ALEXANDRIA NEASON
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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.
S E RG E B LO C H
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?
K I LL LI ST
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.”)
