21 minute read
All of It Matters
HARD AND SOFT
By Sam Sanders
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WHEN 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, personalitydriven, 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,
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
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
Ten political journalists reflect on starting their careers in the Trump era and look ahead to what comes next
ORAL HISTORY
The New Guard
AUTHORS Shinhee Kang Ian W. Karbal Feven Merid
ILLUSTRATOR Nate Kitch For 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 tremendous. 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 underrepresented 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 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 opinionrelated 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 definitely 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. having conversations about hostility towards the press, how to carry ourselves as professionals, 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 important 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
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 twentyone, 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 Jschool.
Right as things were ramping up for the 2016 election, I got a politicalreporting 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 politics. It’s fun getting to talk to different people
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
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
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 Englishlanguage newspaper there. I was in Jschool 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 understand 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 positions 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 newspapers 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.
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.
MCGRAW 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 highranking 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.
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 actually comes from sources.
FOWLER There has certainly been a falloff in people’s trust of the capitalM 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 Republicans. 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.
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.
NILSEN In 2016, I was covering a Trump event that’s always stuck with me, because there was already that very antimedia 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 obviously has more of a reputation as being a leftwing publication. And so Republicans in Congress sometimes didn’t want to talk to us. But at the same time, I think Republicans in general cared less about what Vox was going to say, the negative things about them, potentially. 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 community: leaders and nonprofit organizations, that kind of thing. So building relationships 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 pushback 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 advocacy journalism and for reporting that is very close to a specific ideological perspective. 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 advocacy 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 unordinary 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 important. I don’t mean that you tell your reader everything about yourself,
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 bothsidesism come at the cost of realitybased, evidencesteeped 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 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 Republicans 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 upperclass 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
