As a sports fan I can tell you: don't underestimate the role of journalistic laziness here. After every sports event, athletes (who are often required by leagues and contracts to sit for questions) are asked totally inane questions by reporters who often barely watched the game and gave no thought to what they might ask:
"Can you describe the emotion of this win?"
"Talk about that game winning hit."
I view process questions of politicians the same way. The easiest way to look like you are holding a politician's feet to the fire is to ask about their poll standing or something similar. Actually knowing what to ask on substantive issues requires the journalist do real work and research and preparation. They don't want to do that!
Yeah, I honestly feel like I read the same issue play out in sports obviously with much lower stakes. Reporters who cry all the time when players don’t do press conferences where they are asked incredibly dumb questions that don’t illuminate anything, or when coaches treat the questions/press conferences with contempt.
Meanwhile the actual interesting sports journalism I read either cuts out the dumb “tell me about that hit” questions and just tries to do tactical analysis of the game, or involves long form profiles of athletes / coaches where they actually talk about their lives and journeys rather than answering dumb beat reporter questions.
In both cases the writer has 90% decided the story they want to write before asking the question. In gamer stories they probably have it half written before the end of the game. So you ,"Talk about how big So and So was for you in this game, so that I have a quote for the second paragraph," type of "questions."
This is why I'm less sympathetic to all the journalist layoff stories. A lot of these jobs had a point in a prior world but they've just outlived all usefulness and even the people doing them are just going through the motions. In the future the story that could be half written before the game is over just won't be written and nothing of value will be lost.
You have a point but to be fair deadlines often make it necessary. Having a gamer story only half done at the end of the game is not remotely acceptable, usually. It should be more like 90%. Source: Former night sports editor at a metro daily (me).
And the same way, the best journalism about politicians usually comes from people far from the television camera or the White House press room. It was no accident at all that Watergate was broken by two guys in the newsroom working the phones.
We need more Zach Lowes. His NBA column was a must-read until he got locked behind the ESPN paywall.
Imagine sports journalism that actually teaches us the intricacies of basketball, beyond the tired bloviating about Jordan's legacy and the Mamba Mentality.
We have room for Shaq to play his dumb comedic role, but less Stephen A's please!
This is actually at the heart of why Bill Belicheck was so notorious in his after the game press conferences. I mean it led to quite possibly his most famous quote (repeating “we’re on to Cincinnati” over and over again). But mostly it led to mumbling terse responses that illuminated nothing.
And it apparently all stemmed from early in his career as defensive coordinator getting a “gotcha” question and it being days of content for WFAN. Because reality is even when he was coach, there were places he actually gave some genuinely fascinating insights. And it was when he was asked actual pertinent questions like “tell us the importance of a long snapper” and then him riffing for like 15 minutes with some pretty interesting insights.
Agree. The current crop of political journalists, as a class, is not that impressive, so as the article says, it's not that surprising politicians don't pay them more attention now that they're not the only game in town anymore.
What's interesting is that Trump seems pretty much on their level, in terms of focusing on process questions.
In his Trump's recent press conference, he spent much of his time on polling and process questions and talking about the campaign in meta terms, like he was reviewing the ratings and market performance of the latest season of The Apprentice so far.
Overall, it gave the impression Trump's mental model for his campaign is he's producing another reality TV show and just trying to win the ratings this season; the premise and plotline for next season hasn't even been written yet so that's a world away.
If you care about politics, Matt’s job is much more fun than being in the white house press corps.
The white house press corps is just inane— who wants to be judged by a 30 word question— and landing the palace intrigue stories you sometimes see in the Times and the WaPo means kissing up to sources and calculating your every move.
There are a few coaches that are fun to watch, such as Popovich, Spoelstra, or Mica Norah, but mostly because they treat the exercise with a funny sort of contempt.
The funny thing is... the media LOVES them for it. Popovich holds the press in open contempt and they write about him glowingly for this very behavior.
This gets back to my take that journalism degrees (especially journalism graduate degrees) shouldn't exist, and that aspiring journalists should get a degree in something else to be a kind of subject matter expert.
An undergraduate degree (of a serious student at a serious institution) is a passable bullshit detector and not much more. A BS in economics does not prove you can conduct credible economic research, but it does make you harder to hoodwink.
Don’t forget the sports tautologies. Winning is all about “performing under pressure” and excelling “at the critical time.” It’s also essential to “want it more” and to “be clutch.”
This is as insightful as saying presidential candidates need to get more electoral votes.
Interesting question: do Hindu professional athletes thank particular Hindu deities for helping them win and, if so, which deities are considered particular patrons of sporting activities?
I know this is probably naive of me but where you stand on a particular issue really shouldn't be a difficult question at all if you have a coherent set of beliefs.
Like, politicians should be excited to explain why they hold their positions because that could be persuasive to others.
Honestly I think the real reason politicians don't want to explain where they stand on a particular issue because "I'm taking this position to serve this interest group or to shore up this coalition" is a common reason that doesn't look good when you're honest about it.
True, but I actually think in many cases you could give some version of "My job is to serve the American people's interests. On this issue it's clear that overall the American people want X, and I believe that's reason enough." At least, I think that works as long as you don't do it too often and only on issues that aren't so divisive that you can't imagine someone just going along with an opposing view.
I have no great love for modern journalism, but we should also recognize that there is lots of blame to go around here. Matt makes the point that the audience in some ways is part of the problem. Beyond that, politicians are historically uncooperative with journalist even when they ask good questions. Famously one of the first things politicians learn is that you might need to answer a question, but it doesn't have to be the question you were asked. If a politician is just going to answer the question they want instead of the question they were asked, it doesn't behoove a journalist to work hard coming up with thoughtful questions.
If you're a reporter that has a set amount of time to do the interview (e.g. 60 minutes), are you going to spend half of it arguing with the candidate that they didn't answer your question the way you asked it?
It might work in a TV environment where the audience can see the candidate is prevaricating, but it definitely won't work for print where its very hard to demonstrate that to the reader.
So, I agree that this is the vast majority of what happens, but I think that (at least in print, and on TV only if the interviewer is clever) the media source can note that the candidate didn't actually answer without repeatedly trying to re-ask the same question. (I see this in some blogs, where the blogger will quote someone and just literally note that the question didn't get answered. Zvi of Don't Worry About the Vase does this well). Maybe you get bits and pieces of the answer indirectly if your other questions are good.
But also, I have to remind myself that in addition to being politicians, these people are also senior managers. When I was at my first job I had one coworker who everyone senior thought was brilliant. But if I asked him a question I wanted the simple version of an answer to, usually he'd give a non-answer and then launch into a 10 minute story that I thought had no relation to anything. Then about 6 years later I started to figure out what he was actually trying to say, and why, and why he had a hard time communicating it to me as a newbie. To him the object level was just too straightforward and obvious to be worth mentioning, stuff you should just already know, and the meta-meta-level had all the interesting bits. He really was brilliant, but just bad at communicating with people with much less experience than himself.
There's an old joke (I think) that if you are considering promoting someone to Captain and ask them (as a test) how to dig a trench, the correct answer contains no details, it is just for them to say, "Sergeant, dig a trench." The answer for becoming a sergeant is very different. In that vein, the President should know a lot about a lot of things, but most of what they need to know to be effective is 1) how to quickly learn enough about a topic to evaluate sources, 2) how to delegate effectively, and 3) how to communicate at a level the audience will appreciate and understand. I think a lot of times we Slow Boring readers expect wonky details on tap when most people don't want that, and no one person can provide that on every important topic.
Prime Minister's Questions does not require wonky details, but does require the PM to be on top in a general sense of what is going on. Most PMs have quickly found that it's an incredibly effective way of stopping their lower levels hiding things from them, because watching your boss's boss be humiliated on national TV because you didn't want to pass on that you fucked up is a remarkably effective way of making sure that people make sure they report their own fuckups up the chain.
I think it's generally the level that most political interviews should be conducted at (without the ridiculous barracking, of course).
In print I think you just run the lede “Candidate X refuses to give straight answer to Question Y.” I agree that ex post transcript review is very difficult for this. It’s a genuinely hard problem (eg debate moderators should generally not try to make themselves the focus of attention) but it seems like the unwillingness to call bullshit has led us to the current stupid equilibrium in which all we hear are canned responses to the questions the candidates would have preferred to be asked, which at least for me has negative value.
Yes, but deciding whether a canned response is BS is often in the eyes of the beholder, and journalists are not without their biases. Candidates are more likely to give interviews to journalists who don't call them on their BS also.
A long time ago, when Bill Hemmer was hosting the morning show on CNN, then Senator Joe Biden used to be on there a lot, usually talking about Iraq or Afghanistan-related topics. I cannot remember what they were discussing, but there was one interview when Hemmer basically said, the (Bush) White House is saying one thing, and the Democrats are saying something else. How are we supposed to know what the truth is? And Biden spent about 60 seconds smiling broadly and explaining how journalism works to Bill Hemmer (Well, reporters like you are supposed to go out and talk to experts and do your research and figure out which one of us is being dishonest... or something to that effect). To which Hemmer responded, Thanks for your time, Senator, and then quickly moved on to the next segment. I am paraphrasing a 20-year-old memory, and I wish I could find a video or transcript. It was one of the funniest things I had seen on cable news up to that point, and one of the reasons I have always had an affection for Biden, even when I did not necessarily agree with him. I want to say Hemmer had this look on his face, a kind of pained irritation mixed with embarrassment, like he just pooped his pants and was hoping nobody noticed, but my mind may be making that part up. Or maybe Bill Hemmer just looks that way all the time.
I was lucky enough to attend some Olympic events in Paris. Out of curiosity, I read some of the coverage of the events I saw live. Much was unbelievably bad. Lots of crowing about the USWNT’s eighth basketball title and not nearly enough about what an absolute embarrassment the game was and how horrifically we played.
The best part of post game press conferences is guessing how many words its takes media trained coaches/athletes to say "we/they scored more points, we/they didn't score enough. it was a team effort though." Rarely to they say more, but they certainly talk a lot!
Media fragmentation means there are few or no viable places to do intervjews. No network news show has an audience of more than 7 million. No morning news show has an audience of more than 4 million. Most regular news viewers are politically engaged and already have their minds made up. Late night talk show audiences might be lower information and more persuadable, but no late night talk show has much over 2 million viewers.
This means that only a sliver of persuadable voters would see the actual interview. However, if there was a gaffe or a gotcha, it would go viral and would be all over the internet.
I was thinking this too and didn't feel like Matt really addressed it. "An interview with good questions will help convince some people that Harris isn't too radical."
Okay, but what media do those people consume? How do you reach them?
It almost certainly isn't any kind of "media interview" unless you get Mr Beast to interview you.
They are consuming 234 different blogs, tiktoks, etc. A single interview in a single venue seems like spitting into the ocean.
Harris might actually reach some persuadable people by going on Rogan. He supports Kennedy, and so there might be a reservoir of listeners with weak political attachments.
As much as I detest Joe Rogan, I'd actually kind of like to see this -- it would make sense for both him and her. He tends to flail any time someone smarter than him comes on that doesn't agree with him though, and this is probably where you'd see Kamala-the-ultra-prepared-prosecutor that would come out during congressional hearings.
I think Rogan might have moved out of the realm of polite company at this point. There was a point a while back where he was just asking question, but now he’s heading headlong into MAGA land.
I dunno, I think he'd actually give Kamala a relatively soft treatment at this point. He'd respect that she was coming into hostile territory and actually try to substantively engage with her, as much as he's capable of that. He'd at least be willing to hear her out better than any other right-wing podcaster out there.
I don’t think he’s right wing. I guess it could seem so if you’re far to the left. Quite frankly I think he’s a rather normal-ish guy. Which is why so many guys listen. Right-wing is way overused in our discourse.
It’s interesting though. He thinks religion is ridiculous, that drugs should be legalized, that we should have universal healthcare...and yet in polite company he codes right. All I can say is, this nation is undergoing a realignment for the first time in over half a century.
Basically anyone who is potentially willing to ask somewhat uncomfortable questions that might possibly cast doubt on the moral superiority of the smug and self-satisfied American upper middle class can expect to be accused of being right-wing.
Well, picking those three issues makes him sound like Hayek, who I doubt would have had time for anti-vaxxers or Terence Howard's claims to have revolutionized arithmetic and physics, or the parade of full-blown idiots Rogan promotes and platforms constantly.
Apparently, MAGA world is pissed at him now because he said some nice things about RFK Jr. I think Rogan is a little nutty but doesn't fall cleanly onto one side or the other.
It was also the same advice the podbros were all giving Biden several months ago. And it's still INCREDIBLY VALID! Just go out there and talk to anyone who'll give you a mic who isn't some campaign beat reporter [ed: IE whose reporting only reaches political junkies].
I've seen a bunch of people suggest she does Hot Ones, which she'd be great on, but I'm not sure they want her; Sean doesn't want to interview politicians (he prefers interviewing people about their lives and work, not about issues) and knows he'd have to do Trump if he did Harris and has dropped hints that he really doesn't want to do that.
Now, Walz and Vance on Hot Ones: that I can see, as the interviews would be about their (in both cases quite extensive) pre/non politics lives with bits of politics coming in, mostly at the interviewee's choice.
Also, they're both whitebread midwesterners. I bet neither of them cope well with that much pepper.
Lots of people listen to Rogan and don’t share his politics (or don’t have any particular politics to speak of). He mostly talks to comedians and martial artists.
I don’t think it’s possible to find a single venue. The right approach is to do lots of local news. That is the closest we have to a relatively decent sized audience of people who follow the news enough that they’re probably going to vote but maybe aren’t hardcore partisans.
Yeah, but throw in Philly (less for the city itself and more for the suburbs, Reading, and Allentown and for cross-carriage in Harrisburg) and Grand Rapids.
I don't know. One implication of the historical trend noted in the piece is that it's possible to make almost anything viral now, and virality is the only thing that can transcend fragmentation. The trick for Harris will be that "normal and moderate" is not the normal formula for virality, but given the demand, her team might make it work.
I seem to recall that was the Buttigieg strategy in the 2020 primary - do interviews with millions of little specialty podcasts and blogs and magazines.
>Media fragmentation means there are few or no viable places to do intervjews. No network news show has an audience of more than 7 million.<
There are plenty of viable places to do interviews. Go on Sixty Minutes. Go on Meet the Press. The fact that these shows don't attract the kinds of audience share they used to doesn't mean they're not still valuable. That's because the discourse that takes place during the interview will be reported on by other media—and will also generate viral clips—so it's still possible to "make news" and it's likewise still an opportunity for the public to learn about a candidate's thoughts.
They were. The point is that if *this* is what candor even in a private, closed-doors setting gets you, why would you ever agree to speak extemporaneously in a public interview, where the exposure of any remarks to public scrutiny and the painstaking gleaning of the same for viral circulation goes from risk to certainty?
Paraphrasing Archer: Do you *want* rehearsed anodyne vapidity in your interview responses? Because that’s how you get rehearsed anodyne vapidity in your interview responses.
(Or, more realistically, just refusing interviews at all, because (a) fuck that and (b) why bother when it doesn’t pencil out risk/reward-wise).
If you do an interview on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, whatever, it isn't just that the audience will see it, it is that every other news org will write or talk about it.
I'm guessing only a few hundred thousand watched the fiasco of Elon Musk interviewing Trump on X, but my feed is swamped with all the other major news outlets talking about what a fiasco it was, and sharing clips of it.
But on the flip side if things go well, I think that gets a lot of coverage, too
How many times has a politician “gone viral” for saying smart, inoffensive things? Compare that to the incidence of viral moments of a less favorable nature.
The circle is squared by the fact that those interviews will end up posted to YouTube and discussed elsewhere, driving people to the interview over the following days.
I feel like the solution here is less conventional interviews - he's become weirdly alt-right now but the 2020 Bernie/ Joe Rogan interview feels like it was good for him because it gave him to chance to talk to normies for 2 hours straight with an interviewer who was uninformed enough to ask questions that low info voters also have.
It's become a meme but I feel like Kamala going on Hot Ones could have the same effect (plus she loves cooking so its in her wheelhouse). I've also seen people say that once football season starts Walz should do a bunch of hits where he just talks ball on sports podcasts/ ESPN/ etc., which I also think would be great. Lots of questions on bio/ values/ "what's the craziest thing about running for president" and fewer about the minutia of whatever the story of the week is.
Is he not still in favor of completely open borders? It seems like his politics is closest to RFK Jr with Bernie in 2nd. What counts as alt-right nowadays?
I’m really only half-exaggerating when I say that his opinions on trans issues are what code him as “alt right” despite his opinions on literally everything else.
That's fair - I don't think he's alr-right in any specifically defined way. Just that he's vaguely right coded (complains about trans people a lot) but in an alternative way because he's not a down the line Republican and generally is receptive to more out there stuff on e.g. vaccines/ IQ truthers.
I don't hate Joe Rogan like some people hate Joe Rogan. Gotta give it to him, he can ask interesting questions! But on public policy, he's deeply uninformed and has no interest in becoming informed. Unfortunately, he can move votes, so Kamala definitely should go run circles around him.
Yeah. I feel like "hating Joe Rogan" is just an unnecessary political self-own by the Dems. He's hugely popular, go on the show like Bernie and Yglesias did and get your message out. Holding you nose at it (often, ironically, from an uninformed vantage point) just does nothing at all. Low-information podcast viewers aren't going away, Rogan collects many of them all in one place, take advantage of that and stop shooting yourself in the foot, Dems!
I was genuinely curious, but also I feel like the left has lost a lot of support by allowing thoughts on trans or covid to be key definers of who is left or right. Ditto with masculinity being seen as right. Or in Joe's case, defining an RFK guy as Republican because he not clearly a Democrat.
I haven't listened to him in a long while but unless something big has changed he's basically a "moderate" in the sense of having a mishmash of left and right views. There's a lot of people like that, although they don't always turn out to vote.
Yeah reminds me of Matt's story about a Heartland Diner Visit™ where he ran into a couple of Obama-Trump voters that believed both modern MAGA conspiracies (big lie, adrenochrome) and older leftwing conspiracies (CIA killed JFK, Jet fuel can't melt steel beams). For the conspiracy-inclined, it seems like you pick your politics first based on vibes and then adopt the conspiracies second because its a sort of hobby or interest of yours. If Joe Rogan became enamored with some lefty he'd probably start talking about vaccines less and greedflation more without his fundamental politics shifting much.
I heard a Jon Lovett (one of the PSA guys) interview where he talked about how political media has two sort of axes: earnest - cynical and funny - serious, and how left-wing media indexes really heavily on earnest & serious (Maddow or w/e) or cynical & funny (dirtbag left guys who are left wing but rarely actually pull the lever for Dems). Would be good for us if there was someone out there who was earnest & funny (and masculine, too) who could capture the attention of Rogan types and also would tell them that voting for Kamala Harris is cool and based.
"adopt the conspiracies second because its a sort of hobby or interest of yours"
I have lot of friends who truly enjoy conspiracies. They are otherwise very intelligent people, one is a manager at a FANG company and another has a STEM PhD from a leading university. But you can see their eyes light up when they talk the topics, everything from the moon-landing to covid.
I was telling one of them about a conspiracy I had heard about because Garry Kasparov (chess champion) believes it. It's that "the middle ages didn't happen". Right away his eyes light up "oh...could be! Makes sense!". I hadn't even told him a single detail and he was buying into it.
I've recently run into the truly bananas conspiracy theories that 1) Judaism didn't exist until the 1920's and evidence to the contrary is Zionist propaganda and 2) "foreign languages" didn't exist until after WWII, when nations started to develop their own identities and cultures, and prior to that everything was in English. Evidence? The Bible was written in English.
I love the stuff. Don’t believe any of it, it’s just fun to kick around similar to talking about what might have happened if the Red Sox had kept Babe Ruth. Just an exercise. I got ruined by Robert Anton Wilson when I was 19.
I think people receive these clips from Rogan like they’re newscasts. It’s just a couple of people shooting the shit for literal hours. It’s not supposed to be your news diet and the people I know who listen regularly don’t receive it as such. Just outraged people online watching the craziest 2 minute clip that someone could find, like a lot of things.
As in, the hundreds of years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance never happened, or that it wasn't a particularly "dark age". The latter is a respectable academic position, the former is...not.
"Whither Tartaria" on ACX is a great read on a similar conspiracy. I'm also fond of:
- Hillary and Bill were in an open relationship but thought an affair would be more acceptable to the American people
- The Hawaii nuclear text wasn't a false alarm, it was a real nuke that we shot down but we don't want to world to know about our aerial defense systems.
Obviously neither is true but something fun for the brain to chew on.
ETA:
- A time traveller came back to make that guy just miss Trump to avoid the very bad timeline
Oh totally right. I feel like it was easier in the Obama era because he was cool enough that it wasn't cringe to earnestly like him. Didn't work for Hillary or Biden but so far seems like it is for Kamala
The update on RFK Jr. is: it's fine to slaughter bears and leave their carcasses in public parks, as long as you don't protect your children from bird flu.
It feels like it may only have loose cultural connections. If someone were to start dressing like a Brooklyn Hipster, do they become left-wing? It just seems overly politicizing to associate cultural markers with politics, as well as self defeating, because if I'm a Dem I'd prefer that people who order penis pills also want to vote for me.
Or is alt-right purely a cultural marker, like being an emo / goth kid? If it is I think it's probably also being way over-applied. I doubt Joe Rogan would call himself "alt right", but if he were to take on that label he'd probably make it much more popiular.
I feel like the culture war over trans stuff has gone on for several years now and I still am just deeply confused by it. Why do we talk about trans people so much? This goes for both trans activists and the Joe Rogans and Jesse Singals of the world. I am earnestly puzzled why both sides of the culture war talk about this stuff like one out of every three people is trans and we either have to protect them from bigots or protect them from themselves. Sorry if my comments sound crass, but I am earnestly confused by this! Are trans issues just the current front in woke wars? Like when the Allies landed at Normandy so nobody really paid attention to North Africa anymore (justifiably!)?
My interest in that issue - and specifically Jesse Singal’s take on it - has little to do with trans issues as such and much more with how it’s an area in which science has really face-planted. We genuinely do not know much about whether various medical interventions are effective for treating gender dysphoria at a population level, but there’s been a big push to make it appear that we do, and that’s not good! Being in academia, I’m invested in the public feeling that “science” is generally trustworthy, so I find it troubling when bad science is presented as definitive proof, no matter how noble the cause may be.
As a note on Jesse, he has - unfairly, I think - acquired a reputation as someone obsessed with trans issues, but it’s really not the case. He’s done a lot of good work digging into bad trans medicine science, which is good. He has also inadvertently attracted some fans who are just happy because they perceive him as dunking on wokeness/trans ideology/etc. But that’s really not his aim.
The bit that nags at me about this is that I've been reading Ben Goldacre for years, and most medical science is pretty crappy at a population level.
Singal could probably have run a similarly interesting set of columns over many years about dozens of other types of medicine: painkillers (NSAIDs don't actually kill pain for many people, for instance) or various psychatric meds (especially for relatively mild conditions like most depression) or therapy (especially for people in relatively decent mental health), or ... well, almost anything where the primary outcome is "the patient says they feel better".
Did Singal come across the evidence that he did that led him to the trans columns he's written because he was transphobic beforehand and was looking for it? Or because he has transphoblic friends who pointed him at it? Or did he just run into the story by accident? I can certainly see why so many trans people and their allies suspect that it's one of the first two.
Well, it should be noted that his first (so far only, but he is currently writing another) book is about a range of pop psychology interventions that were wildly and briefly claimed to be transformative but for which there is no evidence. And while he was at New York magazine he ran their online science section. He does sometimes discuss more general issues with "patient says they feel better" interventions like regression to the mean, placebo effect and so on. He's also run takedowns of e.g. columns in Scientific American that have nothing to do with trans issues (e.g. a recent completely ridiculous one that argued that people aren't terrified enough by various crises).
I think he's said that his interest in trans issues stems from writing his 2018 New York magazine feature on trans youth (why he did *that* in the first place, I'm not sure - he may have been assigned to it or he may have chosen it), which then caused various firestorms of controversy. Being a journalist, I think he thought to himself "wait, I wrote what I think is a quite even-handed column and I'm being attacked as a despicable transphobe. What's going on here?" and decided to look further into it. And it's made him successful! I wouldn't - and I think he wouldn't, either - deny that pursuing this topic has allowed him to be a really successful independent journalist whereas writing consistently about the limitations of, say, SSRIs would not. And finally, he has been pretty badly harrassed by a certain online subset of trans activists and their putative allies (told to kill himself, accused baselessly of serial harassment, death threats etc.). I don't feel vindictiveness or even really resentment in his writing (the way I do in, say, Matt Taibbi's), but I do think there's a certain desire to show that those people are really deeply mistaken.
So yes, I agree that he focuses on trans issues in part because it's polarized and thus drives readership, but also because I think he believes that that same polarization is what makes the topic important to dig into. I often don't read his comments because there are some frequent commenters who I think are genuinely obsessed by trans issues to the point of malice (as there are a few in this comments section, as well). But I really do not see him doing anything in his writing to validate those people.
It's just always accessible and interesting. Even if it doesn't effect many people directly, it kind of speaks to very fundamental issues in norms and behaviors and how we see ourselves. It tends to overlap with everything a culture cares about, from sexuality to crime to sport to sexism. And the average person (ie Joe Rogan) can easily form an opinion and react to it, whereas he probably has much less to say about how taxes can create deadweight loss or whether plea bargains are overused.
Thanks for the reply! I've asked this before and usually my question is ignored so I really appreciate you providing a good faith response.
Your response makes a lot of sense and perhaps I am viewing it through the wrong lens. Like with any issue, it's probably also a question of salience. I just don't encounter a lot of trans people in any capacity so it's kind of out of sight out of mind for me. I do have a 6 year old in a suburban elementary school though so perhaps that will change!
For me, it's just "I have about ten trans friends and there seems to be a massive amount of people who want to be shitty to them". Happened to acquire one friend through a connection and she kept introducing me to more and more of her friends who are (for obvious reasons) mostly trans.
So every time a politician says something or does something that that will make my friends' lives harder, well that matters to me as well.
This is so out of touch. iI we've learned anything from this social media and partisan age, it's that the loudest voices don't fully represent, and often misrepresent, the groups they come from.
Joe Rogan's viewers aren't "alt-right" in part because that's not even a self-professed thing outside of a tiny core of guys. I must know a dozen people who listen to Joe Rogan. They are mostly guys who listen to podcasts while fixing air conditioners or driving to a worksite 3 hours away. Most of them aren't even Republicans, let alone whatever the heck "alt-right" means.
Guys like Rogan who talk about their fear that eventually "White men will not be allowed to speak" are alt-right. Put as much lipstick on that pig as you want, but the racism, sexism and hateful rhetoric are right on the surface and he is leaning into it as a way to appeal to that audience.
I don't think you have any actual examples of this from his show, but feel free to prove me wrong.
Edit.
More to the point, I can show a lot of examples e.g. 'progressive stack' where it's baked in, explicitly, that white men are not welcome to speak. How do we have a conversation about that without you putting people into the 'explicit racist' category?
There is a huge culture of apologetics around Rogan and his brand of racist, misogynist, "anti-woke" -- and yes -- "X"-right wing political nonsense. You can keep pretending this a "big tent" of "persuadable" voters, but to the extent there are any actual persuadables in there they can be reached in a different way.
OK - fact / source check: how many occasional and / or regular listeners are there? What are their demographics? How many episodes have you listened to? Could you name more than a dozen non-controversial guests? How many people do you know who listen to JRE?
On the first two I don't have the data, but I know listener numbers are in the millions and maybe tens of millions depending on how you count. If you have the data please show it to me.
But on the last 3 I could give answers that would support my having an informed an educated opinion. I'm not "pretending" something. I've also experienced talking to liberals who've never listened to the show but have somehow indirectly formed an uneducated opinion on the matter.
Regular listeners over 11M, with spikes above 50M for Musk, for example. The audience is 88% male and 50% outside the US. WiredClip.com has stats. I have tried to listen to about 12 podcasts / YouTubes over the years with guests or topics that seemed interesting, including comedians I like and some authors (Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, etc. I have read). Rogan does not seem to know what to do with any topic deeper than MMA or stand-up comedy. He strikes me as a loutish ignoramus, which we know from Trump is not a bar to popularity. The tell is that he has become more popular as he has leaned into that demographic.
This is the first time I've heard "alt-right" is specifically limited to views on racism. I've understood it for years to mean any form of modern American conservativism that isn't based on evangelical Christianity or classic liberalism.
Nah Richard Spencer either coined the phrase himself or wrote it into a speech that this other guy gave in the mid 00s. It has a specific meaning that is a repudiation of what they saw as a softening and liberalizing of hard Right white supremacist values and goals.
It starts to sound like a Carlin joke after a while... It is a very large bag ofq mixed nuts, but it's fine if they want to preserve all their particular "identities" like that.
The was a great profile of Walz the coach in The Athletic yesterday. They talked to a bunch of his former players and coaches and he came out looking pretty good imo.
I can't decide whether Trump would be so unperturbed even the production crew start wondering if they forgot to sauce his wings... or whether he would make DJ Khaled look like a graceful loser.
Either way, I have this feeling that both of those episodes would turn out to be flying too close to the sun for all parties involved, and I don't want to sacrifice Hot Ones for that.
'If the media’s countermove is just to bully politicians with the threat of negative coverage, all that happens is politicians’ supporters will become more receptive to freezing out the media."
This has been the NYT's reaction to the Biden White House freezing them out. They engaged in the whole "Biden Old" with glee and speculation of a malign bully.
Except their speculation turned out to be well-founded as Biden was in fact avoiding interviews and public appearances due to his old age. Whether it was because his old age was leading to issues with mental acuity or energy or he was fine but the campaign was worried that any gaffes made would feed into such a narrative is a fair question.
I'm sure no one here had any qualms about the media questioning Trump's mental fitness when he was avoiding interviews and press conferences during his presidency and I'm sure many here, at least pre-Biden, would have wished the media asked more questions about Reagan's mental state during his presidency.
When there is no new information and all the journalists run a podcast "wish casting" their replacement for Biden that isn't Harris (one put out freaking Joe Manchin who left the party), it is a deeply unserious and deluded effort.
Harris is trying to wait out the "why did you flip?" questions until they're old news. Presidential campaigns (unlike down-ballot campaigns) have huge coms teams that can factually answer a question, like "does she still support a ban on fracking?" Once that's answered by a spokesperson, the pressure on the embed (traveling reporter, usually in their 20s and getting seasoned) to ask about it decreases; it's not a scoop anymore.
The recent model for this was actually Nikki Haley. She never got close enough to the nomination to matter, but for a candidate polling in single digits most of the primary, she was incredibly cautious and would wait out news cycles. Her embeds went months without getting to ask questions; they'd have to watch Fox News that afternoon or evening bc Haley did most of her media on there. The campaign ended without Haley 1) taking a position on SC's abortion law or 2) explaining any details of a "middle class tax cut" she promised to pass.
I do worry that this is the new normal. One way it's bad for the campaigns: If the beat reporters are getting nothing from the candidates, they need to find News in the interviews the candidates do with friendly media. You get more sensational coverage, not less! Bob Novak's dictum still applies: "You're either a source or you're a target." A candidate who goes back and forth with reporters can make news about something he/she wants to inject into the discourse, while a candidate who hides from the press makes his/her old Facebook posts or Twitter follows etc much more interesting/scandalous.
I'd guess this is a feature of the Trump era. In last month's British election Labour had a manifesto 130 pages long, parties would attack each other for lack of details in their plans, and top think tanks' analysis of the manifestos would get coverage.
So long as Trump is doing his 'alternative facts' shtick, that's not going to happen in America. But conceivably in a Haley vs Harris 2028 match-up it could.
My impression from the outside is that conventional wisdom was that Labour ran an extremely cautious campaign, with a so-called "Ming vase strategy" focused on just trying to not mess up the huge lead it had throughout
From the point of view of a consumer of news, this dynamic often comes across as a game journalists play, where they try to get a candidate to say something that deviates from what they or their surrogates have said in the past. The bigger the difference, the more points they score as the candidate gets asked to explain the difference over and over and over. It's a fine game insofar as it tests important qualities in a political candidate, but campaign promises stopped mattering when Congress stopped passing laws and the advent of screenshots has given journalists eidetic memories.
Trump refused to play along, by taking every possible side of every position and generally being incoherent and shamelessly dishonest. That creates a real asymmetry for anyone running against him, for whom there is still big downside risk to mixing it up with a gaggle of reporters. Caution seems warranted from both Haley and Harris in that respect—especially the latter, so long as her polls keep improving. I mean, why take the risk?
>>By the same token, I always wish reporters who got the chance to do these big-time interviews would take the chance to ask things they are genuinely curious about or that reflect concerns they sincerely believe the public has.
This, IMO, is the best thing Ezra Klein still has going for him, because he actually bothers to just ask real questions.
People in many industries face the challenge of serving all customers equally instead of prioritising the most opinionated ones, or indeed getting distracted by status competitions with industry peers.
Journalists seem have it extra hard because many of them spend their lives on social media marinating in the views of their most opinionated customers and their peers. That's how you end up wasting a rare opportunity to ask the candidate a question on asking about why you don't get to ask more questions.
Maybe media orgs should do more focus groups and polling to better inform their journalists about what their readers want to know about.
When doing research about this, I read an article about how the progressive era politicians were pretty united in their belief that they needed to take their fight to the public. Hence, more interviews.
Because that was the only way to get your message out to lots of people. In 2024, you can just go direct to the consumer, as other companies in other industries have found out.
Is that true? I would have thought broadcast media at least was maximally consolidated in the early TV era, maybe 1930’s to 1960’s. (I thought there were many local/regional radio stations in the early 20th century) But I could be wrong! Do you have a specific source in mind?
This doesn't feel particularized to politics. Celebrities, sports stars, actors… Interviews are simply an opportunity to misspeak and have some kind of career endangering gaffe. With the rise of social media and alternative channels to reach their audience and control the message and their public persona, "regular" media is an unappetizing alternative.
I broadly agree but I think there's probably a threshold of media competence + volume above which this ceases to hold (e.g., Pete Buttigieg), it just turns out to be a very high bar to clear.
And Harris has gotten killed for years about fake gaffes and sounding "awkward" so I understand why she is gun shy but I think she has gotten a lot better and shouldn't be afraid
It's underrated how much of the negative net political rating bias is just a function of Trump. The Trump Era has gone on so long it's become more or less completely normalized. Remember the small hands thing
But given that he's such an obvious corrupt dirtball his only play has always been to trash everyone else in very personal and over the top ways. Michelle Obama aside, Democrats have long focused on Trump's unfitness for office by saying many negative things about him.
And I think there's psychological motivation for anyone thinking of voting for Trump to rate the opponent negatively. With McCain or Romney or Bush II (pre-Katrina it was plausible to say I like Kerry or Obama alright, but I like this guy better. With Trump the justification is more plausible that the other is actually worse.
I wonder if there’s a psychological defense mechanism at play: if you hate Trump, but you’re going to vote for him for normal Republican reasons, you must hate his opponent more
It's remarkable that we don't know Kamala's positions. That is what I want. This isn't about the press.
If I vote for Kamala, I simply don't know what I'm getting.
I assume we're not canceling private health care insurance, seizing guns via executive order, or opening the borders, or doing other ridiculous things she has promoted over the years.
But I'm at the edge of my seat to see how Kamala reconciles her past crazy positions with what voters currently want.
Does she say she evolved?
Does she say "I've learned some things?"
Does she say "I tried my best to give the primary voters in 2019 what they wanted, and now realize that was a mistake?"
This last explanation sounds crazy, but it's likely 100% true and 100% believable.
We're at peak Kamala now because she's been avoiding answering the tough questions, but that time has passed.
If you really have zero idea how Kamala Harris is going to govern on significant substantive issues I’d say you probably haven’t paid much attention. She’s a former Senator and the Vice President of the United States, not a former reality television host - she has a track record of the kinds of policies she supports when in office. Maybe the political press can report on the substantive impacts of these votes and policies (good and bad) rather than trying to ask questions about whatever fever dream scandal is gripping the news today.
As a public policy nerd, I greatly appreciated reading Elizabeth Warren’s detailed and lengthy plans on various issues, some of which I agreed with and others less so. But in reality every single one of these plans was completely DOA even if she got elected! You genuinely get a better sense of what a candidate is going to do in office from the major themes they campaign on than these types of white papers.
Sure, but I think David's point is that one's sense doesn't cut it here. He wants her to go unequivocally on the record about something she actually cares about, poll numbers be damned. Or maybe it's all a poll number optimization machine all the way down (right now we have to assume it is), which is fine in its own way and certainly preferable to Trump, but not exactly inspiring.
If Kamala did, indeed, have any "I'm doing it because it's right, not because it's popular" views, the only reasons you could possibly want her to express them now are:
1) you want Kamala to lose, so you want her to say something unpopular
2) you want to know what the unpopular thing is so you can decide to vote against her if you don't like it
I forget who said it, but you win elections to spend political capital to achieve goals, not the other way around. If there is any unpopular-but-correct thing that she is going to lay down on a train track for, her every incentive is to keep that to herself until she's won the election, and expecting/demanding her to do otherwise is irrational if you want her to win and disingenuous otherwise.
And what did you actually learn from that? Was there any difference about what Biden actually did compared to what one of the other candidates would have done?
This is only a meaningful question in a primary--its pretty clear what her opponent will do, and just *not doing that* is an absolute shit ton of information. Whether she pursues Standard Issue Party Priority 1(a) or 1(b) doesn't really matter at this point.
I want to know if she has changed her mind from the last time she ran for President. She took some wacky stances during 2019 and 2020 and I'd like to know if she still wants to do some of the things she advocated for during that primary.
Most Dems were trying to appease the Sandersistas in 2019. We both know that caucus has atrophied and holds little sway over public discourse or opinion in places other than Queens.
Harris needs to do a bit of hippy punching and she has been doing that with the Omnicauser protestors.
Isn't that what she's trying to do with the quiet "sources close to Harris say she doesn't want to ban fracking anymore" kind of stuff? Signal to those in the know that she's disavowing those positions without picking a big fight with activists?
I'm not promoting Trump, but I wonder if a large part of his appeal - even to those who don't like him - is that he doesn't have to "signal to those in the know" any of his true positions. He just says his "true positions", whatever they are and no matter how crazy they are, and lets those in the know on his side squirm about them or accept them or deal with them.
- he contradicts himself and flip flops constantly, and is a serial liar (in easily verifiable ways, not in "oh I was misquoted" ways or in "vaguely speaks a lot without saying anything" ways that are typical of politicians), such that you never actually know what positions are "true" at all
- Some of the very unpopular opinions he has are ones that he stridently avoids saying out loud and discussing.
- Of course, to that last point, his judgment is very unsound, so he says a lot of stuff that he thinks is popular because his fans at his rallies eat it up, but is actually very unpopular (e.g. saying things like "you won't need to vote again")
I actually don't know (not sure he has one at this point: the repeal-Obamacare thing seems to have faded away), but this doesn't change my point that whatever true positions he claims to have, he doesn't shy away from shouting them.
As others have said, this is not true. On abortion, on taxes on the rich, on social spending, he constantly says what he thinks the audience wants to hear. He even stopped talking up the vaccines because people were booing.
But I think you (and others) are missing the point of what I'm saying. My point is not that he doesn't pander (and I'm not sure that those examples you give are actually examples of pandering/saying something he doesn't believe or intend). My point is that he doesn't engage in signalling what his true intentions are apart from what he says.
That sort of signalling behavior does seem to be characteristic of a lot of politicians, and I think it's pretty broadly unappealing.
It genuinely isn’t clear to me if Harris would govern significantly to the left of Biden, very similar to Biden, or a little to the right of Biden. You can argue for each of these based on her record. Do you feel like you know which it would be?
Why not listen to what she's saying and determine from that? She's talking every day about what she wants to do in office. It sounds to me like the points of emphasis for the most part are basically the same as Biden but a few main breaks:
-a slightly more adversarial tone toward Netanyahu;
-more of an emphasis on the 'care economy' portions of the dead BBB plan (obv whether these are achievable will depend on Congress).
I think Slow Boring readers will generally all agree that the care economy/childcare plans need a lot of wonkish work to be ready to go as good policy. But as a president, not a legislator, it's helpful to know that will be a point of emphasis.
Otherwise the key themes have been pretty much aligned with Biden - social security/medicare, letting the trump tax cuts on top earners expire, protecting abortion rights. Plenty of room to debate about these things, but pretty obvious priorities!
It’s true — I find campaign speeches pretty insufferable, and don’t generally listen to them. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask a presidential candidate to write down their proposed policies and priorities on their website.
I’m not sure - I think that’s appropriate for a congressperson who can afford to ignore the big issues of the day and work on introducing a specialized bill on a niche topic. But the president has to deal with things as they come up and as Congress writes them. You don’t get much of a better sense than just knowing what party they are from.
Yeah at this point the delta between candidates is so yuge that individual policy questions barely matter, there is nothing Kamala could say to Jay Caspian Kang that would convince him to vote for Trump instead. The vibes of “does she talk more about global warming or health insurance” matters much more to the act of governing (where at best you can put your finger on which of the Groups agendas get prioritized). That said a good journalist could definitely extract a candidates vibes with the right sort of questions, and this is the sort of thing old school Rogan got right (and this would be more useful to the rest of us than gotcha questions).
"Yeah at this point the delta between candidates is so yuge that individual policy questions barely matter"
Yes, pretty much the only "policies" Harris needs to say she holds at this point are: (1) She is not Donald Trump and (2) She is within a standard deviation of the median national Democratic politician in DW Nominate scoring. With how the U.S. electoral system is set up, basically nothing else is relevant.
Remember when a big difference between Clinton and Obama was that Clinton was going to put an individual mandate into her healthcare plan and Obama wasn’t? That’s a genuine substantive policy disagreement. Obama got elected with a super majority and could have whatever healthcare plan he wanted. And he still reversed himself and added the mandate! The idea that we need to hear them speak on every issue so we can know what they will do is wrong not just because their options are limited, but because all kinds of things could happen to change their stances.
>If I vote for Kamala, I simply don't know what I'm getting.<
You know perfectly well you're getting a mainstream Democrat. If you don't know what that means by now, you're remarkably poorly informed by the standards of SB's readership.
If you don't like her just say so—likely eighty million or so voters this autumn will join you in that sentiment. But don't make up fake reasons.
“The 2000 primary showed me I was out of touch, so I tried to fix that. I have spent four years as Vice President listening to the American people and I’ve learned a lot.”
"Ever since I was in my thirties and Bill Bradley lost that 2000 Democratic primary to Al Gore, I knew that I needed to learn more about what the American people are looking for."
> It's remarkable that we don't know Kamala's positions.
But then it seems you actually do know Kamala's positions you're just curious how she'd react to the gotcha flip flopping accusation. I'm curious how she'd answer the question but I'm fairly certain it wouldn't be that interesting. This is orthogonal to the question of the issues. Pretty sure the average slow boring commenter could tell you exactly what her issue positions, they're broadly the positions of the center of the Democratic party.
Yeah, this is my feeling as well. I mean I guess if she said “yep, still in favor of banning fracking and giving health care to unauthorized immigrants” then that would be a pretty reliable signal. But otherwise, why wouldn’t you wonder if maybe her repudiation of her 2024 positions is false?
Does it actually matter? If you vote for Harris, you won’t see her pass reparations, mandate DEI in every classroom, or give illegal immigrants social security. You will see her try to pass abortion rights, appoint liberal- and left-leaning judges, and not demolish the regulatory state. The vast majority of the fact of how left-leaning her administration ends up being depends on factors external to how she presents during the campaign - consider than Biden was by far the most moderate major candidate in the 2020 primary!
It seems like this desire to dig into her psyche and understand how she chooses to present her story comes from a place of political journalism as amusement, rather than a desire to predict likely outcomes of a Harris administration.
If I was on Harris’s team I would do nothing to upset the zeitgeist of what is going on unless I really had to. The calculus for politicians is as simple as considering what is to gain from not necessarily friendly media putting pols to the test? Seems like there’s a higher risk of ruin versus a more limited upside.
Figure can go with the poker terminology since Nate Silver is in the news with his book.
I found this to be a strange piece that is deeply incurious and assumes bad faith from your opponents. I don’t think it is unreasonable at all for people (supporters, undecided or opponents) to want to see the likely President of the United States speak extemporaneously, all the more so given that the party & campaign intentionally misled people about the viability of their prior candidate specifically via the mechanism of having him do minimal extemporaneous speaking.
I even agree with some of the points you make here, but honestly the thesis of this piece is so strange. Go have your candidate speak extemporaneously it’s genuinely not that hard. If you hate the press corps go on some Fox equivalent like Joy Reid. Or do a podcast! Running the Biden 2024 plan but with a younger person is just going to lead to these calls getting louder and louder and having the next major appearance become way more high stakes than it needs to be.
The assumption of bad faith from Matt's "opponents" is completely reasonable though. Harris could give a sharp-as-a-tack interview and it wouldn't change the position of any of the people criticizing her for not doing interviews, so why bother?
Isn’t the point of the piece that she should do this? I think the criticism is of some people having disingenuous reasons for wanting it, which wouldn’t be so bad except it creates bad incentives for whoever’s doing the interview.
For the Harris campaign specifically, why would they grant substantive interviews prior to the biggest moment of Harris's candidacy, her speech at the DNC? My guess is you'll see better press access after she's had an uninterrupted opportunity to make her case at the convention.
You’re right but one counter argument is that the time to build a relationship is now when you don’t need much and not later when you have stepped into the sticky stuff.
Maybe, but the half-life of anything in the news cycle seems quite short. In early July, I was constantly hearing how Democrats didn't have time to pivot from Biden. How we were wasting time, and everything was urgent. Those three and a half weeks were incredibly long. I doomscrolled a lot.
Then Harris came along, people fell in line, and the pivot happened really fast. Harris should do some more substantive media over time, but she has time. Trump is doing adversarial stuff, but that's because he's behind and he needs to switch it up.
"As we recall from the 2020 and 2016 cycles, a primary is a good opportunity for the left to ask Democratic Party politicians to make electorally toxic public commitments that are then not enacted into law, precisely because they are so unpopular"
Reminds me of the West Wing episode where all the candidates in Iowa are forced to take a position for Ethanol/Corn subsidies that a) they all hate and b) are pretty unpopular outside of Iowa
That's kind of the reverse, in that politicians take a position popular with the public (to the very limited extent that the public care outside of the corn belt) but unpopular with wonks
It really does seem like she didn't expect Biden to drop out and hand things over to her until maybe right before it happened. She definitely hadn't set up any sort of shadow campaign in waiting. So now she has to come up with something that's distinctively her's, but can't do a complete 'unburdening of what came before' since Biden is still the president and she's still his VP. It's a delicate maneuver and takes some time to get right.
It's summer, typically the slow season for news. Sure us junkies are still engaged, but she doesn't need to reach us. The Olympics just concluded as well, and why would she want to compete for eyeballs with Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky?
The vibes are still good. Why not ride them a bit longer?
As a sports fan I can tell you: don't underestimate the role of journalistic laziness here. After every sports event, athletes (who are often required by leagues and contracts to sit for questions) are asked totally inane questions by reporters who often barely watched the game and gave no thought to what they might ask:
"Can you describe the emotion of this win?"
"Talk about that game winning hit."
I view process questions of politicians the same way. The easiest way to look like you are holding a politician's feet to the fire is to ask about their poll standing or something similar. Actually knowing what to ask on substantive issues requires the journalist do real work and research and preparation. They don't want to do that!
Yeah, I honestly feel like I read the same issue play out in sports obviously with much lower stakes. Reporters who cry all the time when players don’t do press conferences where they are asked incredibly dumb questions that don’t illuminate anything, or when coaches treat the questions/press conferences with contempt.
Meanwhile the actual interesting sports journalism I read either cuts out the dumb “tell me about that hit” questions and just tries to do tactical analysis of the game, or involves long form profiles of athletes / coaches where they actually talk about their lives and journeys rather than answering dumb beat reporter questions.
In both cases the writer has 90% decided the story they want to write before asking the question. In gamer stories they probably have it half written before the end of the game. So you ,"Talk about how big So and So was for you in this game, so that I have a quote for the second paragraph," type of "questions."
This is why I'm less sympathetic to all the journalist layoff stories. A lot of these jobs had a point in a prior world but they've just outlived all usefulness and even the people doing them are just going through the motions. In the future the story that could be half written before the game is over just won't be written and nothing of value will be lost.
Exceptional writing will survive. There are some good sportswriters on substack
Right but the thing is that is actually a lousy way to report.
You have a point but to be fair deadlines often make it necessary. Having a gamer story only half done at the end of the game is not remotely acceptable, usually. It should be more like 90%. Source: Former night sports editor at a metro daily (me).
Deadlines are a LOT less of an issue now. Newspapers no longer go to press at 1am or something.
100% correct.
Right.
And the same way, the best journalism about politicians usually comes from people far from the television camera or the White House press room. It was no accident at all that Watergate was broken by two guys in the newsroom working the phones.
We need more Zach Lowes. His NBA column was a must-read until he got locked behind the ESPN paywall.
Imagine sports journalism that actually teaches us the intricacies of basketball, beyond the tired bloviating about Jordan's legacy and the Mamba Mentality.
We have room for Shaq to play his dumb comedic role, but less Stephen A's please!
Kevin O'Connor is very good.
I personally find him pretty annoying. To me, it’s almost as if he regurgitates the average of all podcast takes but smugly.
What do you like about KOC? I ask because I sense I’m in the minority here (within the extreme minority of people to who this matters)
There's a reason that Stephan A is getting paid WAY more than Zach Lowe :(
This is actually at the heart of why Bill Belicheck was so notorious in his after the game press conferences. I mean it led to quite possibly his most famous quote (repeating “we’re on to Cincinnati” over and over again). But mostly it led to mumbling terse responses that illuminated nothing.
And it apparently all stemmed from early in his career as defensive coordinator getting a “gotcha” question and it being days of content for WFAN. Because reality is even when he was coach, there were places he actually gave some genuinely fascinating insights. And it was when he was asked actual pertinent questions like “tell us the importance of a long snapper” and then him riffing for like 15 minutes with some pretty interesting insights.
Agree. The current crop of political journalists, as a class, is not that impressive, so as the article says, it's not that surprising politicians don't pay them more attention now that they're not the only game in town anymore.
What's interesting is that Trump seems pretty much on their level, in terms of focusing on process questions.
In his Trump's recent press conference, he spent much of his time on polling and process questions and talking about the campaign in meta terms, like he was reviewing the ratings and market performance of the latest season of The Apprentice so far.
Overall, it gave the impression Trump's mental model for his campaign is he's producing another reality TV show and just trying to win the ratings this season; the premise and plotline for next season hasn't even been written yet so that's a world away.
If you care about politics, Matt’s job is much more fun than being in the white house press corps.
The white house press corps is just inane— who wants to be judged by a 30 word question— and landing the palace intrigue stories you sometimes see in the Times and the WaPo means kissing up to sources and calculating your every move.
As an NBA fan, I never, ever, want to see another on court interview. Neither does any player. Neither does any fan.
There are a few coaches that are fun to watch, such as Popovich, Spoelstra, or Mica Norah, but mostly because they treat the exercise with a funny sort of contempt.
The funny thing is... the media LOVES them for it. Popovich holds the press in open contempt and they write about him glowingly for this very behavior.
Belichick is like this too. They actually respond very well to real questions.
Unlike Belichick, though, Pop is actually kind IRL to reporters.
Belichick going 10 minutes off a question about long snappers is legendary now: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jrvELlakyOk
This gets back to my take that journalism degrees (especially journalism graduate degrees) shouldn't exist, and that aspiring journalists should get a degree in something else to be a kind of subject matter expert.
An undergraduate degree (of a serious student at a serious institution) is a passable bullshit detector and not much more. A BS in economics does not prove you can conduct credible economic research, but it does make you harder to hoodwink.
Don’t forget the sports tautologies. Winning is all about “performing under pressure” and excelling “at the critical time.” It’s also essential to “want it more” and to “be clutch.”
This is as insightful as saying presidential candidates need to get more electoral votes.
You forgot the bit where players praise God, who absolutely takes sides in sporting events, for helping the team/player to victory.
I would love to hear a player who praises God for giving them victory asked "Do you know why God disfavoured your opponent today?"
Interesting question: do Hindu professional athletes thank particular Hindu deities for helping them win and, if so, which deities are considered particular patrons of sporting activities?
Cease your heresy. Winning is evidence of divine favor. I am nothing without him.
Sports interviews are the worst. I’ve never seen a good one, their only function is to let the audience vibe with the champion.
I know this is probably naive of me but where you stand on a particular issue really shouldn't be a difficult question at all if you have a coherent set of beliefs.
Like, politicians should be excited to explain why they hold their positions because that could be persuasive to others.
That requires journalists to know something about issues. :)
Honestly I think the real reason politicians don't want to explain where they stand on a particular issue because "I'm taking this position to serve this interest group or to shore up this coalition" is a common reason that doesn't look good when you're honest about it.
True, but I actually think in many cases you could give some version of "My job is to serve the American people's interests. On this issue it's clear that overall the American people want X, and I believe that's reason enough." At least, I think that works as long as you don't do it too often and only on issues that aren't so divisive that you can't imagine someone just going along with an opposing view.
"Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.)"
Thinking about Marshawn Lynch right now
I know for a fact that in 50 years I'll be confusing the nursing home staff at dinner with, "I'm just here so I won't get fined."
I used this line last night during my fantasy football preseason league meeting. An all time classic!
Don’t feel bad, they’ll be even more confused by me doing “I’m a man! I’m 90!” I just constantly update the age for that sports chestnut.
I have no great love for modern journalism, but we should also recognize that there is lots of blame to go around here. Matt makes the point that the audience in some ways is part of the problem. Beyond that, politicians are historically uncooperative with journalist even when they ask good questions. Famously one of the first things politicians learn is that you might need to answer a question, but it doesn't have to be the question you were asked. If a politician is just going to answer the question they want instead of the question they were asked, it doesn't behoove a journalist to work hard coming up with thoughtful questions.
To be fair, *that’s* kind of on journalists and moderators not characterizing such answers as nonresponsive / refusal to answer.
Yes, but also no...
If you're a reporter that has a set amount of time to do the interview (e.g. 60 minutes), are you going to spend half of it arguing with the candidate that they didn't answer your question the way you asked it?
It might work in a TV environment where the audience can see the candidate is prevaricating, but it definitely won't work for print where its very hard to demonstrate that to the reader.
So, I agree that this is the vast majority of what happens, but I think that (at least in print, and on TV only if the interviewer is clever) the media source can note that the candidate didn't actually answer without repeatedly trying to re-ask the same question. (I see this in some blogs, where the blogger will quote someone and just literally note that the question didn't get answered. Zvi of Don't Worry About the Vase does this well). Maybe you get bits and pieces of the answer indirectly if your other questions are good.
But also, I have to remind myself that in addition to being politicians, these people are also senior managers. When I was at my first job I had one coworker who everyone senior thought was brilliant. But if I asked him a question I wanted the simple version of an answer to, usually he'd give a non-answer and then launch into a 10 minute story that I thought had no relation to anything. Then about 6 years later I started to figure out what he was actually trying to say, and why, and why he had a hard time communicating it to me as a newbie. To him the object level was just too straightforward and obvious to be worth mentioning, stuff you should just already know, and the meta-meta-level had all the interesting bits. He really was brilliant, but just bad at communicating with people with much less experience than himself.
There's an old joke (I think) that if you are considering promoting someone to Captain and ask them (as a test) how to dig a trench, the correct answer contains no details, it is just for them to say, "Sergeant, dig a trench." The answer for becoming a sergeant is very different. In that vein, the President should know a lot about a lot of things, but most of what they need to know to be effective is 1) how to quickly learn enough about a topic to evaluate sources, 2) how to delegate effectively, and 3) how to communicate at a level the audience will appreciate and understand. I think a lot of times we Slow Boring readers expect wonky details on tap when most people don't want that, and no one person can provide that on every important topic.
Prime Minister's Questions does not require wonky details, but does require the PM to be on top in a general sense of what is going on. Most PMs have quickly found that it's an incredibly effective way of stopping their lower levels hiding things from them, because watching your boss's boss be humiliated on national TV because you didn't want to pass on that you fucked up is a remarkably effective way of making sure that people make sure they report their own fuckups up the chain.
I think it's generally the level that most political interviews should be conducted at (without the ridiculous barracking, of course).
Yes, this is a great example of exactly the kind of thing I had in mind.
In print I think you just run the lede “Candidate X refuses to give straight answer to Question Y.” I agree that ex post transcript review is very difficult for this. It’s a genuinely hard problem (eg debate moderators should generally not try to make themselves the focus of attention) but it seems like the unwillingness to call bullshit has led us to the current stupid equilibrium in which all we hear are canned responses to the questions the candidates would have preferred to be asked, which at least for me has negative value.
Yes, but deciding whether a canned response is BS is often in the eyes of the beholder, and journalists are not without their biases. Candidates are more likely to give interviews to journalists who don't call them on their BS also.
So many journalists are defined solely by their absence of subject knowledge.
Hey, they're also defined by their lack of curiosity about it!
>Actually knowing what to ask on substantive issues requires the journalist do real work<
It barely requires even that. "President Trump, are you cheering on Ukraine's offensive, or do you hope Russia defeats it?"
A long time ago, when Bill Hemmer was hosting the morning show on CNN, then Senator Joe Biden used to be on there a lot, usually talking about Iraq or Afghanistan-related topics. I cannot remember what they were discussing, but there was one interview when Hemmer basically said, the (Bush) White House is saying one thing, and the Democrats are saying something else. How are we supposed to know what the truth is? And Biden spent about 60 seconds smiling broadly and explaining how journalism works to Bill Hemmer (Well, reporters like you are supposed to go out and talk to experts and do your research and figure out which one of us is being dishonest... or something to that effect). To which Hemmer responded, Thanks for your time, Senator, and then quickly moved on to the next segment. I am paraphrasing a 20-year-old memory, and I wish I could find a video or transcript. It was one of the funniest things I had seen on cable news up to that point, and one of the reasons I have always had an affection for Biden, even when I did not necessarily agree with him. I want to say Hemmer had this look on his face, a kind of pained irritation mixed with embarrassment, like he just pooped his pants and was hoping nobody noticed, but my mind may be making that part up. Or maybe Bill Hemmer just looks that way all the time.
Old Joe back in similar form yesterday: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2024/08/15/remarks-by-president-biden-before-marine-one-departure-52/
Q Do you have any regrets?
THE PRESIDENT: Talking to you guys.
I was lucky enough to attend some Olympic events in Paris. Out of curiosity, I read some of the coverage of the events I saw live. Much was unbelievably bad. Lots of crowing about the USWNT’s eighth basketball title and not nearly enough about what an absolute embarrassment the game was and how horrifically we played.
The best part of post game press conferences is guessing how many words its takes media trained coaches/athletes to say "we/they scored more points, we/they didn't score enough. it was a team effort though." Rarely to they say more, but they certainly talk a lot!
Podcasts have opened information in sports up by a lot. The quality can be much higher and it’s more interesting.
Media fragmentation means there are few or no viable places to do intervjews. No network news show has an audience of more than 7 million. No morning news show has an audience of more than 4 million. Most regular news viewers are politically engaged and already have their minds made up. Late night talk show audiences might be lower information and more persuadable, but no late night talk show has much over 2 million viewers.
This means that only a sliver of persuadable voters would see the actual interview. However, if there was a gaffe or a gotcha, it would go viral and would be all over the internet.
I was thinking this too and didn't feel like Matt really addressed it. "An interview with good questions will help convince some people that Harris isn't too radical."
Okay, but what media do those people consume? How do you reach them?
It almost certainly isn't any kind of "media interview" unless you get Mr Beast to interview you.
They are consuming 234 different blogs, tiktoks, etc. A single interview in a single venue seems like spitting into the ocean.
Harris might actually reach some persuadable people by going on Rogan. He supports Kennedy, and so there might be a reservoir of listeners with weak political attachments.
As much as I detest Joe Rogan, I'd actually kind of like to see this -- it would make sense for both him and her. He tends to flail any time someone smarter than him comes on that doesn't agree with him though, and this is probably where you'd see Kamala-the-ultra-prepared-prosecutor that would come out during congressional hearings.
I think Rogan might have moved out of the realm of polite company at this point. There was a point a while back where he was just asking question, but now he’s heading headlong into MAGA land.
Gender polarization in this election is going to be huge and engaging in non-traditional media outlets like Rogan would help pick up cut into that!
I dunno, I think he'd actually give Kamala a relatively soft treatment at this point. He'd respect that she was coming into hostile territory and actually try to substantively engage with her, as much as he's capable of that. He'd at least be willing to hear her out better than any other right-wing podcaster out there.
Yeah, Rogan isn't a very smart guy but he's not an asshole. He'd likely have a very courteous conversation with Harris.
I don’t think he’s right wing. I guess it could seem so if you’re far to the left. Quite frankly I think he’s a rather normal-ish guy. Which is why so many guys listen. Right-wing is way overused in our discourse.
It’s interesting though. He thinks religion is ridiculous, that drugs should be legalized, that we should have universal healthcare...and yet in polite company he codes right. All I can say is, this nation is undergoing a realignment for the first time in over half a century.
Basically anyone who is potentially willing to ask somewhat uncomfortable questions that might possibly cast doubt on the moral superiority of the smug and self-satisfied American upper middle class can expect to be accused of being right-wing.
Well, picking those three issues makes him sound like Hayek, who I doubt would have had time for anti-vaxxers or Terence Howard's claims to have revolutionized arithmetic and physics, or the parade of full-blown idiots Rogan promotes and platforms constantly.
Maybe he “codes right” the way I do
Throw in the fact he's freaked out about immigration and anti-vax, and he sounds like a center-right European voter.
Couldn't be anymore hostile than Trump sitting down with the black journalists organization. But he did it
Yes, but not for reasons of wanting to answer questions or engage with them.
Apparently, MAGA world is pissed at him now because he said some nice things about RFK Jr. I think Rogan is a little nutty but doesn't fall cleanly onto one side or the other.
Don’t we all have friends that are a little nutty? If you don’t you should.
That was my impression of him about four years ago, but my impression moderated in between. Is he going back?
That was going to be my response.
It was also the same advice the podbros were all giving Biden several months ago. And it's still INCREDIBLY VALID! Just go out there and talk to anyone who'll give you a mic who isn't some campaign beat reporter [ed: IE whose reporting only reaches political junkies].
I've seen a bunch of people suggest she does Hot Ones, which she'd be great on, but I'm not sure they want her; Sean doesn't want to interview politicians (he prefers interviewing people about their lives and work, not about issues) and knows he'd have to do Trump if he did Harris and has dropped hints that he really doesn't want to do that.
Now, Walz and Vance on Hot Ones: that I can see, as the interviews would be about their (in both cases quite extensive) pre/non politics lives with bits of politics coming in, mostly at the interviewee's choice.
Also, they're both whitebread midwesterners. I bet neither of them cope well with that much pepper.
Lots of people listen to Rogan and don’t share his politics (or don’t have any particular politics to speak of). He mostly talks to comedians and martial artists.
I prefer when he has scientists on. But I’m always down for a little bear talk. Shane Gillis doing Trump impressions is great too.
I don’t think it’s possible to find a single venue. The right approach is to do lots of local news. That is the closest we have to a relatively decent sized audience of people who follow the news enough that they’re probably going to vote but maybe aren’t hardcore partisans.
So the local news in Phoenix, Pittsburgh. Atlanta, Milwaukee and Detroit?
Yeah, but throw in Philly (less for the city itself and more for the suburbs, Reading, and Allentown and for cross-carriage in Harrisburg) and Grand Rapids.
I don't know. One implication of the historical trend noted in the piece is that it's possible to make almost anything viral now, and virality is the only thing that can transcend fragmentation. The trick for Harris will be that "normal and moderate" is not the normal formula for virality, but given the demand, her team might make it work.
I seem to recall that was the Buttigieg strategy in the 2020 primary - do interviews with millions of little specialty podcasts and blogs and magazines.
>Media fragmentation means there are few or no viable places to do intervjews. No network news show has an audience of more than 7 million.<
There are plenty of viable places to do interviews. Go on Sixty Minutes. Go on Meet the Press. The fact that these shows don't attract the kinds of audience share they used to doesn't mean they're not still valuable. That's because the discourse that takes place during the interview will be reported on by other media—and will also generate viral clips—so it's still possible to "make news" and it's likewise still an opportunity for the public to learn about a candidate's thoughts.
David’s point thought is that there’s a massive asymmetric weighting of things that are electorally negative rather than positive going viral.
It’s Mitt Romney’s 47% remark stamping on a human face, forever.
Or Hillary's "basket of deplorables".
I believe both of those comments were made during fundraisers. The truly risky venue!
They were. The point is that if *this* is what candor even in a private, closed-doors setting gets you, why would you ever agree to speak extemporaneously in a public interview, where the exposure of any remarks to public scrutiny and the painstaking gleaning of the same for viral circulation goes from risk to certainty?
Paraphrasing Archer: Do you *want* rehearsed anodyne vapidity in your interview responses? Because that’s how you get rehearsed anodyne vapidity in your interview responses.
(Or, more realistically, just refusing interviews at all, because (a) fuck that and (b) why bother when it doesn’t pencil out risk/reward-wise).
And most of the venues noted above would probably not ask very good questions in the first place.
You are allowed to do more than one interview…
If you do an interview on CNN, Fox, MSNBC, whatever, it isn't just that the audience will see it, it is that every other news org will write or talk about it.
I'm guessing only a few hundred thousand watched the fiasco of Elon Musk interviewing Trump on X, but my feed is swamped with all the other major news outlets talking about what a fiasco it was, and sharing clips of it.
But on the flip side if things go well, I think that gets a lot of coverage, too
How many times has a politician “gone viral” for saying smart, inoffensive things? Compare that to the incidence of viral moments of a less favorable nature.
I like the idea overall of doing late night tv, though. Stephen Colbert is not looking to embarrass Democratic politicians.
Or, say, Oprah magazine.
I think doing soft focus stuff might also force the MSM to offer sweeteners to get interviews.
The circle is squared by the fact that those interviews will end up posted to YouTube and discussed elsewhere, driving people to the interview over the following days.
I feel like the solution here is less conventional interviews - he's become weirdly alt-right now but the 2020 Bernie/ Joe Rogan interview feels like it was good for him because it gave him to chance to talk to normies for 2 hours straight with an interviewer who was uninformed enough to ask questions that low info voters also have.
It's become a meme but I feel like Kamala going on Hot Ones could have the same effect (plus she loves cooking so its in her wheelhouse). I've also seen people say that once football season starts Walz should do a bunch of hits where he just talks ball on sports podcasts/ ESPN/ etc., which I also think would be great. Lots of questions on bio/ values/ "what's the craziest thing about running for president" and fewer about the minutia of whatever the story of the week is.
"he's become weirdly alt-right now"
Is he not still in favor of completely open borders? It seems like his politics is closest to RFK Jr with Bernie in 2nd. What counts as alt-right nowadays?
I’m really only half-exaggerating when I say that his opinions on trans issues are what code him as “alt right” despite his opinions on literally everything else.
That's fair - I don't think he's alr-right in any specifically defined way. Just that he's vaguely right coded (complains about trans people a lot) but in an alternative way because he's not a down the line Republican and generally is receptive to more out there stuff on e.g. vaccines/ IQ truthers.
I don't hate Joe Rogan like some people hate Joe Rogan. Gotta give it to him, he can ask interesting questions! But on public policy, he's deeply uninformed and has no interest in becoming informed. Unfortunately, he can move votes, so Kamala definitely should go run circles around him.
Yeah. I feel like "hating Joe Rogan" is just an unnecessary political self-own by the Dems. He's hugely popular, go on the show like Bernie and Yglesias did and get your message out. Holding you nose at it (often, ironically, from an uninformed vantage point) just does nothing at all. Low-information podcast viewers aren't going away, Rogan collects many of them all in one place, take advantage of that and stop shooting yourself in the foot, Dems!
Joe Rogan is a good guy but he just isn't very smart. Listening to his podcast with Nick Bostrom was straight up painful.
I was genuinely curious, but also I feel like the left has lost a lot of support by allowing thoughts on trans or covid to be key definers of who is left or right. Ditto with masculinity being seen as right. Or in Joe's case, defining an RFK guy as Republican because he not clearly a Democrat.
I haven't listened to him in a long while but unless something big has changed he's basically a "moderate" in the sense of having a mishmash of left and right views. There's a lot of people like that, although they don't always turn out to vote.
Yeah reminds me of Matt's story about a Heartland Diner Visit™ where he ran into a couple of Obama-Trump voters that believed both modern MAGA conspiracies (big lie, adrenochrome) and older leftwing conspiracies (CIA killed JFK, Jet fuel can't melt steel beams). For the conspiracy-inclined, it seems like you pick your politics first based on vibes and then adopt the conspiracies second because its a sort of hobby or interest of yours. If Joe Rogan became enamored with some lefty he'd probably start talking about vaccines less and greedflation more without his fundamental politics shifting much.
I heard a Jon Lovett (one of the PSA guys) interview where he talked about how political media has two sort of axes: earnest - cynical and funny - serious, and how left-wing media indexes really heavily on earnest & serious (Maddow or w/e) or cynical & funny (dirtbag left guys who are left wing but rarely actually pull the lever for Dems). Would be good for us if there was someone out there who was earnest & funny (and masculine, too) who could capture the attention of Rogan types and also would tell them that voting for Kamala Harris is cool and based.
"adopt the conspiracies second because its a sort of hobby or interest of yours"
I have lot of friends who truly enjoy conspiracies. They are otherwise very intelligent people, one is a manager at a FANG company and another has a STEM PhD from a leading university. But you can see their eyes light up when they talk the topics, everything from the moon-landing to covid.
I was telling one of them about a conspiracy I had heard about because Garry Kasparov (chess champion) believes it. It's that "the middle ages didn't happen". Right away his eyes light up "oh...could be! Makes sense!". I hadn't even told him a single detail and he was buying into it.
I've recently run into the truly bananas conspiracy theories that 1) Judaism didn't exist until the 1920's and evidence to the contrary is Zionist propaganda and 2) "foreign languages" didn't exist until after WWII, when nations started to develop their own identities and cultures, and prior to that everything was in English. Evidence? The Bible was written in English.
I love the stuff. Don’t believe any of it, it’s just fun to kick around similar to talking about what might have happened if the Red Sox had kept Babe Ruth. Just an exercise. I got ruined by Robert Anton Wilson when I was 19.
I think people receive these clips from Rogan like they’re newscasts. It’s just a couple of people shooting the shit for literal hours. It’s not supposed to be your news diet and the people I know who listen regularly don’t receive it as such. Just outraged people online watching the craziest 2 minute clip that someone could find, like a lot of things.
As in, the hundreds of years between the fall of the Roman Empire and the Renaissance never happened, or that it wasn't a particularly "dark age". The latter is a respectable academic position, the former is...not.
"Whither Tartaria" on ACX is a great read on a similar conspiracy. I'm also fond of:
- Hillary and Bill were in an open relationship but thought an affair would be more acceptable to the American people
- The Hawaii nuclear text wasn't a false alarm, it was a real nuke that we shot down but we don't want to world to know about our aerial defense systems.
Obviously neither is true but something fun for the brain to chew on.
ETA:
- A time traveller came back to make that guy just miss Trump to avoid the very bad timeline
Jon Stewart in the early days - earnest & funny?
Oh totally right. I feel like it was easier in the Obama era because he was cool enough that it wasn't cringe to earnestly like him. Didn't work for Hillary or Biden but so far seems like it is for Kamala
Earnest and funny was Jon Stewart, no?
The update on RFK Jr. is: it's fine to slaughter bears and leave their carcasses in public parks, as long as you don't protect your children from bird flu.
You forgot that he also promotes those penis pills that used to be all over talk radio 20 years ago....
Is that "alt-right"?
Taking pills for your penis is right-coded.
Coding non-political things as "right" is an easy way to lose voters. Don't encourage it if you want the left to win.
Yes.
What does it have to do with politics?
It feels like it may only have loose cultural connections. If someone were to start dressing like a Brooklyn Hipster, do they become left-wing? It just seems overly politicizing to associate cultural markers with politics, as well as self defeating, because if I'm a Dem I'd prefer that people who order penis pills also want to vote for me.
Or is alt-right purely a cultural marker, like being an emo / goth kid? If it is I think it's probably also being way over-applied. I doubt Joe Rogan would call himself "alt right", but if he were to take on that label he'd probably make it much more popiular.
I feel like the culture war over trans stuff has gone on for several years now and I still am just deeply confused by it. Why do we talk about trans people so much? This goes for both trans activists and the Joe Rogans and Jesse Singals of the world. I am earnestly puzzled why both sides of the culture war talk about this stuff like one out of every three people is trans and we either have to protect them from bigots or protect them from themselves. Sorry if my comments sound crass, but I am earnestly confused by this! Are trans issues just the current front in woke wars? Like when the Allies landed at Normandy so nobody really paid attention to North Africa anymore (justifiably!)?
My interest in that issue - and specifically Jesse Singal’s take on it - has little to do with trans issues as such and much more with how it’s an area in which science has really face-planted. We genuinely do not know much about whether various medical interventions are effective for treating gender dysphoria at a population level, but there’s been a big push to make it appear that we do, and that’s not good! Being in academia, I’m invested in the public feeling that “science” is generally trustworthy, so I find it troubling when bad science is presented as definitive proof, no matter how noble the cause may be.
As a note on Jesse, he has - unfairly, I think - acquired a reputation as someone obsessed with trans issues, but it’s really not the case. He’s done a lot of good work digging into bad trans medicine science, which is good. He has also inadvertently attracted some fans who are just happy because they perceive him as dunking on wokeness/trans ideology/etc. But that’s really not his aim.
The bit that nags at me about this is that I've been reading Ben Goldacre for years, and most medical science is pretty crappy at a population level.
Singal could probably have run a similarly interesting set of columns over many years about dozens of other types of medicine: painkillers (NSAIDs don't actually kill pain for many people, for instance) or various psychatric meds (especially for relatively mild conditions like most depression) or therapy (especially for people in relatively decent mental health), or ... well, almost anything where the primary outcome is "the patient says they feel better".
Did Singal come across the evidence that he did that led him to the trans columns he's written because he was transphobic beforehand and was looking for it? Or because he has transphoblic friends who pointed him at it? Or did he just run into the story by accident? I can certainly see why so many trans people and their allies suspect that it's one of the first two.
Well, it should be noted that his first (so far only, but he is currently writing another) book is about a range of pop psychology interventions that were wildly and briefly claimed to be transformative but for which there is no evidence. And while he was at New York magazine he ran their online science section. He does sometimes discuss more general issues with "patient says they feel better" interventions like regression to the mean, placebo effect and so on. He's also run takedowns of e.g. columns in Scientific American that have nothing to do with trans issues (e.g. a recent completely ridiculous one that argued that people aren't terrified enough by various crises).
I think he's said that his interest in trans issues stems from writing his 2018 New York magazine feature on trans youth (why he did *that* in the first place, I'm not sure - he may have been assigned to it or he may have chosen it), which then caused various firestorms of controversy. Being a journalist, I think he thought to himself "wait, I wrote what I think is a quite even-handed column and I'm being attacked as a despicable transphobe. What's going on here?" and decided to look further into it. And it's made him successful! I wouldn't - and I think he wouldn't, either - deny that pursuing this topic has allowed him to be a really successful independent journalist whereas writing consistently about the limitations of, say, SSRIs would not. And finally, he has been pretty badly harrassed by a certain online subset of trans activists and their putative allies (told to kill himself, accused baselessly of serial harassment, death threats etc.). I don't feel vindictiveness or even really resentment in his writing (the way I do in, say, Matt Taibbi's), but I do think there's a certain desire to show that those people are really deeply mistaken.
So yes, I agree that he focuses on trans issues in part because it's polarized and thus drives readership, but also because I think he believes that that same polarization is what makes the topic important to dig into. I often don't read his comments because there are some frequent commenters who I think are genuinely obsessed by trans issues to the point of malice (as there are a few in this comments section, as well). But I really do not see him doing anything in his writing to validate those people.
It's just always accessible and interesting. Even if it doesn't effect many people directly, it kind of speaks to very fundamental issues in norms and behaviors and how we see ourselves. It tends to overlap with everything a culture cares about, from sexuality to crime to sport to sexism. And the average person (ie Joe Rogan) can easily form an opinion and react to it, whereas he probably has much less to say about how taxes can create deadweight loss or whether plea bargains are overused.
Thanks for the reply! I've asked this before and usually my question is ignored so I really appreciate you providing a good faith response.
Your response makes a lot of sense and perhaps I am viewing it through the wrong lens. Like with any issue, it's probably also a question of salience. I just don't encounter a lot of trans people in any capacity so it's kind of out of sight out of mind for me. I do have a 6 year old in a suburban elementary school though so perhaps that will change!
For me, it's just "I have about ten trans friends and there seems to be a massive amount of people who want to be shitty to them". Happened to acquire one friend through a connection and she kept introducing me to more and more of her friends who are (for obvious reasons) mostly trans.
So every time a politician says something or does something that that will make my friends' lives harder, well that matters to me as well.
Rogan is only right wing to
left-wing bubble dwellers.
His audience is alt-right, based on the frantic backpedal when he seemed to endorse RFKJr. I see no upside to KH addressing that audience.
This is so out of touch. iI we've learned anything from this social media and partisan age, it's that the loudest voices don't fully represent, and often misrepresent, the groups they come from.
Joe Rogan's viewers aren't "alt-right" in part because that's not even a self-professed thing outside of a tiny core of guys. I must know a dozen people who listen to Joe Rogan. They are mostly guys who listen to podcasts while fixing air conditioners or driving to a worksite 3 hours away. Most of them aren't even Republicans, let alone whatever the heck "alt-right" means.
ITT: people who don't know what alt-right is.
Guys like Rogan who talk about their fear that eventually "White men will not be allowed to speak" are alt-right. Put as much lipstick on that pig as you want, but the racism, sexism and hateful rhetoric are right on the surface and he is leaning into it as a way to appeal to that audience.
I don't think you have any actual examples of this from his show, but feel free to prove me wrong.
Edit.
More to the point, I can show a lot of examples e.g. 'progressive stack' where it's baked in, explicitly, that white men are not welcome to speak. How do we have a conversation about that without you putting people into the 'explicit racist' category?
There is a huge culture of apologetics around Rogan and his brand of racist, misogynist, "anti-woke" -- and yes -- "X"-right wing political nonsense. You can keep pretending this a "big tent" of "persuadable" voters, but to the extent there are any actual persuadables in there they can be reached in a different way.
OK - fact / source check: how many occasional and / or regular listeners are there? What are their demographics? How many episodes have you listened to? Could you name more than a dozen non-controversial guests? How many people do you know who listen to JRE?
On the first two I don't have the data, but I know listener numbers are in the millions and maybe tens of millions depending on how you count. If you have the data please show it to me.
But on the last 3 I could give answers that would support my having an informed an educated opinion. I'm not "pretending" something. I've also experienced talking to liberals who've never listened to the show but have somehow indirectly formed an uneducated opinion on the matter.
Regular listeners over 11M, with spikes above 50M for Musk, for example. The audience is 88% male and 50% outside the US. WiredClip.com has stats. I have tried to listen to about 12 podcasts / YouTubes over the years with guests or topics that seemed interesting, including comedians I like and some authors (Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, etc. I have read). Rogan does not seem to know what to do with any topic deeper than MMA or stand-up comedy. He strikes me as a loutish ignoramus, which we know from Trump is not a bar to popularity. The tell is that he has become more popular as he has leaned into that demographic.
No. Alt-right specifically means 'we are racist/race realist, which distinguishes us from normie Right who downplay race/aren't racist.'
It doesn't mean 'New Right' or 'online Right'. It is a specific thing which has been exploded to mean whatever the speaker doesn't like on the Right.
This is the first time I've heard "alt-right" is specifically limited to views on racism. I've understood it for years to mean any form of modern American conservativism that isn't based on evangelical Christianity or classic liberalism.
Nah Richard Spencer either coined the phrase himself or wrote it into a speech that this other guy gave in the mid 00s. It has a specific meaning that is a repudiation of what they saw as a softening and liberalizing of hard Right white supremacist values and goals.
Maybe you get to write the OED entry on “alt-right” but that hardly informs its meaning in the common parlance
It starts to sound like a Carlin joke after a while... It is a very large bag ofq mixed nuts, but it's fine if they want to preserve all their particular "identities" like that.
The was a great profile of Walz the coach in The Athletic yesterday. They talked to a bunch of his former players and coaches and he came out looking pretty good imo.
Kamala on Hot Ones would be great, but it’s not obvious to me that Hot Ones actually wants to get involved in politics. So it may not be an option.
(For the sake of fairness, I of course believe that both Trump and Harris should be offered a chance to go on the show)
I can't decide whether Trump would be so unperturbed even the production crew start wondering if they forgot to sauce his wings... or whether he would make DJ Khaled look like a graceful loser.
Either way, I have this feeling that both of those episodes would turn out to be flying too close to the sun for all parties involved, and I don't want to sacrifice Hot Ones for that.
Given his preference for well done steaks and fast food, I can't imagine he could handle Da Bomb.
Harris on Hot Ones would be gosh dang amazing.
'If the media’s countermove is just to bully politicians with the threat of negative coverage, all that happens is politicians’ supporters will become more receptive to freezing out the media."
This has been the NYT's reaction to the Biden White House freezing them out. They engaged in the whole "Biden Old" with glee and speculation of a malign bully.
Except their speculation turned out to be well-founded as Biden was in fact avoiding interviews and public appearances due to his old age. Whether it was because his old age was leading to issues with mental acuity or energy or he was fine but the campaign was worried that any gaffes made would feed into such a narrative is a fair question.
I'm sure no one here had any qualms about the media questioning Trump's mental fitness when he was avoiding interviews and press conferences during his presidency and I'm sure many here, at least pre-Biden, would have wished the media asked more questions about Reagan's mental state during his presidency.
Wait for the debate! He's gonna come across as very old and MAGA world will freak.
When there is no new information and all the journalists run a podcast "wish casting" their replacement for Biden that isn't Harris (one put out freaking Joe Manchin who left the party), it is a deeply unserious and deluded effort.
A far more unserious and deluded effort was the Biden campaign thinking they could win while hiding Biden's health and age issues from voters.
Deluded maybe, but it was a serious attempt.
Biden’s age is a real concern, but the media just recycled the same speculation only stories over and over without any new insights or information.
It was supremely lazy.
Harris is trying to wait out the "why did you flip?" questions until they're old news. Presidential campaigns (unlike down-ballot campaigns) have huge coms teams that can factually answer a question, like "does she still support a ban on fracking?" Once that's answered by a spokesperson, the pressure on the embed (traveling reporter, usually in their 20s and getting seasoned) to ask about it decreases; it's not a scoop anymore.
The recent model for this was actually Nikki Haley. She never got close enough to the nomination to matter, but for a candidate polling in single digits most of the primary, she was incredibly cautious and would wait out news cycles. Her embeds went months without getting to ask questions; they'd have to watch Fox News that afternoon or evening bc Haley did most of her media on there. The campaign ended without Haley 1) taking a position on SC's abortion law or 2) explaining any details of a "middle class tax cut" she promised to pass.
I do worry that this is the new normal. One way it's bad for the campaigns: If the beat reporters are getting nothing from the candidates, they need to find News in the interviews the candidates do with friendly media. You get more sensational coverage, not less! Bob Novak's dictum still applies: "You're either a source or you're a target." A candidate who goes back and forth with reporters can make news about something he/she wants to inject into the discourse, while a candidate who hides from the press makes his/her old Facebook posts or Twitter follows etc much more interesting/scandalous.
I'd guess this is a feature of the Trump era. In last month's British election Labour had a manifesto 130 pages long, parties would attack each other for lack of details in their plans, and top think tanks' analysis of the manifestos would get coverage.
So long as Trump is doing his 'alternative facts' shtick, that's not going to happen in America. But conceivably in a Haley vs Harris 2028 match-up it could.
My impression from the outside is that conventional wisdom was that Labour ran an extremely cautious campaign, with a so-called "Ming vase strategy" focused on just trying to not mess up the huge lead it had throughout
From the point of view of a consumer of news, this dynamic often comes across as a game journalists play, where they try to get a candidate to say something that deviates from what they or their surrogates have said in the past. The bigger the difference, the more points they score as the candidate gets asked to explain the difference over and over and over. It's a fine game insofar as it tests important qualities in a political candidate, but campaign promises stopped mattering when Congress stopped passing laws and the advent of screenshots has given journalists eidetic memories.
Trump refused to play along, by taking every possible side of every position and generally being incoherent and shamelessly dishonest. That creates a real asymmetry for anyone running against him, for whom there is still big downside risk to mixing it up with a gaggle of reporters. Caution seems warranted from both Haley and Harris in that respect—especially the latter, so long as her polls keep improving. I mean, why take the risk?
>>By the same token, I always wish reporters who got the chance to do these big-time interviews would take the chance to ask things they are genuinely curious about or that reflect concerns they sincerely believe the public has.
This, IMO, is the best thing Ezra Klein still has going for him, because he actually bothers to just ask real questions.
And he liked Walz because Walz actually pondered and answered his questions rather than returning to a script.
agreed. despite the fact that hes annoying as hell, and his questions that go around and around. he's one of the few who still asks real questions.
People in many industries face the challenge of serving all customers equally instead of prioritising the most opinionated ones, or indeed getting distracted by status competitions with industry peers.
Journalists seem have it extra hard because many of them spend their lives on social media marinating in the views of their most opinionated customers and their peers. That's how you end up wasting a rare opportunity to ask the candidate a question on asking about why you don't get to ask more questions.
Maybe media orgs should do more focus groups and polling to better inform their journalists about what their readers want to know about.
Journalists should just generally stay off social media. I mean, everyone should, but journalists especially seem deeply susceptible to its brain rot.
Good post but… when do you think cable television arrived?! Chart shows declines going back to the radio era.
Yes, and the timing seems to undermine the “media fragmentation—> fewer interviews” thesis
When doing research about this, I read an article about how the progressive era politicians were pretty united in their belief that they needed to take their fight to the public. Hence, more interviews.
Because that was the only way to get your message out to lots of people. In 2024, you can just go direct to the consumer, as other companies in other industries have found out.
You mean they actually tried to convince people, how strange...
Not sure about that, media has been fragmenting for 100 years.
Is that true? I would have thought broadcast media at least was maximally consolidated in the early TV era, maybe 1930’s to 1960’s. (I thought there were many local/regional radio stations in the early 20th century) But I could be wrong! Do you have a specific source in mind?
Exactly, newspaper -> radio -> broadcast TV was a huge increase in centralization
But (until recently) newspapers and radio didn’t go away, it was all additive. Newspapers + radio + broadcast + newsmagazines + cable…
This doesn't feel particularized to politics. Celebrities, sports stars, actors… Interviews are simply an opportunity to misspeak and have some kind of career endangering gaffe. With the rise of social media and alternative channels to reach their audience and control the message and their public persona, "regular" media is an unappetizing alternative.
I broadly agree but I think there's probably a threshold of media competence + volume above which this ceases to hold (e.g., Pete Buttigieg), it just turns out to be a very high bar to clear.
And Harris has gotten killed for years about fake gaffes and sounding "awkward" so I understand why she is gun shy but I think she has gotten a lot better and shouldn't be afraid
It's underrated how much of the negative net political rating bias is just a function of Trump. The Trump Era has gone on so long it's become more or less completely normalized. Remember the small hands thing
But given that he's such an obvious corrupt dirtball his only play has always been to trash everyone else in very personal and over the top ways. Michelle Obama aside, Democrats have long focused on Trump's unfitness for office by saying many negative things about him.
And I think there's psychological motivation for anyone thinking of voting for Trump to rate the opponent negatively. With McCain or Romney or Bush II (pre-Katrina it was plausible to say I like Kerry or Obama alright, but I like this guy better. With Trump the justification is more plausible that the other is actually worse.
I wonder if there’s a psychological defense mechanism at play: if you hate Trump, but you’re going to vote for him for normal Republican reasons, you must hate his opponent more
It's remarkable that we don't know Kamala's positions. That is what I want. This isn't about the press.
If I vote for Kamala, I simply don't know what I'm getting.
I assume we're not canceling private health care insurance, seizing guns via executive order, or opening the borders, or doing other ridiculous things she has promoted over the years.
But I'm at the edge of my seat to see how Kamala reconciles her past crazy positions with what voters currently want.
Does she say she evolved?
Does she say "I've learned some things?"
Does she say "I tried my best to give the primary voters in 2019 what they wanted, and now realize that was a mistake?"
This last explanation sounds crazy, but it's likely 100% true and 100% believable.
We're at peak Kamala now because she's been avoiding answering the tough questions, but that time has passed.
If you really have zero idea how Kamala Harris is going to govern on significant substantive issues I’d say you probably haven’t paid much attention. She’s a former Senator and the Vice President of the United States, not a former reality television host - she has a track record of the kinds of policies she supports when in office. Maybe the political press can report on the substantive impacts of these votes and policies (good and bad) rather than trying to ask questions about whatever fever dream scandal is gripping the news today.
As a public policy nerd, I greatly appreciated reading Elizabeth Warren’s detailed and lengthy plans on various issues, some of which I agreed with and others less so. But in reality every single one of these plans was completely DOA even if she got elected! You genuinely get a better sense of what a candidate is going to do in office from the major themes they campaign on than these types of white papers.
Let me ask it differently:
Is there any position that Kamala is going to take that is outside of smack-dab in the middle of where she thinks the party is?
Remember in 2020 when Biden stood on the debate stage and was the only one who said he wasn't going to ban fracking?
Or when Biden was the only one who said he wasn't in favor of open borders?
When Biden rather forcefully told Kalama on the debate stage that guns can't be seized by executive order?
I respect him for doing all this.
I also have a grudging respect for Bernie for going his own way, and doing what he thinks is right, even if he's alone.
Does Kamala have any "I'm doing it because it's right, not because it's popular" views?
My sense is that if she wins, the two big fights are going to be over the Trump tax cuts and then subsidizing the care economy.
Sure, but I think David's point is that one's sense doesn't cut it here. He wants her to go unequivocally on the record about something she actually cares about, poll numbers be damned. Or maybe it's all a poll number optimization machine all the way down (right now we have to assume it is), which is fine in its own way and certainly preferable to Trump, but not exactly inspiring.
If Kamala did, indeed, have any "I'm doing it because it's right, not because it's popular" views, the only reasons you could possibly want her to express them now are:
1) you want Kamala to lose, so you want her to say something unpopular
2) you want to know what the unpopular thing is so you can decide to vote against her if you don't like it
I forget who said it, but you win elections to spend political capital to achieve goals, not the other way around. If there is any unpopular-but-correct thing that she is going to lay down on a train track for, her every incentive is to keep that to herself until she's won the election, and expecting/demanding her to do otherwise is irrational if you want her to win and disingenuous otherwise.
Reason 3) is, you think political victories happen when politicians say the right thing, not when they do it.
And what did you actually learn from that? Was there any difference about what Biden actually did compared to what one of the other candidates would have done?
This is only a meaningful question in a primary--its pretty clear what her opponent will do, and just *not doing that* is an absolute shit ton of information. Whether she pursues Standard Issue Party Priority 1(a) or 1(b) doesn't really matter at this point.
I want to know if she has changed her mind from the last time she ran for President. She took some wacky stances during 2019 and 2020 and I'd like to know if she still wants to do some of the things she advocated for during that primary.
Most Dems were trying to appease the Sandersistas in 2019. We both know that caucus has atrophied and holds little sway over public discourse or opinion in places other than Queens.
Harris needs to do a bit of hippy punching and she has been doing that with the Omnicauser protestors.
Wait, is Queens a hotbed of Bernie Sanders boosterism?
It’s has the highest concentration of dues paying DSA members in the U.S. (I think it’s actually Astoria.)
Isn't that what she's trying to do with the quiet "sources close to Harris say she doesn't want to ban fracking anymore" kind of stuff? Signal to those in the know that she's disavowing those positions without picking a big fight with activists?
I'm not promoting Trump, but I wonder if a large part of his appeal - even to those who don't like him - is that he doesn't have to "signal to those in the know" any of his true positions. He just says his "true positions", whatever they are and no matter how crazy they are, and lets those in the know on his side squirm about them or accept them or deal with them.
I mean this is pretty clearly false.
- he contradicts himself and flip flops constantly, and is a serial liar (in easily verifiable ways, not in "oh I was misquoted" ways or in "vaguely speaks a lot without saying anything" ways that are typical of politicians), such that you never actually know what positions are "true" at all
- Some of the very unpopular opinions he has are ones that he stridently avoids saying out loud and discussing.
- Of course, to that last point, his judgment is very unsound, so he says a lot of stuff that he thinks is popular because his fans at his rallies eat it up, but is actually very unpopular (e.g. saying things like "you won't need to vote again")
What's Donald Trump's position on health care?
I actually don't know (not sure he has one at this point: the repeal-Obamacare thing seems to have faded away), but this doesn't change my point that whatever true positions he claims to have, he doesn't shy away from shouting them.
As others have said, this is not true. On abortion, on taxes on the rich, on social spending, he constantly says what he thinks the audience wants to hear. He even stopped talking up the vaccines because people were booing.
But I think you (and others) are missing the point of what I'm saying. My point is not that he doesn't pander (and I'm not sure that those examples you give are actually examples of pandering/saying something he doesn't believe or intend). My point is that he doesn't engage in signalling what his true intentions are apart from what he says.
That sort of signalling behavior does seem to be characteristic of a lot of politicians, and I think it's pretty broadly unappealing.
It’s not just a “sources close to” thing now; a campaign spokesperson communicated the info to the press in an official capacity.
It genuinely isn’t clear to me if Harris would govern significantly to the left of Biden, very similar to Biden, or a little to the right of Biden. You can argue for each of these based on her record. Do you feel like you know which it would be?
Why not listen to what she's saying and determine from that? She's talking every day about what she wants to do in office. It sounds to me like the points of emphasis for the most part are basically the same as Biden but a few main breaks:
-a slightly more adversarial tone toward Netanyahu;
-more of an emphasis on the 'care economy' portions of the dead BBB plan (obv whether these are achievable will depend on Congress).
I think Slow Boring readers will generally all agree that the care economy/childcare plans need a lot of wonkish work to be ready to go as good policy. But as a president, not a legislator, it's helpful to know that will be a point of emphasis.
Otherwise the key themes have been pretty much aligned with Biden - social security/medicare, letting the trump tax cuts on top earners expire, protecting abortion rights. Plenty of room to debate about these things, but pretty obvious priorities!
Right. These comments are super weird to me. Kamala gives a speech about her positions every day. Listen to one if you don't know her positions.
They are blaming their absence of interest in knowing on the subject of supposed interest,
Cf. The classic, "Why isn't the media reporting this?!?!?!?!?!?!?" over a link to a NYT/Washington Post/CNN/etc. article.
It’s true — I find campaign speeches pretty insufferable, and don’t generally listen to them. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask a presidential candidate to write down their proposed policies and priorities on their website.
I’m not sure - I think that’s appropriate for a congressperson who can afford to ignore the big issues of the day and work on introducing a specialized bill on a niche topic. But the president has to deal with things as they come up and as Congress writes them. You don’t get much of a better sense than just knowing what party they are from.
Yeah at this point the delta between candidates is so yuge that individual policy questions barely matter, there is nothing Kamala could say to Jay Caspian Kang that would convince him to vote for Trump instead. The vibes of “does she talk more about global warming or health insurance” matters much more to the act of governing (where at best you can put your finger on which of the Groups agendas get prioritized). That said a good journalist could definitely extract a candidates vibes with the right sort of questions, and this is the sort of thing old school Rogan got right (and this would be more useful to the rest of us than gotcha questions).
"Yeah at this point the delta between candidates is so yuge that individual policy questions barely matter"
Yes, pretty much the only "policies" Harris needs to say she holds at this point are: (1) She is not Donald Trump and (2) She is within a standard deviation of the median national Democratic politician in DW Nominate scoring. With how the U.S. electoral system is set up, basically nothing else is relevant.
Remember when a big difference between Clinton and Obama was that Clinton was going to put an individual mandate into her healthcare plan and Obama wasn’t? That’s a genuine substantive policy disagreement. Obama got elected with a super majority and could have whatever healthcare plan he wanted. And he still reversed himself and added the mandate! The idea that we need to hear them speak on every issue so we can know what they will do is wrong not just because their options are limited, but because all kinds of things could happen to change their stances.
Just posted a salty response before reading your comment. Sigh.
>If I vote for Kamala, I simply don't know what I'm getting.<
You know perfectly well you're getting a mainstream Democrat. If you don't know what that means by now, you're remarkably poorly informed by the standards of SB's readership.
If you don't like her just say so—likely eighty million or so voters this autumn will join you in that sentiment. But don't make up fake reasons.
“The 2000 primary showed me I was out of touch, so I tried to fix that. I have spent four years as Vice President listening to the American people and I’ve learned a lot.”
"Ever since I was in my thirties and Bill Bradley lost that 2000 Democratic primary to Al Gore, I knew that I needed to learn more about what the American people are looking for."
It was a typo, but funny
You said
> It's remarkable that we don't know Kamala's positions.
But then it seems you actually do know Kamala's positions you're just curious how she'd react to the gotcha flip flopping accusation. I'm curious how she'd answer the question but I'm fairly certain it wouldn't be that interesting. This is orthogonal to the question of the issues. Pretty sure the average slow boring commenter could tell you exactly what her issue positions, they're broadly the positions of the center of the Democratic party.
Yeah, this is my feeling as well. I mean I guess if she said “yep, still in favor of banning fracking and giving health care to unauthorized immigrants” then that would be a pretty reliable signal. But otherwise, why wouldn’t you wonder if maybe her repudiation of her 2024 positions is false?
Does it actually matter? If you vote for Harris, you won’t see her pass reparations, mandate DEI in every classroom, or give illegal immigrants social security. You will see her try to pass abortion rights, appoint liberal- and left-leaning judges, and not demolish the regulatory state. The vast majority of the fact of how left-leaning her administration ends up being depends on factors external to how she presents during the campaign - consider than Biden was by far the most moderate major candidate in the 2020 primary!
It seems like this desire to dig into her psyche and understand how she chooses to present her story comes from a place of political journalism as amusement, rather than a desire to predict likely outcomes of a Harris administration.
If I was on Harris’s team I would do nothing to upset the zeitgeist of what is going on unless I really had to. The calculus for politicians is as simple as considering what is to gain from not necessarily friendly media putting pols to the test? Seems like there’s a higher risk of ruin versus a more limited upside.
Figure can go with the poker terminology since Nate Silver is in the news with his book.
I found this to be a strange piece that is deeply incurious and assumes bad faith from your opponents. I don’t think it is unreasonable at all for people (supporters, undecided or opponents) to want to see the likely President of the United States speak extemporaneously, all the more so given that the party & campaign intentionally misled people about the viability of their prior candidate specifically via the mechanism of having him do minimal extemporaneous speaking.
I even agree with some of the points you make here, but honestly the thesis of this piece is so strange. Go have your candidate speak extemporaneously it’s genuinely not that hard. If you hate the press corps go on some Fox equivalent like Joy Reid. Or do a podcast! Running the Biden 2024 plan but with a younger person is just going to lead to these calls getting louder and louder and having the next major appearance become way more high stakes than it needs to be.
The assumption of bad faith from Matt's "opponents" is completely reasonable though. Harris could give a sharp-as-a-tack interview and it wouldn't change the position of any of the people criticizing her for not doing interviews, so why bother?
Isn’t the point of the piece that she should do this? I think the criticism is of some people having disingenuous reasons for wanting it, which wouldn’t be so bad except it creates bad incentives for whoever’s doing the interview.
For the Harris campaign specifically, why would they grant substantive interviews prior to the biggest moment of Harris's candidacy, her speech at the DNC? My guess is you'll see better press access after she's had an uninterrupted opportunity to make her case at the convention.
You’re right but one counter argument is that the time to build a relationship is now when you don’t need much and not later when you have stepped into the sticky stuff.
Maybe, but the half-life of anything in the news cycle seems quite short. In early July, I was constantly hearing how Democrats didn't have time to pivot from Biden. How we were wasting time, and everything was urgent. Those three and a half weeks were incredibly long. I doomscrolled a lot.
Then Harris came along, people fell in line, and the pivot happened really fast. Harris should do some more substantive media over time, but she has time. Trump is doing adversarial stuff, but that's because he's behind and he needs to switch it up.
"As we recall from the 2020 and 2016 cycles, a primary is a good opportunity for the left to ask Democratic Party politicians to make electorally toxic public commitments that are then not enacted into law, precisely because they are so unpopular"
Boom! Take that Lefties.
Reminds me of the West Wing episode where all the candidates in Iowa are forced to take a position for Ethanol/Corn subsidies that a) they all hate and b) are pretty unpopular outside of Iowa
That's kind of the reverse, in that politicians take a position popular with the public (to the very limited extent that the public care outside of the corn belt) but unpopular with wonks
A few thoughts:
It really does seem like she didn't expect Biden to drop out and hand things over to her until maybe right before it happened. She definitely hadn't set up any sort of shadow campaign in waiting. So now she has to come up with something that's distinctively her's, but can't do a complete 'unburdening of what came before' since Biden is still the president and she's still his VP. It's a delicate maneuver and takes some time to get right.
It's summer, typically the slow season for news. Sure us junkies are still engaged, but she doesn't need to reach us. The Olympics just concluded as well, and why would she want to compete for eyeballs with Simone Biles and Katie Ledecky?
The vibes are still good. Why not ride them a bit longer?