Janine Jackson interviewed FAIR’s Julie Hollar about the 2020 election for the December 6, 2020, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript.
Janine Jackson: Presidential election coverage is of course well underway, and is bringing us some of the tropes and troubles we’re accustomed to—a focus on horserace and “winnowing the field,” to the detriment of deeper attention to substantial concerns, and a general mismatch between the issues the public says they care about and those that news media choose to spotlight.
But the stakes of the 2020 election are incredibly high, with a sitting president who is a toxic hazard, and a Democratic primary that includes candidates talking about things that are traditionally taboo for corporate elites, including in the press. FAIR is following election coverage closely. Joining us now to talk about what we're seeing so far is FAIR senior analyst for Election 2020, Julie Hollar. Welcome back to CounterSpin, Julie Hollar.
Julie Hollar Thanks, Janine, it's great to be here.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris debating on CNN (7/31/19).
JJ: We hope that reporting will tell us about candidates’ policy proposals, and about their public record, in an ongoing way, and that reporters will be asking candidates substantive questions all the time. But the debates are really what many people see as the real chance to see candidates side by side, and to hear them answering questions in real time, and maybe disagreeing or contrasting their ideas with one another. So it matters a lot what ground gets covered in these debates and, on the other hand, what gets left out. What's been your observation about the debates so far, about their scope and I guess their quality, the Democratic debates?
JH: I think, to no one's real surprise, they've been pretty superficial, sometimes quite sensationalistic. I think CNN probably gives us the best example of that, with their WWF-style introductions, and the way they were setting up questions to really try to get the candidates to attack each other.
You do see a little bit of variety across debates, because you have different outlets hosting them, but you see a really heavy emphasis across all of them on healthcare and economy questions. We've been tracking the questions asked, and so we have tallies of all of these. And healthcare and economy have accounted for almost 40% of questions across all of the debates, which is really—you know, healthcare and economy are very important topics to people.
JJ: Right.
JH: But that is a tremendous amount of questions about two subjects.
So there's sort of a second tier of international foreign policy questions and immigration questions, which, combined with non-policy questions—which are the useless questions that are asked, like, you know, “Ellen DeGeneres is friends with George W. Bush, who's an unusual friend that you might have?”—that the outlets always seem to need to ask. That second tier accounts for about another quarter of questions.
And then your last quarter is the environment, race, guns, women—the sort of Democratic Party questions that tend to see a very small section, if any section, of questions posed in any given debate.
So there are a lot of issues that people are really concerned about right now. And there also are a lot of candidates right now. And so you have an inherent tension in these debates between giving viewers a real chance to get to know all of the candidates, and giving them a fair shake—candidates who don't necessarily already have the name recognition of a Joe Biden—but then also really giving people the opportunity to understand what they really stand for, and going deep on some of these issues. That's going to be impossible to do, when you have 20 people and you have lots and lots of issues.
We started these debates in June, you know; the first primaries are in January. So lots of time to do this, and I think the really obvious answer to the problem of “lots of people, lots of issues,” is to narrow down the issues that you talk about in a debate. And there are a lot of activists who've been calling for single-issue debates. And it's a really obvious answer to this problem, but it's one that the DNC has so far refused to entertain.
JJ: When folks say, a single-issue debate, where you can really go deep and get very thorough, or more thorough, one of the first things that comes to mind is climate change. You can't really overestimate the importance of that set of issues, it's not just one issue, and the urgency of it—we've got the latest reports talking about “widespread catastrophic effects.” It's obvious that we're already late on action on this, and that's going to be something that the next president is going to have to engage. But we haven't really seen, and when we look at those debates, as much as people are talking about it, it hasn't really come up that much in the debates, has it?
JH: No, it's been 7% of all questions so far. So this is the one issue that got the most attention, in terms of activism, for a single-issue debate. And the DNC chair, Tom Perez, he refused. He said it wasn't necessary. He said he had “the utmost confidence” that would be discussed “early and often” in the debates.
We actually just, I think it was last week, took a look at that, and it's not been early, it's not been often. So 7% of questions—only one of the seven nights did it come in the first hour, that was at the 59-minute mark. So it's really not being taken seriously in the debates. It's passed over pretty quickly. When we count questions in our study, we're counting not just the substantive, original questions that are asked of candidates, but also the followup, “And what do you have to say about that, Senator So-and-So?” kinds of questions.
JJ: Right, that also counts as a question, and you still get just 7%.
JH: So when we're talking about 7% of questions, OK, I think there's been 47 questions [on climate change]. Well, really only 20 of those have been the substantive questions that are given a 60-second-or-more response time. When you get the follow-up question, the followup prompt, you're given 30 to 45 seconds. Bernie Sanders, so far—Sanders is at the moment, of the candidates who are still in the race, he has the most ambitious and detailed climate plan, I would say, of the candidates at the moment, and he's gotten five follow-up questions. He's not gotten a single substantive question that he's been given 60 seconds or more to answer. So this is not a way for people to understand the differences between the candidates’ plans here.
JJ: Some folks might think, “Well, but they had that climate town hall,” and they've had town halls and meetings on women, and certain other issues, but it's not the same, really it doesn't fill the same function.
JH: No. And those were great, actually. There were a lot of audience questions, which were fantastic; the journalists’ questions, some of those were unsurprisingly lackluster. But a lot of the audience questions were very probing.
The problem is, in a town hall, each candidate is given the opportunity to speak; they have the floor, by themselves, for however long, 20 minutes, whatever it is. It’s not an actual debate; they're not confronting each other, so their plans are not really juxtaposed. And so it's a different kind of perspective. And it's a different kind of view that you get of these topics.
And also, their viewership is much, much lower. So yes, there are people who are really interested in climate, who are given this climate town hall, they get to watch it, they get to learn more about it. But a lot of people don't have time to tune into a five-hour town hall to get these 20-minute chunks from each candidate. They want to see the candidates debate the questions amongst themselves, they want to see the differences highlighted; that's the way that you really can make a better decision, an informed decision, about this. The debates get a much, much higher viewership than the town halls.
So, yes, town halls are important, and they're great to do. They should be informing the kinds of questions that the debates are then asking. They're not doing that; the debates have acted as if the town halls didn't happen, except that they're asking even fewer questions about climate now that the town halls have happened.
But, again, this points to the need for this single-issue—well, let’s have a two-issue debate, why not a climate and economy debate? Why not have a healthcare and women debate? We can do two things at once. The town halls are helpful, but not enough.
JJ: It's almost like they use it almost like an excuse, that that was vented, those issues were covered somewhere else.
You mentioned Bernie Sanders. It's almost a joke, if it wasn't our democratic process at stake, how much support Sanders has among the public, but for corporate media, of all stripes, the distaste for him is palpable, and sometimes it has really amounted to journalistic malpractice, really. I'm not just imagining that, right?
JH: Back in the summer, Sanders called out the media for this. Actually, his campaign has been doing it for a while now. In some of the campaign stops, he was saying, You know, I criticize Amazon all the time for not paying taxes. I wonder why the Post doesn’t write good articles about me. The New York Times, they don't write good articles about me either, you know? I wonder why.
And the media pushback on this was remarkable. They were so offended: How could Sanders suggest that the Post is not writing good articles because Jeff Bezos is telling them not to? And they're comparing him to Trump, saying, Oh, it's just like Trump, talking about fake news. Very dangerous to do this. So we put together a compilation of all of the instances we had covered—which is certainly not exhaustive—of this media malpractice against Sanders. It's very clear.
JJ: Sometimes they'll have a chart, and his number will be higher, and they'll just put his name lower; it's kind of bizarre.
JH: Yeah, sometimes you're just scratching your head: How can they get away with this? But Sanders wants fundamental change in the structure of power in this country. And the corporate media outlets don't. The structure of power in this country is working quite well for them.
Julie Hollar: "Sanders wants fundamental change in the structure of power in this country. And the corporate media outlets don't. The structure of power in this country is working quite well for them."
The Times executive editor Dean Baquet recently told the Guardian that he had to “warn junior staff and readers against pushing to embrace left-wing candidates, like Sanders or Warren.” I thought it was such a telling comment. You notice that senior staff aren’t mentioned there, because, by the time you’re a senior staffer, you've already learned you don't do this; you're getting pushback when you start writing more positive stories about a Sanders or a Warren. Get a lot of pushback, you're going to leave, or you're going to learn a way to get the praise, you’re going to learn the way to get the promotion. The fact that he can say that publicly and not think twice about it...
JJ: Yeah.
JH: ...it's very evident where this is coming from.
JJ: It's interesting that he specifically says he warned them against embracing a Sanders or a Warren; he didn't warn them against anybody else. It's a particular set of ideas that he's talking about, and not just people, it seems.
JH: Right. "We can't be seen as political. We don't want people to see us as political. So we can't embrace Warren or Sanders." Because if you embrace Biden, you're not seen as political.
JJ: Right, somehow.
If you combine media's distaste for Sanders, and then the lack of urgency in the attention to climate change, you put those together, and you get this New York Times piece that I know that you and Jim Naureckas wrote about, where they were basically saying, Sanders—it was almost like he was "pandering" with his climate change plan, or that it wasn't serious. What was going on with that piece?
JH: Right. The headline was something like “Experts Aren’t Impressed With Sanders Climate Plan.” It “Thrilled Supporters, but Experts Aren't Impressed.” Yeah. Which is really a head-scratcher, because I think if there's one thing that climate experts can all agree on, it's that we need to take urgent action now. Right? That is the scientific consensus.
The article interviewed several experts—these were people like, you know, energy experts, a lot of them were academic, university-affiliated, energy, climate, some were business—but really, most of them did say positive things about Sanders plan, in terms of the scale, the ambition; some, it was unalloyed praise.
There were a couple who had criticisms of things like, in his plan, he wants to phase out nuclear energy, doesn't propose a carbon tax. So there are specific aspects, the more technical aspects of his proposals, that climate experts disagree on, which makes sense; this is a complicated issue, and there are going to be a lot of people with a lot of different ideas about the best way to go about it.
But it's so narrow and shortsighted to look at this, to frame an article like this, in terms of the details of the approach, instead of, you know, we're talking about who's gonna lead the country for a very critical four years in terms of climate, because, as all the experts are telling us, we have to act, well, yesterday, right?
But particularly when the next president comes in, we're talking about, we either have a presumed Republican candidate who is an active climate denier, who's rolling back environmental regulations, or we have to choose between Democratic candidates who have proposals that are on various scales. Are any of these at the scale that's necessary? Sanders, again, has one of the most ambitious plans; I think a much more useful article would have put this into the context that it needs to be in.
Sure, there are experts who are going to disagree. But what's the overall consensus about whose plan is going to get us where we need to be? Or whose plan envisions the scale of the work that needs to be undertaken? I think if that's the kind of framing that you have, those are the questions that you're going to these experts with, you're going to get different kinds of answers. And you certainly wouldn't get a headline like, “Experts Aren't Impressed.”
JJ: Yeah.
JH: I can't, you know, what would the headline be for something about Trump? It's just hard to imagine.
JJ: The piece—actually, I just pulled it up—it actually compared, it had rhetoric comparing it to Trump's border wall, right, Sanders’ climate plan?
JH: Right. Because Sanders expects—what was it? He expects the fossil fuel industry to help fund the climate plan. I suppose, and I'm trying to get inside the reporter's head, the idea is, Well, that's ridiculous, because the fossil fuel industry will never pay for this, just like it's ridiculous that Mexico would pay for a border wall. When they're really entirely different things. Mexico's a sovereign country; of course, it's not going to pay for a wall that we want to build.
JJ: Yeah.
JH: The fossil fuel industry, we're talking about companies that have to pay taxes here, there's litigation that can happen, and this is a very real thing. Why can't we do it?
JJ: Exactly.
JH: Because they're powerful?
JJ: Right.
JH: You know, it's really ridiculous.
JJ: And it shows the limits, really, of the debate, of the conversation, and when you go beyond the pale.
I just wanted to ask you, finally, and sort of continuing that theme, you wrote recently about this kind of—we see them all the time, but it just seemed like the "worried" articles are more worried than we're used to. It really seems like media showing their hand; they're saying, “Ooh, Sanders is popular, Warren is popular. We don't really want that.” And yet they're saying people don't really want that. There's a strange, you know, move to the right, I guess it's the typical...
JH: Right. Well, journalists can't express their opinions, right, in a straight news article, but they can call on sources to express opinions. So they call on all of their centrist sources. They have their Rolodex of Democratic establishment sources. So you have these articles full of, sometimes they’re named, current or former officials, who are very clearly the centrist wing of the party; sometimes they’re Democratic strategists, or advisors, or donors, you know, anonymous. But they'll compose a story that is 90 to 100% these sources, who talk about things like electability, and things like what the people want. And it's framed in these articles as being about the Democratic Party, they’re worried in the Democratic Party, that the party has uncertainty—which basically just erases the fact that, well, actually there is another wing of this party that doesn't have the same worries, and is actually quite excited about some of these candidates. But by eliminating those sources from your story, you've painted a picture of a unified, centrist Democratic Party that then can offer all of these tropes about electability, that as a straight journalist, you can't really write about yourself, you can't say that. But your sources sure can.
JJ: Right. And it's so strange, because it feels so disconnected from reality. They're talking about things like Medicare for All, things like free college education, as being undoable or unpractical, but these are popular ideas. So who are they really speaking for?
JH: Right, and—if we have time—the one last thing that I would want to get in here is the real push against Medicare for All; I think it's starting to be really effective. There's just so much, it's such a concerted, coordinated effort from the healthcare industry, that is being aided and abetted by corporate journalists, that you never see positive coverage of Medicare for All. It's always talking about how unpopular it is, when, in fact, Medicare for All is something that a lot of people don't understand all that well.
JJ: Right, right.
JH: And it can be framed in lots of different ways. And if you frame it in certain ways, like, “It's going to raise your taxes,” then people are less in favor of it. If you frame it in other ways, like, “It's going to lower your overall costs,” then people favor it.
JJ: Right.
JH: And most of the polling that was done, all summer into the fall, showed people being very much in favor of Medicare for All. But journalists sort of cherry-pick some of these questions that were framed in the more negative way, and talk about how it's unpopular. And in the debates, the questions about healthcare were always framed in this way of, “Well, what about how expensive it's going to be?” Warren was questioned repeatedly about, “Are you going to raise taxes on the middle class? Are you going to raise taxes on the middle class?”
And after months and months of this, you do start to see the polling, the popular support for Medicare for All, slipping a bit, which is unsurprising with this kind of coverage.
Within election coverage, it's not just about Sanders and it’s not Warren, it's also about the issues that they represent, and the issues that are getting the negative coverage that Sanders and Warren also can get.
JJ: Absolutely. Well, we will end it there. We've been speaking with FAIR senior analyst Julie Hollar. Thanks, Julie Hollar. You can find her work on the election on FAIR.org. Thanks a lot, Julie.
JH: Thanks, Janine.
| 
No comments:
Post a Comment