His tough interview with Crenshaw was praised by many liberals, but not everyone enjoyed it. “Did anyone learn anything from this exchange?” Ross Garber, a law professor and CNN contributor, asked on Twitter.

“Hasan appears to have hoped to take Crenshaw down. But compare his huffing, exasperated, righteous, talking-over approach with, for example, Tim Russert’s technique.”

Hasan can sometimes bring more heat than light. And since Biden took office, promising a return to “normalcy,” some audiences have been happy for news coverage to simmer down. When Hasan interviewed Brian Deese, a top economic adviser to Biden, some liberal viewers accused him of being too harsh, even though the interview was not especially tough.

That doesn’t mean Hasan plans to adopt the American way. He is steadfastly devoted to fierce debate and believes that more of his TV news peers are coming around to his style.

“You know what? The more of us who do it,” he said, “the fewer safe spaces there will be.”

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iming to find out what it’s like to be on the receiving end of a Hasan interrogation, I called up Arthur Laffer. An influential supply-side economist who has posited, with his eponymous curve, that it’s possible to cut taxes and increase tax revenue by spurring growth, Laffer advised politicians including Ronald Reagan and, more recently, Trump, who awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. In 2014,

CJR

Laffer appeared on Head to Head, where Hasan grilled him on his complicity in rising inequality and his track record of economic predictions. At one point, Hasan held up a napkin with Laffer’s curve on it—a reference to a meeting in DC, in 1974, at which Laffer drew the curve on a napkin for Dick Cheney.

The “problem with your principles,” Hasan told Laffer, is that “they’re great on napkins.

In the real world, they don’t work.”

Laffer told me that he loved the interview. He has since appeared with Hasan twice more, on UpFront. “This is not my first barbecue,” Laffer, who is eighty-one, said.

“I’ve been in this framework and this environment for much of my life, and I thought it was about as good as any I’ve seen.” Laffer was referring mostly, though, to academic settings—like Milton Friedman’s workshops at the University of Chicago—and to interviews overseas; Hasan’s approach, he said, is “very rare” in US media. “I found his pushy style—his aggressive style—charming, and inclusive, and expository, and really, really helpful in bringing out the inner workings of the subject matter.” He told me that American friends who watched his Head to Head appearance were “very stressed” by it and found Hasan to be rude. But the Brits he knew enjoyed the sparring. “I wish Margaret Thatcher was still alive and I could have shown it to her,” he said. “She would have loved, loved, loved it.”

In today’s media landscape, there’s little incentive for public figures to subject themselves to hostile interviews; they can, especially on the right, simply appear on shows and networks that will massage their egos.

Yet there are those like Laffer out there who enjoy a vigorous exchange. Many politicians go for it because they value attention of any kind, or because they possess the kind of confidence that makes them think they’ll be the one who comes out on top where others have failed. Some waltz onto a cable news set without doing any homework on the interviewer. Taken together, these factors have provided Hasan a regular stream of guests on his shows, despite his reputation. “In theory, should we be concerned about people not wanting to come and do interviews with me?” he asked. “Sure. But has it actually happened in practice? I’m

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pleasantly surprised to say no. We’re still doing very well.”

At NBCUniversal, Hasan’s booking odds have been enhanced somewhat by a change in format; unlike the journalistic utopia of Head to Head, with limited runs of forty-plusminute interviews built on months of preparation, he now has nightly episodes to fill, each with far shorter segments. At more than sixteen minutes, his interview with Crenshaw, for instance, was long by cable standards, and required dropping an ad break. (It’s no wonder Bolton felt like his fifteen minutes with Hasan dragged on forever.) On American cable news, “you’re expected to paint with a broad brush,” Hasan told me. “I have to work this out on a nightly basis. What is the right balance? What is the right tone? What is the right guest selection?” Conaway, of ­NBCUniversal, told me that Hasan’s team has been working to tease out “what Rumsfeld might have called the ‘unknown unknowns’ ”—attributes that Hasan may not be aware he has. The next step, she said, is growing his “dynamic range,” mixing his intensity with bashfulness and humor. “What Mehdi turns out to be—that I think an American audience loves, but did not know that they were gonna get out of him—is he’s adorable,” Conaway said. “He makes you love him.”

His tack seems to be working. He’s risen quickly through MSNBC’s ranks; occasionally, he has filled in as a guest host for Chris Hayes. The ratings for Hasan’s M ­ SNBC show have held up well against those of his Sunday-night colleagues (though they tend to trail Fox and CNN, and lag behind the viewership of MSNBC’s top-rated weeknight hosts). Peacock does not publish viewing figures, but Conaway told me that Hasan, along with another host, Zerlina Maxwell, has been the “heart and soul” of its news programming so far—establishing a foundation and raising its profile whenever clips from his show go viral online. When I asked Conaway, who used to work on Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC show, whether Hasan could one day match Maddow’s enormous popularity, she replied, “Absolutely.”

Griffin told me, “I think he’s gonna end up a player.”

At the moment, Hasan’s approach poses perhaps one question more than any other:

Even if he can book contentious guests, should he? Since the early days of his career, he has warned about the dangers of handing extremists a media platform. And yet to watch some of his early interviews is to glimpse back at a less tense time for discourse, when disagreements felt more civil than they do today and debating more of an intellectual exercise. (Often that was a sign of complacency, as much as anything, and not necessarily cause for nostalgia.) He once ended a conversation with Asad Durrani—the former head of Pakistan’s intelligence services, who referred to dead children as “collateral damage”—by telling Durrani that although he had expressed “some pretty appalling views,” he had done so “very confidently, very passionately”; in 2013, Hasan went toe to toe with a climate skeptic. Hasan told me that he wouldn’t interview a climate change denier today. “My views have probably hardened,” he said, “because I’ve seen the damage that’s been done by giving untrammeled, unrestricted platforms to extremists.”

Lately, when American media critics have made the case that news organizations should withhold platforms from harmful figures, their complaints have often been more about how journalists treat such people, rather than the fact of the platform itself; interviews with any subject can reveal something valuable if handled with vigilance and rigor, as Hasan has proved with Rogers and Prince. But that doesn’t mean he’ll spar with anyone. Hasan has spoken about his practice of conducting “hygiene tests” to weed out meritless interlocutors.

When Crenshaw came on, Hasan started by asking him to accept that Biden was the legitimate president. Crenshaw did, so the conversation proceeded.

In Hasan’s view, arguments only work if the participants operate within a shared reality—no guarantee these days. “I’m a debater,” he said. “I love debating ideas, debating people. But on two conditions: I will debate in good faith, and right now much of what we see in our media is done in bad faith, especially on the right. And I will debate with facts, and figures, and reason, and science, and qualifications. Like, you could pay me a million dollars—I’m never going to interview Marjorie Taylor Greene. Why? What would be the point?” cjr

Political cartooning is a dying profession, but there are more cartoons with politics than ever.

CO MICS

AUTHOR

Matt Bors

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n 2007, at the age of twenty-four, I went to the Mayflower Hotel, in Washington, DC, to attend the fiftieth annual gathering of the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists. It was my first time there; I’d been invited as part of a cohort of about ten young people, an outreach by old-timers to the next generation. Newspapers were declining, and the AAEC was interested in how our profession could make money on the internet. A panel posed the question, “What is the future of editorial cartoons?”

At the time, the answer was me. I’d been cartooning professionally for four years, and I’d recently signed a syndication deal with United Media—home of Garfield and Nancy—that made me the youngest syndicated cartoonist in the country. I had nearly full-time employment drawing three editorial cartoons a week, and I filled every other waking hour with freelance illustration and work on a graphic novel. Roaming through the convention, feeling awkward in a borrowed blazer amid the chandeliers and Pulitzer winners, I felt that perhaps I had chosen something of a real profession—one that could garner respect, or enough of a living that I could toast myself and my colleagues in a ballroom once a year.

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Back to the Drawing Board

MATT BORS In a 2003 comic for syndication (left), I worried that the global war on terror would become a “forever war.” My prediction was correct; sixteen years later, I found myself drawing a version of the same cartoon for The Nib (below).

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sk a political cartoonist when the profession began, and you’re likely to hear that it all started with cave drawings—an answer that casts us as a fundamental part of society. In fact, Benjamin Franklin is credited with one of the first official political cartoons—“Join, or Die,” a commentary on the disunity of the colonies—in 1754 for his newspaper the Pennsylvania Gazette. In Great Britain, around the same time, William Hogarth, an artist and social critic, drew satirical illustrations. But the field didn’t coalesce into something with a name until 1841, with the arrival of a British humor magazine, Punch, which would soon coin the term “cartoon.”

Political cartoons took off in popularity in tandem with the explosion in newspaper publishing facilitated by mass printing technology; illustrations were a convenient means to break up text-heavy pages. The godfather of the field, Thomas Nast, popularized such figures as the Democratic donkey and Uncle Sam. Cartooning in the second half of the nineteenth century for Harper’s Weekly, Nast devised intricate ink drawings that were painstakingly etched into engraving plates by assistants; his claim to fame was helping usher in the downfall of William “Boss” Tweed, a corrupt New York City politician convicted of stealing millions of dollars. Those were the glory years, when printed matter ruled the cultural conversation and political cartoons often appeared on newspapers’ front pages.

According to the Herb Block Foundation— a nonprofit established in 2001 by the bequest of Block, who had been a Washington Post cartoonist—by the start of the twentieth century

there were an estimated two thousand editorial cartoonists employed by American newspapers. With the advent of radio, television, and other media, newspapers began a long, slow decline—and with them went the cartoonists. In 1957, the year the AAEC was formed, the association counted two hundred seventy-five staff cartoonists. Today, fewer than thirty political cartoonists are employed full-time, and every year the survivors are winnowed further by buyouts, layoffs, and age. In 2020, Pulitzer Prize winners Signe Wilkinson and Tom Toles retired from the Philadelphia Daily News and Washington Post, respectively; their jobs were not filled.

Even as the cartooning profession faded, the art of political cartooning grew sharper.

Starting in the seventies, cartoonists experimented with new styles and modes of storytelling in the alt-weekly press. Jules Feiffer’s comics in the Village Voice, for which he eventually earned an annual salary of seventyfive thousand dollars, filled full pages with dialogue-heavy panels that reflected the rhythms of everyday life; in 1986, he became the first and only “alternative” cartoonist to win a Pulitzer. Matt Groening’s “Life in Hell,” which first appeared regularly in the Los Angeles Reader in 1980, wasn’t exactly a political cartoon, but when he took shots at Reaganomics, his work had more teeth than what was appearing in the daily papers. In the nineties, artists such as Derf and Tom Tomorrow infused political cartoons with more idiosyncratic artwork and cutting jokes.

I discovered these nineties cartoonists in the run-up to the Iraq War, when I was nineteen, after having spent my childhood reading superhero fare. Suddenly my interests were political, and I found myself drawing editorial cartoons. My peers—people like David Rees, whose “Get Your War On” strip in Rolling Stone was thrilling and deceivingly simple, nothing more than clip art of office workers cursing about the war on terror— challenged the presumption that cartoonists needed to be trained artists to make political points. I started my career just in time to catch the tail end of the alt-weekly era, landing work in the Boston Phoenix and Seattle’s The Stranger. Cartooning in the Bush era felt important; wars without end and abuses of civil liberties were rolling out with high public

C LO C K W I S E F RO M TO P: L I B R A RY O F C O N G R E SS / C O R B I S / VC G V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ; © C O R B I S / C O R B I S V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S ; U N I V E RSA L H I STO RY A RC H I V E / U N I V E RSA L I M AG E S G RO U P V I A G E T T Y I M AG E S

Later, I would come to see that convention and its open bar as a last hurrah. The event was a financial disaster for the AAEC, leaving it mired in debt. Over the next decade-plus, the organization’s venues became smaller and humbler, and the number of attendees dwindled and aged. I watched my peers move into other careers like graphic design and animation, which came with higher and steadier paychecks. Meanwhile, my promising start in syndication never paid me more than twenty thousand dollars a year. It turned out I wasn’t the future of editorial cartoons; I was one of the last people making a go at it.

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN This cartoon, first published in 1754 in the Pennsylvania Gazette, accompanied an editorial in which Franklin called for the American colonies to band together for protection against Native Americans and the French.

PUNCH An 1889 cartoon in Punch, a satirical magazine, warns cyclists about the penny-farthing.

THOMAS NAST In this Harper’s Weekly cartoon from 1900, Nast lampoons the corrupt New York administration led by “Boss” Tweed and the Tammany Society.

C O U RT E SY O F T H E V I L L AG E VO I C E

JULES FEIFFER In 1986, when Feiffer was a staff cartoonist for the Village Voice, he was recognized with a Pulitzer in Editorial Cartooning.

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TOM TOMORROW I was inspired to draw political comics when I discovered artists like Tomorrow in the alt-weeklies of the Nineties.

He and others of that era would become regulars at The Nib.

DAVID REES From “Get Your War On,” published in 2001 in Rolling Stone

G E M M A C O R R E L L 20 14 FO R T H E N I B

GEMMA CORRELL The early days of The Nib were exciting, though ultimately the publication was short-lived. I wanted to publish political and nonfiction comics by new artists.

Correll was one of our first contributors and remains one of the most popular.

Cartoonists often blame editors for their lack of interest and visual illiteracy—“words people,” we call them.

approval, and reporters seemed to have abandoned their role as critics. More than a hundred years after Nast, the political cartoonists of this era made a strong argument for the field’s relevance by being right about the most consequential issues of the day.

But it was during the same period that altweeklies got swallowed by chains and revenues tanked across the newspaper industry. The idea that every newsroom should employ a cartoonist quickly dissolved. Without stable jobs, we met our audiences directly, on social media; many of my cartoons took off with tens of thousands of shares and millions of views. There was no money in posting online, but we learned to turn follower counts into merch sales and commercial gigs; eventually, some of us signed up for Patreon and Substack.

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long with the fire hose of social media attention came corporate capital. In 2013, I got my first staff job, as a cartoonist and editor at Medium.

The role was vague and in constant flux, but the company was willing to experiment on an idea for an all-comics publication: The Nib. I’d edit it, Medium would fund it, and we’d make a new online home for political cartoons and nonfiction comics of all kinds.

The Nib was popular, reaching millions of readers every month. But Medium was not there to serve cartooning; cartooning was there to serve it. Not quite two years after it started, almost all the editorial staff was laid off. I took a buyout and retained The Nib. For a few years, I took The Nib to First Look Media—and then was laid off again.

Some online media companies are figuring out the future better than others. It’s become clear by now, though, that political cartoons won’t be along for the ride. They never really were. From the beginning, digital outlets rarely made space for political cartoonists as staffers or even as freelance contributors— and so the move away from print has permanently decoupled political cartoons from news journalism. Cartoonists often blame editors for their lack of interest and visual illiteracy—“words people,” we call them. I have often marveled that The Nib was ever able to exist at all. Surely, I thought, my top talent would be poached by media companies with deeper pockets. But it never happened.

I

n April, I quit political cartooning. I was thirty-seven, and I’d drawn about sixteen hundred cartoons over eighteen years.

Deep burnout had set in over the course of the pandemic, and I decided to devote time

WHIT TAYLOR Excerpt from “America Isn’t Ready for a Pandemic,” 2018

KENDRA WELLS Opposite page: “More Benefits of Climate Change,” 2020

THE NIB

NICCOLO PIZARRO “Family Portrait,” 2021

THE NIB

Cartoonists have in recent years gravitated more toward memoir and essay, freeing them from reacting to the news of the day.

to other kinds of work—genre comics, nonfiction graphic novels. It was mostly a creative decision, but there was also a financial incentive: while the market for political cartoons is shrinking, graphic novels are booming.

Last year, graphic novels and comic books accounted for $1.28 billion in sales in North America. (The revenue from political cartooning, meanwhile, must be the combined income of the last thirty people doing it.)

I am still running The Nib—an awkward perch for a retired political cartoonist. The magazine is small and completely independent, funded by subscribers. Many of the comics we publish aren’t political cartoons in the traditional sense, as many cartoonists have in recent years gravitated more toward memoir and essay, freeing them from reacting to the news of the day and giving them more space to make an argument. (Kendra Wells, a thirty-year-old Nib contributor, told me they view political cartoons as “stuffy old guys whose one-panel strips get into newspapers or Time magazine.”)

Yet the comics scene as a whole is more fiercely political than ever—far more than when I started drawing. Navel-gazing indie comics, once dominated by white men, have given way to nonfiction work by artists such as Niccolo Pizarro, Ben Passmore, Mattie

Lubchansky, and Whit Taylor, who employ a variety of styles to comment on the state of the world. A perusal of my Instagram feed in May showed comic essays on queer identity, illustrations in support of Palestine, and an instructional comic from NPR on how bystanders can intervene in racist attacks on Asians. These comics are political—they just aren’t what we would call political cartoons.

In June, many of us in the field were dismayed to find that, for the first time since 1973—and in one of the most politically tumultuous years of our lifetimes—the Pulitzer Prize board declined to issue an award for editorial cartooning. The AAEC issued a fiery statement to “urge radical structural reform of the award to evaluate modern opinion cartoons by 21st century standards.”

As far as I was concerned, the decision confirmed that the stewards of old media just aren’t that into us anymore. I had left at the right moment.

I might dip into political cartoons again someday. Maybe I’m done for good. Maybe The Nib will collapse. Maybe my stressinduced chest pains will kill me. All I know is that, even if political cartoons are disappearing, comics with politics in them are everywhere. I’ve stopped caring what people call them. cjr

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BEN PASSMORE Excerpt from “A Good Old-Fashioned Screaming Match,” 2020

MATTIE LUBCHANSKY Excerpt from The Antifa SuperSoldier Cookbook, published in 2021 by Silver Sprocket

STREET SALES Above: Trinity Holabach with copies of Real Change.

Right: Zackary Tutwiler is a vendor in Seattle.

Opposite: Candy Bland, also a vendor, scopes out her spot.

A Seattle newspaper models how to cover unhoused people—and puts money in their pockets LOCAL JOURNALISM

Retail Politics AUTHOR

E. Tammy Kim

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itter Lake, in northwest Seattle, derives its name from the acidic residue of a long since demolished sawmill. Small and oblong, it now hosts noisy, profusely defecatory gaggles of Canadian geese and sits beside houses, apartments, and the Broadview ­Thomson elementary and middle school. In the spring of 2020, camping tents began to pop up along the wooded southern edge of the lake, adjacent to Broadview Thomson’s ball field. A few dozen people in need of housing moved onto the land, which is owned by the local school district.

One afternoon this past May, Samira George, the features reporter for Real Change, a weekly newspaper attached to a nonprofit of the same name, arrived at Bitter Lake to interview residents of the encampment. George, who is twenty-six, was first sent there on a tip: a woman who lived in a house nearby had gotten to know the newcomers and felt disturbed by how they were portrayed on KOMO-TV, a local station owned by the conservative Sinclair Broadcast Group. The coverage she’d seen drew on demeaning tropes of homelessness: allegations of “violence,” “drug use,” “property crimes,” a “half naked” “sex worker”; there were panning shots of tents and shopping carts and interviews with angry parents and business owners. The woman reached out to Real Change and connected George to the residents, hoping to get a more humane story before the public.

Reporting from the camp, George spotted a couple of men talking and asked if “Tony” was around. Anthony Pieper and his partner, Shelly Vaughn, were living in a large tent beneath a stand of trees.

George had met Pieper once before, on an earlier visit to Bitter Lake,

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and he gamely answered her questions— about when he and Vaughn had arrived, interactions with activists and reporters, access to bathrooms and garbage cans. Vaughn kept a journal, which she showed to George, reading aloud from a response she’d written to an especially hurtful KOMO segment.

“Making Bitter Lake home” appeared as a full-color centerfold in the June 2 issue of Real Change. The article was both a profile of Vaughn and Pieper and a critique of TV news as brokered by a self-proclaimed homeless-­rights activist who “will pop up at their encampment, walk around for roughly 30 minutes, take photos or videos and offer to pick up trash, which the campers are OK doing themselves,” George wrote. The story sidestepped any concern for orthodox notions of balance: Pieper and Vaughn were presented in their voice, but there was no quote from the activist, nor from the KOMO reporter who had filed so many sensationalized stories about the camp, nor from a mayoral candidate whom Pieper accused of scapegoating homeless people.

A week before the story came out, I’d sat in on an editorial meeting with George and the other two members of the Real Change

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newsroom, held over Zoom. “Nobody’s actually talking to people living in the encampment,” George said. That bothered her especially because her brother was homeless, living out of his car in Northern California.

She discussed the framing of her piece with Lee Nacozy, the managing editor, and ­Henry Behrens, the arts editor and designer. If, for instance, someone in a tent were doing drugs, would it be appropriate to portray that? To publish a photo of used needles? “What is accurate yet fair in advocacy journalism?”

Nacozy wondered.

Real Change has always done advocacy journalism, which Nacozy—a forty-yearold former staffer of the Austin American-­ Statesman—said she is still getting used to.

Real Change, the umbrella organization, has a three-part structure: newspaper, vendor program, and advocacy department. Homeless and low-income people can sign up with Real Change, the nonprofit, to sell Real Change, the newspaper; vendors buy the paper at sixty cents per copy and sell it for two dollars plus tips. “The newspaper has two bottom lines,” Shelley Dooley, the managing director, told me. “It’s one of the last weekly papers and provides information from the participant perspective. The other is, the newspaper is a widget for vendor income.” To keep the newsroom independent, Real Change maintains an institutional firewall; if the advocacy team is presenting at a city council hearing, the Real Change reporter covering the story sits on the other side of the room. (That has at times caused the paper to lose out to other outlets: “The most embarrassing thing was when the Seattle Times scooped us on a story our advocacy department was involved in,” Ashley Archibald, a former Real Change writer, said. “I had no clue.”)

Still, as one of about a hundred “street papers” around the world that fuse journalism, employment, and activism, Real Change tends to support the nonprofit’s overall mission. “A special vantage point for a Real Change reporter is when we’re asking about homelessness,” Nacozy told me. “We’re ­really clear. We advocate for these people in particular.” But if, at its founding, in 1994, the newspaper had a unique grasp of the housing crisis, most media have since been forced to confront the problem. “Homelessness”—by

which people usually mean the eyesore of tent dwellers rather than mass displacement accelerated by the spread of Amazon and other tech giants—is now the central political concern in Seattle. Every newsroom in the city has made the subject a daily focus—often following Real Change’s lead while crowding its niche.

In the spring of 2021, when George was reporting on Bitter Lake, three-quarters of adult Seattleites were receiving coronavirus vaccines, and Real Change was attempting to reopen its office and newsroom, just across the street from a Christian charity. The pandemic had meant a dramatic loss in circulation, vendors, and staff; the next few months would be critical, for both the publication and the city. Residents were busy fighting over “Compassion Seattle,” an amendment to the city charter that promised to keep the streets “open and clear of encampments.” Kshama Sawant, a socialist council member and Real Change ally known for her “tax Amazon” campaign, was expected to face a recall. And Seattle was looking toward November, when it would elect several council members and a new mayor to replace Jenny Durkan—whose policies have been criticized frequently in the pages of Real Change. (“Homeless sweeps under Mayor Durkan have mostly increased the stress on unsheltered people and made them less likely to accept help,” a piece read.)

Real Change planned to cover these stories with earned empathy—and to set an example for other newsrooms.

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eal Change is a Seattle institution, but it was conceived in the late eighties by Tim Harris, a young Marxist convert in Boston. In those days, Harris was struggling with a basic contradiction. As he recruited homeless people to stage sit-ins at the state capitol and to join tent-city protests, “what I saw was that social-justice, economic-­ justice organizing has a very long timeline and is very uncertain,” he recalled. “Yet, at the same time, people’s needs were very immediate and dire.” He wondered if there might be a way to mix politics and service.

In New York City, in 1989, Hutchinson ­Persons, a rock musician with an activist streak, began to publish Street News, a paper sold by unhoused and low-income people.

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A similar tabloid called Street Sheet started up in San Francisco. Harris had founded an anarchist monthly in college and was intrigued by the vocational sales model of these emerging papers. He decided to establish one in Boston, which he called Spare Change and declared to be “Alinskyist” in form (after Saul Alinsky, the Chicago radical), meaning that “homeless people needed to make all the decisions.”

Eventually, he joked, the proletariat kicked him out. He looked for a new place that would benefit from a similar outfit.

He chose Seattle but decided, this time, to operate “along more cross-class lines,” appointing himself founding director and installing a traditional infrastructure of staff and board. Then, as now, Seattle had a visible homelessness crisis. Activists were taking over empty properties; a group called share (the Seattle Housing and Resource Effort) was building protest encampments; wheel (the Women’s Housing and Equality Enhancement League) was founded to advocate for unhoused women; homeless artists were running the Street Life art gallery. One day, an artist named Wes Browning was at Street Life when Harris walked in to solicit paintings and illustrations for his new paper. As Browning recalled, Harris was wearing a suit. “I thought he was the FBI,” Browning said. (Harris denied that he wore a suit but said that he did have an uncharacteristically “straight haircut.”)

Harris persuaded Browning to contribute to Real Change. Browning’s cover design for the first issue, in August 1994, was an abstract geometric face rendered in bands of black and white, an octopus tentacle swirling around the chin and cheek. In the years since, Browning and his wife, Anitra ­ Freeman, whom he also met at the gallery, have played every imaginable role at Real Change, while living housed and unhoused. Browning has provided artwork and written a regular humor column; he’s now employed at Real Change part-time, managing the paper’s circulation. Freeman has organized political actions, taught writing workshops, and contributed poetry and essays; she currently sits on the board. In 1997, with Harris, they attended the first conference of a regional street paper organization.

Israel Bayer, who runs what is now the International Network of Street Papers (INSP)

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North America, is an alumnus of Real Change, Portland’s Street Roots, and Colorado’s Denver Voice; he has also lived through poverty and addiction. When he moved to the Pacific Northwest from Illinois, in 1999, “the anti-­ globalization movement was rockin’,” he recalled. “There was something in the air that made it feel like something was happening around movements and social change.”

Street papers in cities like Seattle and Portland were initially more about community organizing than journalism, he said, but they have since “evolved to be a more polished platform.” The INSP counts more than a hundred street papers around the world, in thirty-five countries and twenty-five languages. Most are monthlies, glossy in style, often with deceptively banal cover stories: on Dolly Parton, Taylor Swift, the Dalai Lama. “Part of that is trying to attract apolitical people to the paper, to a harder-hitting investigative piece on public housing or marijuana or foster care or child homelessness in the schools,” Bayer said.

“We’re trying to bring people in.”

In its early years, Real Change had the feel of a newsletter. Issue One began with an essay, “Musings of the Fortunate,” by George Woodring, who’d been nomadic and homeless for many years before getting an apartment through the federal government. “For those readers who have not experienced the dilemma of homelessness,” he wrote, “I ask you for a moment to visualize this: You leave your job after a tiring day, and return to find an empty lot, overgrown with weeds, where your lovely house once stood.” A few years later, as protesters prepared to disrupt the Ministerial Conference of the World Trade Organization in November of 1999, the cover of Real Change read “WTO in Seattle: No Day at the Beach”; the paper offered a guide to the proceedings. Many issues featured wellknown artists: the author Sherman Alexie, the singer Pete Seeger, the actor and writer Sandra Tsing Loh; all included national and global news briefs, editorials on social services, and updates on local housing policy. In time, dozens of vendors made their living by selling Real Change, and the organization became a political force for poor and unhoused Seattleites. The budget now exceeds a million dollars per year, funded through newspaper sales, foundation grants, and individual donations.

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“Nobody’s actually talking to people living in the encampment.”

As it grew, Real Change aspired to become a significant community news outlet. In 2004, Harris hired two veteran journalists, Rosette Royale and Cydney Gillis, and within a few years they were publishing stories with remarkable impact. In 2007, after Gillis wrote at length about an economic development plan that threatened to use eminent domain to displace a historically Black and Southeast Asian neighborhood, residents fought back, and the plan was canceled. After the Great Recession, and during Occupy Wall Street, Real Change ran pieces on the foreclosure economy, student debt, and racism in Occupy organizing. And even as Real Change evolved from a subcultural “homeless newspaper” to a professional newsroom, it stayed attuned to the lives of the poor. Anne ­Jaworski, a volunteer with Real Change, told me that she reads the paper because of its “focus on cuts to social services programs—things that wouldn’t be covered elsewhere.”

Today, Real Change publishes a twelvepage weekly in print and online. Though it lacks the resources to compete with major news outlets, it draws on the INSP’s wire service (which sources from street papers

around the world), makes use of grants for the occasional investigative series, and collaborates with partners—from the South Seattle Emerald, which covers Black and other communities of color in hot spots of gentrification; from the Asian-American International Examiner; and from Publicola, ­Erica C. Barnett’s alt-weekly-style blog.

(Real Change pays freelancers, but not much; it has an “equity fund” for writers and artists of color.) Like other street papers, Real Change is constantly reevaluating its place in local media. “We don’t have the structure for breaking news,” Joanne Zuhl, the outgoing editor of Street Roots, in Portland, explained. “So we’d rather look at an issue and talk to the people it will actually impact, the people on the receiving end of this policy.”

“There’s the old axiom that journalism is meant to speak truth to power,” Marcus Green, the editor of the South Seattle Emerald, told me. “That’s true, but it’s also meant to remind people who’ve been told they’re powerless that they’re not.” The readers of community news, he said, want to know “how you are able to survive and hold on in a city that no longer appears to be accommodating you.”

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he stakes of homelessness policy became apparent to Seattle­ ites in 2015, when Ed Murray, who was then the mayor, declared a state of emergency over housing, following the example of Portland, Los Angeles, and Hawai‘i. A few months later, after fatal shootings at “The Jungle,” a tent city along Interstate 5, Murray ordered the site to be cleared, displacing dozens of people.

Around the same time, Amazon planted a thicket of steel high-rises downtown and brought on tens of thousands of tech workers. Soon,

K ILL LIST

Breathless election night coverage before the polls close CNN, on Election Day 2020, seemed intent on blowing out viewers’ synapses no matter how few votes had been counted. Wolf Blitzer and John King colored in states on their “magic wall” and threw out “Key Race Alerts” (sponsored by Calm, a sleep and meditation app). Into the early morning, the outcome remained unknown, yet the intensity stayed high.

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the city saw record-breaking home prices, displacement, and street homelessness. Yet Murray called Amazon’s hiring frenzy “a great problem to have.”

By the summer of 2018, journalists in Seattle were connecting the dots and had decided to cooperate on an official “day of homelessness.” Four outlets—Crosscut/KCTS 9, a nonprofit digital newsroom and public TV station; KUOW public radio; Seattlepi.com; and the Seattle Times—shared data and coordinated #SeaHomeless reporting; the Seattle Times subsequently created a Project Homeless team. “The idea was, ‘We need to elevate this issue—we’re going to do this to bring it to politicians’ attention,’ ” David Kroman, a reporter at Crosscut, told me. “Real Change had been doing it this whole time, so it felt like the larger media landscape was catching up to them.”

Ashley Archibald was the primary reporter for Real Change at the time. She broke several important stories, including one on a streetoutreach group that cut ties with Seattle police because of how officers carried out sweeps and pushed people into emergency shelters. She also wrote about how Amazon and other businesses were likely to use loopholes to circumvent a proposed progressive tax. “Any scoops I got were almost certainly due to the fact that Real Change is very close to the ground,” Archibald said.

But the implications of this proximity were understood differently throughout the office. As “the homelessness problem” became increasingly equated with sweeps, young employees clashed with Harris, who turns sixty-one at the end of September and viewed sweeps as a compromise in the trade-off for shelter. “The way I put this is, I’m not for people’s right to live in squalor,” he told me. His colleagues were vocal in their disagreement; Real Change published op-eds by local activists opposing street evictions without exception. “There were serious tensions between the old-guard homeless-advocacy community that was about expanding services and finding a middle path, and the harder socialist left that was represented by people like Kshama Sawant,” he said.

According to Harris, the debate over the Compassion Seattle amendment has been the latest proof of a polarized community. Business groups and social services agencies behind the proposal argued that it would bake a minimum level of homelessness funding into the city budget and create two thousand emergency housing units.

Their opponents, rallied in large part by Real Change’s advocacy department, called the amendment an unfunded mandate to encourage sweeps and prioritize shelter beds over permanent, affordable housing. “I am absolutely in agreement with Real Change that we are opposing Compassion Seattle,” Sawant told me. “It is not compassionate at all.” (She made the same point in an op-ed in The Stranger, ­noting that the amendment was funded by real estate money.)

Harris, a supporter of Compassion Seattle, found himself awkwardly in league with Tim Burgess, a former city council member who, in heavily left Seattle, counts as a conservative. Back in 2010, Harris and Real Change went to war with Burgess over an ordinance that was widely perceived as criminalizing panhandling—and won a mayoral veto. (Real Change was “almost always pretty harsh on me, both the editorial and the news side,” Burgess said. Nevertheless, he added, “I read it, and people in my office read it, because it offered

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a perspective that in some ways was closer to the ground.”) By last fall, Harris, feeling out of place at Real Change, decided to step down. (He told me that in November he plans to launch a new regional street paper called Dignity City.)

Real Change continued apace. In late May, as Compassion Seattle advocates were finalizing the language of the amendment, Tiffani McCoy and Jacob Schear, of Real Change’s advocacy department, helped organize a press conference in Victor Steinbrueck Park, next to a memorial for unhoused people.

Speakers announced the formation of House Our Neighbors!, a coalition to fight Compassion Seattle and its “pro-sweeps agenda.”

Burgess told me that McCoy “engaged in a significant disinformation campaign” about Compassion Seattle, but McCoy and House Our Neighbors! say that they merely pulled subtext to the surface. The amendment “deceptively co-opted the language of social justice and ‘compassion,’ ” McCoy, Schear, and a vendor named Paige Owens wrote in a Real Change op-ed, in June. In late August, after more aggressive campaigning, a state judge pulled Compassion Seattle from the fall ballot, ruling that it conflicted with state law.

McCoy told me: “What I love about organizing with vendors the absolute most is they can see through bullshit.”

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here does Amazon end and the housing crisis begin? Seattle is growing faster than any other large city in the United States, thanks to the ever-expanding tech economy. Last year, the median home sale price in the surrounding county topped $820,000; twelve thousand people were counted as homeless. To clean up its reputation as gentrifier par excellence, Amazon has started funding programs to confront homelessness. In 2016, it pledged a year’s use of a former hotel to Mary’s Place, a women’s shelter in Seattle. Later, the company promised to give Mary’s Place $100 million over ten years and allowed it to open a shelter on Amazon’s downtown campus.

When the new facility scheduled a ribboncutting ceremony, in the spring of 2020, Nacozy had to decide whether Real Change should cover the event. Though the paper had no intention of doing public relations for

Jeff Bezos, she said, neither did it “want to become the bulldog against Amazon.” Ultimately, Real Change decided against a story— sometimes, they figured, no coverage is preferable to a dutiful report.

As a 501(c)(3) nonprofit, Real Change cannot endorse candidates in elections, but it can take positions on ballot measures and campaigns, as well as on the behavior of companies, and over the past few years the newspaper has devoted many column inches to the extended opera of the Seattle City Council’s attempt to tax Amazon and other big businesses. In 2020, covid-19 and Black Lives Matter consumed much of the staff ’s energy; this year, Amazon returned as a major plotline. Real Change ran an article on local protests in solidarity with workers at a warehouse in Alabama, as well as op-eds decrying Amazon for “interfering with union organizing” and linking the company to the “rightwing recall campaign” against Council Member Sawant. In July, Real Change ran a special Amazon issue, pegged to Bezos’s journey into outer space. The cover illustration portrays him as a cyborg puppeteer steering the movements of faceless laborers.

Samira George told me that she hopes to report more on Big Tech in the future, since Amazon is implicitly part of most housing stories. “The biggest thing that comes up with my sources is the shortage of affordability and how prices are going up,” she said. “Obviously it’s connected to tech jobs.” Reporters at the Seattle Times could be trusted to get “the big Amazon stories or the big shelter stories,” she explained, but it was her responsibility to show how “the smaller ones interconnect, giving more of a voice to people experiencing homelessness.”

All journalism could benefit from taking the street-paper approach, which centers unhoused people rather than, say, ­Amazon executives. Given the rise in extreme inequality across the US, traditional political and business reporting are due for an overhaul; how else to give an honest accounting of our monopoly economy—and of the people deliberately left behind? Katherine Anne Long, the Amazon beat reporter for the Seattle Times, told me that she tries to focus on human stories that reveal “the social impact of business.” Still, she must keep her readership in mind. “I want to tell stories that feel

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Given the rise in extreme inequality across the US, traditional political and business reporting are due for an overhaul.

important to Amazon’s headquarters employees who are in Seattle,” she said. “Those roughly sixty thousand folks constitute a core audience for us.”

Real Change vendors also sell to tech workers, but most customers are older, longer-term residents with a charitable bent. “We’re lucky, in that people come to us who are benevolent toward someone selling a street paper,” Nacozy told me. “So there’s an expectation that there’s an anti-poverty instinct.” The paper assumes “a different starting place,” she said: whereas a mainstream outlet might treat homelessness as a “dollar centric” business or real estate story to satisfy its audience, Real Change would always make it a “human rights issue.”

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n certain neighborhoods of Seattle, outside upscale groceries, bookstores, and coffee shops, it used to be difficult not to run into a Real Change vendor. The most experienced, high-volume vendors enjoyed fixed locations and shifts; they would sit or stand with a stack of papers, yelling out their favorite page numbers and asking after the families of regular customers. During the pandemic, the number of vendors dropped by a third, to just under two hundred, and circulation shrank from more than ten thousand per week to fewer than six thousand. Customers were encouraged to read the paper online and send money by Venmo to individual vendors. But by the early summer of 2021, people were stepping out again; week by week, the printing load was increasing.

On a cool, breezy Friday on Seattle’s Third Avenue, men zipped in and out of their tents in a dance of avoidance and symbiosis with neon-­ shirted garbagemen hired by the downtown business improvement

district. James Smith stood outside a corner Starbucks, wearing a baseball cap, nylon jacket, and jeans, a Real Change badge hanging from his neck and several newspapers under his arm.

He told me that he had come to Seattle thirteen years ago but just recently learned about Real Change. He kept running into a friend who sold the paper. “I decided, I said, ‘I’m gonna check it out.’ ” Smith went through a short orientation, agreed to follow a few basic rules, and received ten free newspapers to try his luck. No other job requires so little of its workers from the start. (“You don’t need to have an ID or even use your real name,” Camilla Walter, Real Change’s development director, told me. “You just have to be over the age of eighteen.”) Smith, who was staying at a Compass Housing Alliance shelter, had made a couple hundred dollars so far. “This has helped me immensely,” he said.

“I’m on hard times, with the pandemic and what’s going on.”

Harris and Bayer speak of street papers’ equalizing plane of commerce, and there are plenty of touching stories from Real Change staff—of customers who invite their vendor to Thanksgiving dinner or bring them on family vacations, who pool funds to buy their

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vendor a van or help them get into permanent housing. Many contacts are less pleasant, though. Some people cross the street to avoid Real Change vendors or pretend to have already bought an issue that just came off the printer’s van.

A 2007 study of Street Sheet vendors in San Francisco described sellers’ efforts to “construct an ‘authentic’ homeless identity that meets the expectations of passersby.”

Other vendors may go in the opposite direction, assuming the mantle of entrepreneur: a respectable small-businessperson distanced from the life of the street. Real Change does not give vendors a script, and Rebecca ­Marriott, who leads the vendor program, told me that the roster ranges from people who are street homeless, living in vehicles or tents, to those living in apartments and working other jobs. Before coming to Real Change, she’d helped poor people in New York City find employment and become independent; she observed that homeless services were often unduly separated from advocacy around labor. “When programming is being developed, employment is never mentioned,” she said. “Traditional employment just doesn’t work for everybody, but that doesn’t mean that people can’t work.”

That day, from her covid-Plexiglas-ringed desk on the first floor of the Real Change office, Marriott buzzed people through a secure door and greeted nearly all of them by name. A vendor named Priscilla came in, carrying a large backpack and wearing a wool coat that drew compliments. “Rebecca got it for me!” she said. (Marriott had set the coat aside from the donations closet.) Another vendor entered, and yelled an off-season “Merry Christmas!” Before March of 2020, the storefront was usually crowded with vendors buying papers at Real Change’s cashier stall, taking coffee and bathroom breaks, charging their phones, and doing research on office computers. In pandemic mode, only a few visitors were allowed in at a time. Many asked Marriott or Ainsley Meyer, a case manager, for grocery bundles, dry socks, hygiene kits, sack lunches, or coats. Eventually, across the street, a mobile health unit started offering covid vaccines, which Real Change encouraged its vendors to get with the promise of twenty-five free newspapers per shot.

Meyer also helped vendors apply for housing, food stamps, and pandemic stimulus checks.

Though vendors aren’t required to join the editorial or advocacy sides of Real Change, many choose to do so. Some have offered feedback at weekly editorial meetings with Nacozy; others tell Marriott and Meyer what they think about cover stories: that a given headline is too depressing (not so marketable) or that a color scheme repeats that of a previous issue (not novel enough to claim the attention of passersby). Vendors contribute story ideas, too. In April, Neal Lampi, a former organizer with Real Change who lives in an RV, supplied a tip: The city intended to reinstate a seventy-two-hour limit on parking, which had been suspended during the pandemic. People living in their cars or camper vans would have to resume their hunt for the next safe space and give up the community they’d formed with neighbors parked nearby. Based on Lampi’s lead, George wrote a profile of Dee Powers, a thirty-eight-yearold who’d begun living in an RV in 2015, when their rent shot up by 40 percent. The advocacy department took up the matter with city hall, and Sawant called on Mayor Durkan to lift the limit—but to no avail, even as the city and state effectively extended a pandemic ban on evictions.

Last summer, as covid deaths spiked and protests flared in response to the murder of George Floyd, Lampi reflected on vending and politics in an essay in Real Change. “You never really know what motivates people to buy a paper,” he wrote, but “even a $2 customer could be seen as a witness to those standing in solidarity with the poor, the homeless, LGBTQ rights activists, #BLACKLIVESMATTER, immigrants and all of the legions of villainized people paraded across the screen of Faux News.”

Yet at the same time, he continued, the great thing about selling the paper “is that virtually anyone” can do it: “We don’t demand adherence to a creed or agreement with our editorial viewpoints. You can thrive simply by treating others like you would like to be treated, selling a boat load of papers, happily voting Republican.” cjr This story was supported by the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, a journalism nonprofit.

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Where Darkness Surrounds Violence AUTHOR

Brendan Fitzgerald

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fter January 6, when pro-Trump insurrectionists and far-right extremists invaded the Capitol, Timothy Snyder, a history professor and the author of On Tyranny, warned of rising domestic terrorism at a time of declining local news. “If we lose the institutions that produce facts that are pertinent to us, then we tend to wallow in attractive abstractions and fictions,” Snyder wrote for the New York Times. “Truth defends itself particularly poorly when there is not very much of it around.”

Between 2005 and 2020, right-wing domestic extremists were involved in more than three hundred plots or violent incidents; of those, two hundred–plus occurred after 2015. Over roughly the same period, more than two thousand local newspapers either closed or merged; the number of local TV newsrooms also declined. As local journalism employment has fallen, gains in TV and digital newsrooms have been unable to make up for print losses.

Threats from right-wing extremists can be high in populous counties, where local-news losses are acute; some attacks occur in rural counties that have gone without much local journalism for years. At crisis moments, when national reporters are tasked with covering communities struck by violence, there’s only so much they can learn by scouring online forums. “These movements have a slow creep,” Brandy Zadrozny, who covers extremism and disinformation for NBC News, said. “They often build on years of local grievances. Having reporters who can document with real understanding of a place and community is crucial.”

In the months following the insurrection, law enforcement arrested more than five hundred people in forty-five states for their connection to the event. “If you don’t understand the place where something happens,” Chris Jones, who covers domestic extremism in Appalachia, said, “you’re preventing yourself from being able to understand why it happens.”

2005

2010

2020

Violent incidents 2016–2020: 221

Newspapers 8,930

Newspapers 6,736

Violent incidents 2010–2015: 93

Violent incidents 2005–2009: 36

2005

2010

2020

TK CREDIT

DATA

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“For every January 6, there’s hundreds of violent incidents all over the country that never made it into a news headline because there wasn’t a journalist there.”

— C HR IS JONES

VIRGINIA Jones, a Report for America fellow working for a nonprofit news site called 100 Days in Appalachia, tracks domestic extremism in the region.

Since the deadly 2017 white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville, more attacks have taken place across the state and in surrounding parts of Appalachia. “It’s the sort of thing where, if you pay attention, you can start to have a better perspective on it before it spills over to urban centers and other parts of the country,” he said. In Virginia, right-wing extremists have threatened mosques, synagogues, and Black churches.

Last year, a self-identified Ku Klux Klan member drove through a crowd of Black Lives Matter protesters near Richmond. (This year, he was convicted of a series of misdemeanors, including assault.)

County with total newspaper circulation drop of 90,000+

County with total newspaper circulation drop of 60,000–89,999

County with total newspaper circulation drop of 30,000–59,999

County with total newspaper circulation drop up to 29,999

Site of right-wing violence

58 67 92

Number of Florida residents arrested in connection to the insurrection

FLORIDA “Extremism and disinformation go hand in hand,” Zadrozny, of NBC News, said. “You literally can’t have one without the other. You need to keep people misinformed, angry, and afraid enough to see no other options than to hurt their neighbors and try to topple their elected governments.” Since January 6, as domestic extremists have been hit with mass prosecutions, “we’re not seeing the kind of open organizing we saw last year—but they haven’t gone away.” Zadrozny added, “There’s an incredibly important role for local journalists to play.” That may be particularly true in Florida, the state with the highest number of insurrectionrelated arrests.

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Net loss in local TV newsrooms nationwide since 2007

NEW YORK “Much of my reporting on extremism has entailed compiling local news reports, which helps me identify national trends,” Tess Owen, who covers extremism for Vice, said. Owen has written frequently about the Proud Boys, established in New York by Gavin McInnes in 2016 (years after he cofounded Vice). In June, Owen, who is based in Brooklyn, published a digest of Proud Boys actions since the insurrection. By tracking local stories, she said, “I was able to make broad conclusions about the group’s resilience and ability to organize around hyper-local culture war issues and establish coalitions with other far-right movements.”

Graphics are based on an analysis of data provided by the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Transnational Threats Project; the Radio Television Digital News Association/Newhouse School at Syracuse University Annual Survey; the Soufan Center’s Mapping Insecurity project; and the University of North Carolina’s Hussman School of Journalism and Media. The Transnational Threats Project does not include incidents for which there is no discernible political motive or threat of violence.

County-specific circulation numbers have not been weighted by population.

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“Extremism and disinformation go hand in hand.”

— B RA NDY Z AD ROZNY

TEXAS “The decimation of local news means a lot less coverage of local hate and extremist events,” Heidi Beirich, who cofounded a nonprofit called the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said. “It leads to an undercount in general of how much extremist activity is happening across the US.” In recent years, Texas has seen numerous anti-Muslim and anti-government threats, as well as militia activity. Last year, rightwing militia members appeared at Black Lives Matter rallies and protests against pandemicrelated public health measures; this year, they showed up at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Dallas and, according to a journalist in attendance, harassed the press.

County with total newspaper circulation drop of 90,000+

County with total newspaper circulation drop of 60,000–89,999

WASHINGTON “It’s not an easy subject to cover,” Chris Ingalls, an investigative reporter at KING 5, Seattle’s NBC affiliate, said. “It takes some digging, and there just aren’t enough people with shovels.” Since 2019, he’s followed the Atomwaffen Division, a neo-Nazi group; last year, KING 5 issued him an armed security detail when agents with the Joint Terrorism Task Force learned that Atomwaffen members planned to visit his home.

(Someone later mailed him a letter that read, “You have been visited by your local Nazis.”)

Ingalls believes that domestic extremism has gone under-covered in the Pacific Northwest.

“We don’t want to believe that it’s here,” he said, “even though we have these examples.”

County with total newspaper circulation drop of 30,000–59,999

County with total newspaper circulation drop up to 29,999

Site of right-wing violence

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The Wall Street Journal’s stubborn conservatism

MUR DOC HVILLE

Breaking Right

AUTHOR

Adam Piore ILLUSTRATOR

Roland Sarkany

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ast December—about a month after Joe Biden was declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election, and a month before rioters staged an insurrection in support of Donald Trump—a firestorm erupted over an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal. Written

by Joseph Epstein, an eighty-three-year-old former lecturer at Northwestern University, the piece was called “Is There a Doctor in the White House? Not if You Need an M.D.” In it, Epstein noted that Jill Biden holds a doctorate in education—an EdD—and mocked her for using the honorific that comes with the degree, suggesting that she “forget the small thrill of being Dr. Jill” and accept the “larger thrill” of being First Lady. “Madame First Lady—Mrs. Biden—Jill—kiddo: a bit of advice on what may seem like a small but I think is a not unimportant matter,” he began. “Any chance you might drop the ‘Dr.’ before your name? ‘Dr. Jill Biden’ sounds and feels fraudulent, not to say a touch comic.” The piece went viral, generating outraged responses from newspaper columnists and social media users around the world.

Many called it misogynistic and patronizing; others identified it as shameless trolling.

For Rupert Murdoch—the owner of the Journal, Fox News, and a phalanx of other media properties—the piece may have represented

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an appealing opportunity for corporate synergy. Tucker Carlson devoted time to the op-ed, and the uproar, on his show, observing that Biden has “the same degree as Dr. Bill Cosby” and that she is a doctor “in the same sense” as Dr. Pepper. But many reporters at the Journal were upset, having found the piece at once insulting and obstructive; Melissa Korn, who covers higher education, tweeted, “Pieces like that make it harder for me to do my job.” The Journal has long been known for its right-wing editorial page, which is kept separate from the newsroom on the organizational chart. “We’re all used to and accepting of that wall being there,” a staffer told me. Nevertheless, the Epstein column was hard to take. “That one, and a couple of the other ones that they’ve done recently, felt like they really went below the belt.”

The Journal holds a peculiar position in the American press. Murdoch, who acquired

the paper along with Dow Jones in 2007 for five billion dollars, is perhaps the most hated executive in media, yet the Journal has managed to maintain a serious news operation, providing a training ground for excellent journalists for decades. The Journal has a distinctly conservative, finance-focused sensibility; it also belongs squarely among the New York media elite. It is not where many reporters aspire to land, however, in large part because its reputation is so tainted by incendiary op-eds. For decades, the Journal newsroom has grumbled about leaps of logic and reckless ideology on the opinion side.

During Trump’s presidency, the grumbling grew into a roar.

In July 2020, more than two hundred and eighty newsroom employees signed a letter addressed to Almar Latour, the CEO of Dow Jones & Company and the Journal’s publisher, complaining about a “lack of

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fact-checking and transparency” on the editorial page, which they believed was undercutting the paper’s credibility and making it difficult to recruit and retain journalists of color. (See, for instance: “There Isn’t a Coronavirus ‘Second Wave,’ ” by Mike Pence.)

“Opinion articles often make assertions that are contradicted by WSJ reporting,” newsroom staffers wrote. “Some of us have been told by sources that they won’t talk to us because they don’t trust that the WSJ is independent of the editorial page; many of us have heard sources and readers complain about the paper’s ‘bias’ as a result of what they’ve read in Opinion.” The letter arrived among a flurry of missives sent by Journal reporters to their corporate bosses around the same time: One condemned a racist op-ed headline, “China Is the Real Sick Man of Asia.” Another denounced a column in which Gerard Baker, who previously ran the newsroom, used the killing of Ahmaud Arbery to contort an argument that hate crimes against Black people are less frequent than attacks on whites. A letter sent in the wake of George Floyd’s murder observed that “WSJ’s coverage has focused historically on industries and leadership ranks dominated by white men,” calling for more diversity in the newsroom and demanding that the paper “encourage more muscular reporting about race and social inequities.”

When the Jill Biden op-ed made the rounds, the newsroom circulated yet another letter of protest.

“The notorious vetting team of the Wall Street Journal that upholds the standards is so intense—they really question every word—but that same group doesn’t go through the op-eds,” Bradley Hope, an investigative reporter who left recently for a startup, told me. He wasn’t among the newsroom’s vocal dissenters, he said, yet he understood their frustration. “When an author purports to be laying out facts, that’s when it really riles up the staff,” Hope continued. “They’re undergoing this crazy process on one hand, and then there’s this bubble that exists where, in the opinion section, everything can be protected by the fact that it’s ‘an opinion.’ ” The editorial board’s response to the letters was consistent, and they shared it with

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readers: “We are not the New York Times,” they wrote, under the headline “These pages won’t wilt under cancel-culture pressure.” The piece declared, “Our opinion pages offer an alternative to the uniform progressive views that dominate nearly all of today’s media.” Matt Murray, the editor of the Journal, told me that dissent over op-eds was outside of his concern: “We keep a firm separation in the Wall Street Journal between news and opinion,” he said. For Murray and for Latour, the conflict was about more than staff morale; the Journal was in the midst of an ambitious push to double its paying customer base, requiring its leaders to pull off an almost impossibly difficult trick in a divided post-Trump America: appeal to new readers without alienating existing ones.

The paper’s audience—just over 3.4 million people, many of them in, or retired from, financial professions—is old; according to internal surveys, half of subscribers are over fifty-eight. Roughly 71 percent are men, and at least 70 percent are white. Among the Journal’s dedicated readers, internal surveys suggest, opinion pieces have long been the most reliable draw.

That is not unknown to Journal employees. But recently, as I spoke with about fifty current and former staffers—most on background, fearing retribution—many expressed frustrations that extended beyond the opinion page. Ultimately, what troubles them is the conservatism of the newspaper as a whole, and how that shapes coverage.

Editors modulate the tone of political stories, set limits on subject matter, and insist on catering to the Journal’s traditional audience at the expense of growth. Murray— who is fifty-five, with a broad, boyish face— described an allegiance to the formula that the paper has used for generations: cover the news through the lens of business. “I think it’s important that we continue to maintain a type of news reporting that is very definitely rooted in reportable fact and has an objective tone,” he said. Attracting new readers, he believes, can be achieved through service journalism that helps people navigate financial decisions.

At a moment when just about every other news outlet, it seems, is questioning its conventions and seeking to start a new chapter,

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Reporters complain that editors modulate the tone of political stories and set limits on subject matter.

the Journal has dug in its heels. That has obvious implications beyond the opinion page; adhering to old habits, and devising coverage that suits right-wing readers, is at once a business stance and an editorial one, a reflection of how much the content of a newspaper comes from defining its audience. But if the Journal stubbornly refuses to change, in the long term, its influence may fade alongside its geriatric readership.

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ounded in 1889 as a four-page afternoon newspaper overflowing with market indexes and stock trends, the Journal was the creation of two young newspapermen—Charles Dow and Edward Jones—who quit their jobs working for a financial-news agency in downtown Manhattan and set up shop behind the soda fountain in the basement of 15 Wall Street. By the time they sold Dow Jones & Company, to Clarence

Barron, a bushy-bearded, rotund wire service proprietor in Boston, in 1902, the paper had a circulation of roughly seven thousand; its readers filled the ranks of Wall Street.

In the mid-twentieth century, the paper underwent a reinvention under Barney Kilgore, a product of small-town Indiana who arrived as a cub reporter just before the 1929 market crash and served as editor from 1941 to 1965. Kilgore instructed his reporters to expand their target audience beyond the financial elite to include “the almost infinitely more numerous bank depositors,” according to Richard J. Tofel, a former Journal assistant managing editor and the author of Restless Genius, a Kilgore biography. “Business news embraces everything that relates to making a living,” ­Kilgore liked to say. “Financial people are nice people and all that, but there aren’t enough of them to make this paper go.” He debuted a feature

K ILL LIST

Reporting on policy as strategy During protests in the summer of 2020, the phrase “Defund the Police” reverberated across the United States. Political journalists filled their notebooks with quotes from campaign strategists about how the message would play in the upcoming presidential election. (“Defunding police will lead to Republican victory this year,” according to a piece in The Hill.) Few interviewed police abolitionists about their advocacy or history.

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that boiled down the day’s events to a list of blurbs on the left side of the front page: “What’s News.” (The news summary has remained ever since and is one of the most widely read parts of the paper.) All the while, the Journal maintained a dedication to business reporting and free-market-loving opinion pieces. As an ad campaign put it: “Everywhere, Men Who Get Ahead in Business Read the Wall Street Journal.”

Under Kilgore’s leadership, the Journal increased its circulation from thirty thousand to more than a million. Many of his ideas remained central through the era of Paul Steiger, who ran the newsroom from 1991 to 2007. (Kyle Pope, now editor and publisher of CJR, worked under Steiger for a decade; Matt Murray previously served on CJR’s Board of Overseers.) During that time, the Journal was marketed as the “daily diary of the American dream,” a second read to complement metropolitan papers, with behind-the-curtain looks at boardroom drama, muckraking investigations into corporate crime, and all the financial news readers could handle. The Journal expanded to four sections, launched a Saturday edition, and won sixteen Pulitzer Prizes. But by the end of Steiger’s tenure, the internet had come to the fore; the newspaper industry faced steep circulation declines and plummeting ad revenue. The Bancroft family, which had inherited Dow Jones & Company from Barron, saw that the Journal was no exception. “Most people were just taking the dividend and not really engaging with the business,” Natalie Bancroft, an early advocate of selling the paper, now a member of the News Corp Board of Directors, told me. “At the end of the day, our number one responsibility was to keep the company going and not to have to lay off thousands of people.”

When Murdoch offered himself as a buyer, the Bancrofts were interested, but they knew of his political predilections and were wary that he might infringe upon the paper’s editorial independence. The division between the newsroom and the opinion section had always felt sacrosanct: In the office at the World Financial Center, reporters were relegated to shabby quarters; the opinion staff occupied the rarefied realm of the executive suites. On the page, editorials were consistently libertarian-conservative; reporting aimed to hold the business world accountable. Before the Bancrofts were willing to hand Murdoch control, the family sought to safeguard the integrity of the Journal’s newsgathering through the creation of an independent committee that would meet at least four times a year, operate in strict confidence, stay in touch with the staff, and continue in perpetuity. Most important: committee members would be empowered to go public with concerns on the pages of the Journal at any time.

Murdoch agreed. “What is on the Opinion pages will never be allowed to flow into the news pages,” he promised Steiger in an email.

“The two must be kept distinct and while I sometimes find myself nodding in agreement with the comment and commentators, even I occasionally find the views a little too far to the right.”

In a note to staff the day the Murdoch sale was approved, Marcus Brauchli, who had recently been appointed Steiger’s successor, tried to reassure a jittery newsroom: “A change of ownership won’t change our understanding of what’s important; our ability to

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compellingly explain the world, politics, and business; or our commitment to reporting that is accurate, honest and free of slant,” Brauchli wrote. But within four months, he resigned and went to the Washington Post.

He was replaced by Robert Thomson—a jovial, stooped Australian who had served as US editor of the Financial Times before moving to News Corp, where he rose to become the editor of Murdoch’s Times of London. Word leaked that the Bancrofts’ committee had not been properly consulted ahead of Brauchli’s departure. “Under the agreement, we have to be brought in to that process, and we weren’t,” Thomas Bray, a former Journal staffer who serves as the committee’s chair, recalled. The events stirred members to act. “We got some amendments to the agreement that make it crystal clear that they’ve got to consult with us if they plan to change the role of the editor in chief or the editorial page editor,” Bray said. “And we have to agree to that.”

It was a small victory—and only the first of many battles to be fought as the newsroom became fully absorbed into the political life of the Murdoch empire.

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nder Murdoch and Thomson, the Journal was reengineered. Reporters were told that lengthy analyses and off-the-news features bred “complacency and indulgence,” Sarah Ellison, a former Journal employee, writes in War at the Wall Street Journal (2010), an exhaustive chronicle of the News Corp takeover. Stories in a newspaper were not like those in magazines or books—they had to be “more direct and less complex,” Murdoch advised the staff.

“This is true for the New York Times and I’m sure that most of you can see the need for some streamlining at home right here.”

He said, too: “We must entice, engage, and excite readers or else we will lose them.”

Instead of being a “second read,” the Journal of Murdoch would aim to lead the pack. “The New York Times sets the national agenda and we should,” he declared. He called a meeting to “figure out how to cripple, really cripple the New York Times.”

Thomson staffed up the Washington bureau—it is now more than twice the size it was in the Bancroft days—and began giving

politics stories more prominent placement.

“There was a desire to make it broader, more comprehensive, to step it up in terms of volume and in terms of ambition,” Gerald Seib—a longtime Washington bureau chief, currently the executive Washington editor—recalled. “It was clearly in service of the idea that the Journal wanted to be a national newspaper, with not just a broader reach geographically, but a broader report every day that essentially put us on a par with the Times and the Post.”

The Journal also widened its coverage of national and foreign affairs, making the front page newsier and more concise. In December 2009, David Carr, who wrote the media column for the Times, took stock of the paper two years after Murdoch’s arrival—when, he wrote, “a chorus of journalism church ladies (I was among them) warned that one of the crown jewels of American journalism now resided in the hands of a roughneck, and predicted that he would use it to his own ends.” Carr praised the Journal for remaining “one of the nation’s premier newspapers” but observed “growing indications” that Murdoch didn’t just want to cover politics; he seemed to want to use the paper to “play them as well.” Carr described reflexively pro-business, anti-government coverage shaped by heavy intervention from the Journal’s leaders; conflict between the Washington bureau and the New York headquarters; and ideology “baked into the coverage through headlines, assignments and editing in a way that had never occurred in the past.”

By this time, a key influence in the paper’s political voice was Gerard Baker, who had been hired that year to serve as Thomson’s number two. An Oxford-educated Brit who had worked at the Financial Times and the Times of London, Baker was known for writing arch neoconservative commentary; he had recently appeared on Fox News narrating a parody montage called “Obama (the Messiah).” In 2012, Thomson was elevated to become the chief executive of News Corp, and Murdoch baptized Baker as the new editor of the Journal, dumping a bottle of champagne on his head and blessing him with the sign of the cross. The bright line between the news and opinion departments suddenly

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“We cover race insofar as it’s not a comparison and it won’t offend our white readers.”

seemed dimmer than ever. As Neil King Jr., a twenty-one-year veteran of the Journal who served as global economics editor and deputy Washington bureau chief, told me, “It was pretty clear that Baker had a kind of visceral loathing for a lot of the political reporters at the paper.” (Baker declined to comment for this story.)

In an email chain, reporters began to exchange complaints about Baker’s editorial interventions—how he policed their language and watered down accountability journalism. When Trump announced his candidacy for president, top editors heavily scrutinized story topics and word choices, treating finished articles like raw copy. King recalled “a quest to find negative stories on the Hillary side to balance what seemed like a profusion of negative Trump stories.” Reporting deemed unflattering to Trump or his followers was sometimes killed or delayed until it

had appeared elsewhere. “The Journal wrote a lot of very exculpatory stories, basically, enhancing the Trump cause during the summer and fall of 2016,” King said. “And they wrote a whole lot of Hillary email stories that were pretty silly.”

When Trump won, Baker projected proud defiance. In a memo to reporters a few days after the election, he wrote, “While many other news organizations seem to have largely abandoned any last effort to be fair in their coverage, ours has been conspicuously objective, penetrating, intelligent, and, yes, fair.” From then on, editors existed to “sand down the edges,” to dull copy, Journal reporters told me; pointing out Trump’s lies would get them in trouble. One person compared the editing process in the early days of the Trump administration to a scene in the Robin Williams movie Good Morning, Vietnam in which a military public

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information officer takes a red pen to any item that might make the US war effort look bad. There were some exceptions: the Journal managed to break news on Jared Kushner’s business dealings, Paul Manafort’s ties to a Russian oligarch, and the Robert Mueller probe. But overall, the Journal’s coverage of Trump veered on fawning.

In the summer of 2017, Baker bigfooted his staff at an Oval Office interview with Trump. Along with Murray, who was then his deputy, he headed to Washington; at a meeting to prepare, he shot down the bureau’s toughest questions. Once the story was published, Baker took the lead byline.

Worse: within a week, a full transcript of the interview was leaked to Politico, much to the embarrassment of everybody involved.

Readers learned that Trump had thanked the Journal for a positive editorial and fielded genial questions from Baker, who dominated the interview and whom Trump called “Gerard.” At one point Ivanka Trump stopped by to say hello; Baker told her how nice it was to have seen her recently in the Hamptons and recalled a conversation about their daughters, both named Arabella.

As the transcript circulated online, Murray, back in New York, summoned almost two dozen members of the Washington bureau to gather in a conference room; over speakerphone, he upbraided them for the leak—a “breach of trust”—and suggested, according to people present, that he would fire the person at fault. (Murray, through a Journal spokesperson, denied vowing to fire anyone: “No investigation or even a discussion of an investigation into the source of the leak took place.”) On the other end of the line, there was shock and disappointment: instead of reflecting upon what had made the interview problematic, Murray apparently felt the need to threaten his staff.

(Later that year, when the bureau scheduled another interview with Trump, the reporters involved went to elaborate lengths to hide the time of the meeting from Baker so he wouldn’t find his way there.)

That August, Baker fired off a series of latenight emails criticizing reporters for, among other things, their coverage of a Trump rally in Phoenix, accusing them of writing “commentary dressed up as news reporting” and

instructing them to “stick to reporting what he said rather than packaging it in exegesis and selective criticism”; the messages were soon leaked to rival publications. During a newsroom town hall meeting, he dismissed observations by other outlets that the Journal was soft on Trump as “nonsense” and “fake news,” then suggested that anyone unhappy with the paper’s approach should find a job elsewhere. Many took his advice. In the months that followed, at least nine members of the Washington bureau decamped to the Post; several more left for the Los Angeles Times and the New York Times. King took a buyout. “There was a lot of seething discontent,” he said.

By June 2018, after more revelations— including that he killed a graphic about the 2008 financial crisis because he found it too liberal—Baker stepped down to become an editor at large. The newsroom staffers I spoke with weren’t sure what the last straw had been, but in the months before his tenure ended, a number of them had been contacted by members of the paper’s special committee. When I asked Bray about it, he said only: “We operate more or less behind the scenes.” The consensus among reporters was that the committee likely played a role in deposing Baker.

Murray ascended. Despite his reputation as Baker’s right-hand man, he was a Journal lifer, around since the pre-Murdoch days, who was seen as reasonable and diplomatic. A relative calm came over the newsroom.

For the first time in a while, mid-level editors loosened their grip, and reporters felt free to do their jobs. That year, the Wall Street Journal published a series of articles uncovering Trump’s secret payoffs to women and the network of people who helped carry out the transactions during the campaign, including Michael Cohen. The authors’ work triggered criminal inquiries and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize.

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n his new role, Murray promised to set a “positive tone” for the newsroom. “We want great work and encourage great work,” he said in a November 2018 interview. “We need to take risks, but we need to be rigorous and push ourselves.” A few months later, he told NBC that he believed

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the Journal should be exhaustive in its coverage of Trump: “Our distinct mark, I hope, will be writing about the full range of the presidency in as clear and fact-based and unbiased a way as we can.” The newsroom’s emphasis, he said, would be economic reporting, and he remarked that the paper had “dominated” coverage of the Federal Reserve’s rate hikes. (“That’s a classic Wall Street Journal story.”) He highlighted his plans to grow the paper’s audience; to the staff, he announced his intention to hire more journalists of color, including in leadership roles. He was off to a promising start.

But the honeymoon didn’t last. In 2020, an astonishing set of pressures tested journalists across the industry, and the Journal’s newsroom again became agitated.

In February, when the “Sick Man of Asia” op-ed was published, Murray told the staff that he agreed with their complaints but said that there was nothing he could do, since the opinion section was outside his purview. Within weeks, however, the piece had direct consequences on the news operation: as part of a larger battle with the United States, China revoked the visas of three Journal reporters and gave them five days to leave the country. Fifty-three reporters and editors, most in the China and Hong Kong bureaus, sent a letter to Journal executives asking that they change the offensive headline and apologize; anything less, they warned, would “cause lasting damage to our brand” and undermine reporters in China.

The opinion page never delivered; the newsroom continued to stew. The letter assailing Baker was more effective: his columns were being published in the news pages even as he blasted out incendiary takes, including the one about Arbery, in violation of newsroom rules. Staffers demanded that Baker be expelled from the newsroom; the next day, he was reassigned to opinion.

Still, politics reporters had to contend with a degree of editorial oversight that some found demoralizing. One called the process “insane.” Several groaned that Murray was personally line-editing their stories, far more often and aggressively than anything they’d experienced before. Many staffers focused their criticism on Jason Anders, one of Murray’s deputies, whose adversarial

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style, they said, made him the subject of widespread resentment. (Anders declined to comment.) In a few cases, reporters said, stories went up online only to be reopened, challenged, and revised by a top editor hours later. In one widely circulated anecdote, a finished piece—on Catholic nuns refusing to sell land that Trump wanted for his border wall—made it all the way up to Murray, who declined to run it because he didn’t want a story about “Trump bullying a bunch of sweet old nuns.” The article was rewritten to focus broadly on “the challenges in building a border wall, even if funding is available.”

Many in the newsroom felt they were being punished for their letters of protest against the opinion section. They found, too, that the level of scrutiny rose after the murder of George Floyd, as leaders at the Journal seemed determined to avoid confronting the realities of white supremacy. “We cover race insofar as it’s not a comparison and it won’t offend our white readers,” a staffer said. “We’ll write a story that says Latinos are buying more homes. But we won’t write a story saying sellers are more willing to sell to white buyers.” Seib, who started at the Journal in 1978, assured me that there has always been tension between the Washington bureau and the bosses in New York, but said the mood feels different lately. “The political climate that we’re in now, in the United States of America, is much more fraught than it ever has been in my life,” he told me. “So the kinds of tensions and suspicions that are always there, to some extent, are probably magnified by the environment that we’re in.”

In the weeks before the 2020 election, the conflict between the newsroom and the opinion section was again put on public display, when the Journal ran two pieces on Hunter Biden that contradicted each other: one by Kimberley Strassel, a columnist, claiming that a new trove of emails and text messages suggested that Joe Biden had been involved in shady business dealings with his son; the other a reported article by Andrew ­Duehren and James T. Areddy, concluding that the emails indicated no such thing. After the inauguration, the newsroom was instructed to be tougher on the Biden administration.

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“That’s a one-eighty from the first year of Trump, when they were tying our hands behind our backs,” a reporter told me. In the early days of the Biden presidency, the Journal was the only national newspaper not to cover the reunification of families separated at the US-Mexico border. Editors have since been reluctant to allow White House reporters to garner goodwill with sources in the administration by covering anything seen as too “PR like.”

Murray, for his part, denied any aggressive monitoring of political coverage. He suggested that the impression I’d been getting from reporters might be owed to the strains of working remotely during the pandemic and to an “incredibly polarized election with emotions running very high everywhere.” Editorially, he told me, “we’ve got a very strong culture. We discuss. We debate. We talk about issues of fairness.

We talk about issues of balance.” He felt that the Journal’s standards were strong, even as “some other publications have gone too far off the rails,” and said that the newsroom “works pretty well.”

When I reached out to Paul Beckett, the Washington bureau chief, he declined to speak, then sent an email to his team “reminding” them that, before they answered my calls, all interviews would have to be cleared by the corporate communications department. (A reporter who requested permission to speak with me on the record never got an answer; another, in New York, was warned by her editor that if she spoke openly, she would be labeled a troublemaker.) One person from the DC bureau, who talked with me under the condition of anonymity, said that Beckett had been editing all copy—after the White House and Congress editor had gone through it—to approve, or sanitize, the text before it went to New York, where it entered another round of hacking.

In recent months, tensions have only worsened. In April, when the Journal broke news that dozens of CEOs had met on Zoom and prepared a statement opposing state-level legislation that restricted voting rights, an editor initially placed the story on A-1; but when Murray reviewed the page, he pushed the story inside, saying: “We don’t

need to give this publicity.” In July, when Trump sued to restore his social media profiles—several months after Facebook, Twitter, and Google banished him from their platforms—the Journal published a report that minimized any connection to his fund­ raising efforts and the fact that the suit was, as a First Amendment lawyer put it, “irredeemably frivolous.” At meetings with the Washington bureau, Beckett addressed concerns about obtrusive top editing by suggesting that reporters were submitting copy that wasn’t “camera ready.” Some of his staff were so upset that, the following week, he offered a mea culpa. But that wasn’t sufficient. “There’s this culture in the Journal of not being a liberal, not having any slack,” a reporter told me. “Just having rigor about it and not having lefty commentary that masquerades as journalism.” The reporter continued, “There’s an awareness among a significant chunk of reporters that we’re not the New York Times. We’re not going to cover these issues in the way the New York Times does.”

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onsistent throughout the Murdoch years has been a fixation on the Times: the Journal seeks both to compete with it and not to be anything like it, in equal measure. When, last summer, a team led by Louise Story—a news strategy chief and executive in product and technology who spent more than a decade at the Times—conducted an internal survey that argued the Journal placed too much emphasis on its traditional audience at the expense of attracting new digital subscribers, including people of color, young people, and women, detractors on the masthead dismissed its central conceit. Critics in the newsroom labeled the report a “woke New York Times strategy”; Murray described it to me as “a draft.” Yet that response overlooked pained observations from within the Journal’s newsroom: more than 70 percent of staffers said that they thought coverage of race, gender, and identity did not reflect “the diversity of the general public and changing demographic trends” and that they felt powerless to change anything. Emily Nelson, the US news editor, was quoted as saying “reporters self-censor.” She continued, “There are

KILL LIST

Setting absurd expectations for complex problems Political change is a slow brew, but news outlets tend to suggest otherwise in headlines, as in June, when the Washington Post summed up the first meeting between Joe Biden and Vladimir Putin like this: “Biden, Putin hold ‘positive’ summit but divisions remain over human rights, cyberattacks, Ukraine.” See also last year, when the Post asked, atop a story on Black Lives Matter, “America convulses amid a week of protests, but can it change?”

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currently no mandates that assigning editors, for example, think at all about whether they are selecting stories that reflect the diverse population of the country, much less if they’ll be stories that will be of interest to diverse audiences.” The report also described how Ebony Reed, the new-audiences chief at the Journal, met with the National Bar Association, the largest group of Black legal professionals in the country, and followed up by sending story ideas to editors; none was acted upon. Weeks later, similar stories ran in other major news outlets—including the Times.

Story’s team advocated transforming the paper’s coverage and culture. The recommendations were presented as a means of securing the Journal’s financial future. “In the past five years, we have had six quarters where we lost more subscribers than we gained,” the report stated. The bottom line: “If we want to grow to 5.5 million digital subscribers, and if we continue with churn, traffic and digital growth about where they are today—it will take us on the order of 22 years.”

Within a few months, the findings were leaked to BuzzFeed. Story did not comment for that article or for this one, but a Journal employee, seeing the audit for the first time, gave BuzzFeed a direct reaction: “Oh fuck, wow,” the employee said. “It seems like the organization is having a come-to-Jesus moment.”

A person who worked on the survey told me, though, that the Journal’s leaders didn’t seem eager to self-reflect. “We were genuinely surprised by the level of hostility we encountered,” the person said.

“The recommendation wasn’t to change the focus of the Journal, or to water down content, or to pander. The recommendation was to be more inclusive and representative while telling the same stories we are telling. We had data that shows there are plenty of business reasons to support content that is more reflective of the population of the world. There was no political or social agenda. So to have it labeled as a ‘woke strategy’ was surprising.”

To be sure, other outlets have struggled with matters of editorial judgment, objectivity, and race, and there have been plenty of conflicts between news and opinion departments—including at the Times, where things came to a head last year when reporters took a stand against an inflammatory op-ed and James Bennet, the section’s editor, was forced out. But for the most part, where leaders at those news organizations have engaged with employees (however unsatisfying or incomplete those discussions may have been), the Journal masthead has largely resisted. On a call with staff last summer, Murray told them he found it “inappropriate” to talk about the opinion page and said, “I don’t think my personal views of it or my political opinions are relevant.” When I asked Murray how he steers news coverage, he replied, “I always think of objectivity as being like salvation. It’s always a good thing to strive for, but it’s a hard thing to achieve. So I like words like fairness, balance, a certain sense of neutrality.” He continued, “You’ve got to reflect as accurately as you possibly can the situation as you see it. We’re not to be advocates. We’re not to push our hand or have opinions. I don’t think that’s the role of a news article.”

Emma Moody, the Journal’s editor of standards and ethics, told me that editors are trained in “neutral language” and encouraged to take out “loaded” modifiers. “We want to be impartial,” she

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said. “Both sides should have their say.”

Her team, which consists of seven senior editors, reviews the “most sensitive” stories and is charged with upholding the values of the newsroom, which she described as being rooted in objectivity and fairness.

“It’s been a really challenging five years,” she said, with a lot of “hard questions.”

Readers, she explained, have served as a guide. “They like to have their point of view reflected, but they also want to be challenged in many ways,” she told me. “Something that we found, just in correspondence from readers, is that they’re really appreciative of what we’re doing because we’re presenting news in a very factual way and not trying to preach and not trying to inject our own opinion.”

As for how bomb-throwing editorial-­ page pieces might affect readers’ perceptions, Moody said that was not her mandate: “We are out there, willing to ask hard questions of either side,” she said.

Besides, things couldn’t be too bad, she argued: the Journal touts that, according to a recent report by the Reuters Institute, it is the most trusted newspaper in America.

Murray, too, seemed complacent. “We do have very discerning readers,” he told me.

“I think that they understand that there’s a lot of different kinds of content for them in different ways. And they don’t have to read everything that we do. Some people love our markets coverage, some people love the opinion page. We’ll find different ways in.”

Still, it’s hard to deny that audiences often find it hard (online, especially) to distinguish between news and opinion as newspapers define them. When, in 2018, the Pew Research Center provided five thousand American adults with a series of statements and asked them to label which were facts and which were opinions, almost 75 percent failed to identify all the facts; two-thirds were unable to identify the opinions. (The study concluded that the participants’ biases were at fault.)

“Everybody agrees we need labeling,” Murray said. In February, the Journal announced that, as part of a “news literacy initiative,” it would set display copy in distinct colors: blue for news, gold for opinion. The plan was met with skepticism by reporters, however, once

they saw that Strassel, the author of the inaccurate Hunter Biden piece and one of opinion’s most partisan columnists, had started appearing on panels to discuss the paper’s news literacy efforts. Several commented on the irony of selecting a person many in the newsroom consider the “queen of disinformation and propaganda” to represent them in educating the public. (Strassel and members of the opinion team declined to comment.)

Renee Hobbs, the director of the Media Education Lab at the University of Rhode Island, is doubtful that the labeling initiative will have much impact. “The idea that you would color-code gold for opinions and blue for news is trivializing the genuine complexity of the interplay between news and opinion,” she said. Howard Schneider, a former editor of Newsday and the current executive director of Stony Brook University’s Center for News Literacy, agreed: “I don’t think labeling or a different typeface for the headlines on opinion versus news is remotely sufficient to make these things clear.” He added, though, that there is only so much the Journal—or any newspaper—can do. (The Washington Post also color-codes news and opinion.) “The only true way to solve the problem,” he argued, “is to do a better job as educators, getting students to recognize the difference between a factual statement or a statement of opinion.”

Until then, a news environment beset by confusion and distortion seems inevitable.

And under Murdoch, the Journal has demonstrated its willingness to reflect a version of reality that its core right-leaning audience wishes to see: according to an internal survey, 85 percent of the paper’s readers say they hold “traditional” or “conservative” economic views, with 69 percent maintaining traditional or conservative social values.

(In a statement, the Journal told me those numbers provide an incomplete picture of the current subscriber base.) “If they’re only giving readers on the news side information that they think will reinforce their worldview and not alienate them,” Schneider said, “then I think they’re failing their readers.”

Which, as Hobbs pointed out, is something newspapers have done forever: “People in power have always used whatever means they have at their disposal to present their

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Under Murdoch, the Journal has demonstrated its willingness to reflect a version of reality that its core right-leaning audience wishes to see.

worldview in a persuasive and compelling way, which means it often includes falsehoods and inaccuracies.”

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o me, at least, Murray projected optimism about the Journal’s future. In March 2019, the paper signed on to the paid subscription service run by Apple News (which the Times, feeling “leery,” declined to join); executives crowed that the partnership would help the Journal reach millions of new readers. (“We’ve got hundreds of thousands of college students now reading us, and people starting out in their careers,” Murray said.) This past February, after a long campaign by Murdoch and Thomson, News Corp inked a three-year deal with Google that promised “significant” payments when Journal stories (and those from other company properties) were featured in Google News.

The same month, News Corp announced that

Journal subscriptions were up; by August, the total number of subscribers had risen nearly 10 percent, to 3.45 million, with digital subscriptions at 2.72 million. But a newsroom digital leader told me that those numbers were misleading—and unsustainable—because they included “corporate subscriptions and student subscriptions and things done at an institutional level” that offered discounts of as much as 90 percent to inflate readership.

Murray said the Journal’s growth strategy was developed in collaboration with Latour, the publisher, who believes that the mission of Dow Jones should be to help people make decisions in “business, finance, and life.” That philosophy, Murray told me, drove newsroom leaders to “think as broadly and expansively of how we can bring it to more people, and what a decision-maker is.” He continued, “A decision-maker isn’t just a CEO. A decision-maker isn’t just the senior

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vice president. A decision-maker is: Do I buy a new car or not? Do I buy a house or not?

How do I want to move in my career?” Murray is now spearheading more “decision maker” stories—service journalism, explainers, and approachable financial reports, under a coverage area called “Life & Work”— that he expects will expand the paper’s audience. “Everybody’s interested in their job, everybody’s interested in their career, everybody’s interested in money,” he said. “Everybody who understands the world knows that those things drive an awful lot of what happens in the world. And being as aggressive as we can on those things in our coverage, I think, informs our success. So I think we are seeing more women come in. We are seeing younger readers.”

The Story team’s recommendations on tone and coverage have been permanently set aside. In fact, they were dead on arrival: According to someone who contributed to the report, Murray called Story when the survey was almost done and expressed “strong regrets” at having commissioned it; he contemplated killing the project, but allowed her to finish what she’d started. Her team interpreted the message as Murray trying to keep his head down and avoid stirring conflict with Latour—the two have historically had a tense relationship, and the survey seemed like it would be a strain. In the spring, Edmund Lee, of the Times, reported that Murray and Latour “hate each other.”

Murray denied that to me; Latour declined to comment. The company told me in a statement: “Almar Latour and Matt Murray have built a strong and productive working relationship that is yielding many dividends.” A person who has worked with both men told me that they have different styles, and have never much liked each other, but “hate” is probably too strong a word. Story left the Journal in July to work on a book about race and money in the United States.

To her former team, Murray and Latour’s “decision maker” plan sounds a bit like code, something for elite readers, or at least those who identify as such. It’s not a given that “Life & Work” stories will exclude certain demographics—“This strategy should feature people of color and young people as decision-makers, of course, and invite people

to recognize that they are part of ‘Team Capitalism,’ ” Hobbs told me—but some Journal staffers still feel disappointed that their bosses seem unwilling to evolve as other news outlets have. “People are heartbroken,” the person from Story’s team said. (Besides, “Team Capitalism” isn’t where everyone following the global economy wants to be.)

Even if subscription rates grow, the Journal remains a Murdoch enterprise, and the opinion section has only become bolder in advancing his political agenda. (In June, Baker published another whopper, on “Jeffrey Toobin, the ‘1619 Project’ and the Journalistic Reign of Error,” in which, among other complaints, he bashed the Pulitzer Prizes as “Hero of the Soviet Union–like ribbons for full-time advocacy of approved causes.”)

Digital audiences may be too put off by sexist and racist op-eds to pay for the paper’s reporting. “The question is: Will their readers—and will their future readers—understand the division and the separation and be able to live with it?” Schneider wondered to me. “Can they have that split personality?”

The combination of news coverage and a Trump-supporting opinion page may have worked fifty years ago, he said. “Is that possible now?” He wasn’t sure.

Hobbs sees Murdoch’s vision manifesting exactly as intended. “He bought the Journal so that he could influence elites, and now he is continuing to push elites into the paradigm that he thinks is going to be the winning play, which is Trump in 2024,” she said. “A lot of people like to see journalists in pain. Some part of this is deliberately baiting journalists by pushing rightward on the editorial side of the house to outrage journalists—it’s like, part of that is a strategy.”

If that’s the case, Murray wasn’t going to say so. But it’s hard to deny that the politics of the Journal have always come down to money. “At this moment in the United States, we are on the cusp of the biggest business boom any of us have seen in our lifetimes,” he said.

“It’s also one facing some challenges—like the cost challenge, the inflation risks, wage issues. We’re trying to cover the hell out of all of those things. And we’re seeing readers flock to those stories. So I think that we’re really right smack in the moment of relevancy right now.” cjr

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End Note

The press had to adapt (yet again) to an unexpected turn of coronavirus events. Political coverage not directly related to covid—on subjects like voting rights and immigration— was bumped, to accommodate breaking stories on rising hospitalization rates. When the Senate reached a breakthrough on a bipartisan infrastructure deal, the news was overshadowed by word that the CDC was reversing its guidance on masks. The New York Times observed that “the resurgence of the disease, driven by the fast-spreading Delta variant, threatens to halt plans by both parties to shift their attention to other matters ahead of the midterm elections next year.” Journalists, still debunking right-wing media conspiracies—no, an antiparasitic drug for livestock will not treat your case of covid—have had their plans halted, too. —Betsy Morais

O L I V E R C O N T R E R AS / S I PA U SA V I A A P I M AG E S

I

n May, Joe Biden gave a triumphant press conference in the Rose Garden. A few hours before, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had announced that fully vaccinated people did not need to wear masks, inside or outside.

“You’ve earned the right to do something that Americans are known for all around the world,” Biden said. “Greeting others with a smile.”

By June, news outlets were publishing “summer of fun” coverage: “Where to eat and drink to fall in love with the Bay Area again” (the San Francisco Chronicle); “Put away Zoom and grab the sunscreen” (The Tennessean). New York magazine declared “The Return of fomo,” reporting that “we may now be on the way to a new golden age as we try to make up for the year we lost by doing more than ever.” The piece described an art dealer sliding into a booth, ordering a mezcal, and saying, “It’s gonna be a hot dick summer, you know?”

Those stories didn’t hold up for long. In July, the Delta variant tore through the country, messing with our optimistic pandemic denouement. “People underestimated how transmissible Delta is, or what that would mean,” Ed Yong wrote, for The Atlantic. An infectious-­ disease ecologist told him that Delta “really rewound the clock.”

Jen Psaki, the White House press secretary

For 60 years, CJR has been the voice of journalism. Join us as we celebrate our past with a special issue later this year, and as we chronicle our profession’s next chapter. cjr.org

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—Averi Harper, deputy political director at ABC, p. 48

Adam Piore on the conservatism of the Wall Street Journal Jon Allsop on Mehdi Hasan’s fierce debates Clio Chang on what’s up with Teen Vogue Hunter Walker on the inertia of the White House press corps

801 Pulitzer Hall 2950 Broadway Columbia University New York, NY 10027

Osita Nwanevu on preaching to the choir Stephania Taladrid on Washington-centric coverage of Latin America E. Tammy Kim on a street paper in Seattle Sam Sanders on hard and soft news Matt Bors on political cartoons