One Further Thought

I want to recount a story I have told you before. But I hope you might reflect on it a bit more today as it relates to the American political press’s coverage of this election season.

In 2009, CNN approached me about joining their network. Jon Klein, the then network boss, made a very simple pitch to me. CNN was then a network headquartered in Atlanta without any voices on the network that really sounded like anyone from Atlanta or related to people who lived in Georgia. They wanted a non-Washington voice from the right.

When Sean Hannity found out that CNN had made me an offer, he insisted I meet with Bill Shine at Fox News. I went into Shine’s office and he explained Fox’s dominance on a map of the United States. He drew ovals around the coasts and then a small circle in the middle of North Carolina.

Shine showed me the map and said the ovals around the coasts are who CNN and MSNBC fight over. MSNBC gets ahead of CNN because it picks up liberal college towns, pointing to the circle in the Raliegh-Durham area. Shine then made a very particular statement that has stayed with me.

He said CNN and MSNBC are interested in what people who live within fifty miles of a coast thing and Fox News actually spends time trying to figure out what people who live within a hundred miles of America’s river valleys think. Ironically, it was Rush Limbaugh who pushed me to go to CNN. He argued I should cut my teeth being an evangelist to CNN viewers about conservatism and could always go to Fox later, which I eventually did.

More than a decade later, I think that Bill Shine’s media landscape analysis still holds up. CNN has an entire crew of reporters who obsess about Fox News on a daily basis. But the network, like so much of the political press these days, seems to not really understand at an editorial level what is going on politically in the nation.

Frankly, I am not sure Fox does that good a job at it, but if you watched Fox News you’d understand Americans actually really were concerned with law and order topics, and suburban women in the south actually were impacted by that issue. You would be more aware of a red wall combating a blue wave if you watched Fox’s political coverage than if you watched CNN’s. You’d understand a lot of Americans care more about their businesses shutting down than the virus. You’d understand the BLM/Antifa riots really have bothered people.

I don’t say this to pick on CNN. But CNN remains, for me, what should be the gold standard for objective news coverage and increasingly a lot of its programming seems to be MSNBC oriented, catering to a progressive audience that isn’t sure how Trump and the GOP are doing what they’re doing in the election because nobody they interact with would ever vote for them.

The American media landscape has boxed itself in. If you’re a talking head on a network, you are either a pro-Democrat Democrat or a pro-Republican Republican. There really are not many Democrats on panels who will criticize the Democrats or Republicans who will criticize the GOP. Every talking head must enthusiastically back their team it seems and that is across all the TV networks. Frankly, there’s not a place these days on TV for someone like me who is a conservative, votes Republican, but has issues with the party and its leader nonetheless. Ironically, I find that my radio listeners actually gravitate to me for being that way.

Beyond the partisan pundits, the analysts who are relied on as the objective analysts tend to have Democrat orientations. They have believed by faith that demography will lock in a Democratic dominance. But that narrative died in Florida last night. While some Republicans get talked to, the press corps seems far more comfortable accepting Democrat talking points as truth while dismissing GOP talking points as spin.

The media really messed up yesterday. The media missed what half of America cares about and how that half of America operates in politics. The political press saw a blue wave and never saw the red wall it would run into. They missed the real drift of young black men and Hispanic voters moving to the GOP and some of those who tried to explain it in the press did so with racist tropes about black men and toxic masculinity or Hispanic voters’ infatuation with strong men.

Something needs to change. It’s not just that a lot of voices reflected in print or on television from the left and right less and less reflect people who live outside Washington and New York. It’s that there seems to be some editorial hostility to those voices.

The Democratic Party is probably about to go through a crack up as rich, white, secular voters with college degrees and high incomes take over and alienate working-class Hispanic and black voters. I don’t know that the political press is equipped to see that fight coming or cover it honestly because of the existing composition of the political press.

Our American political press genuinely missed this election and it is no surprise at all that they missed it as bad as the Democratic Party missed the election. The two increasingly exist within the same bubble and that is a real problem moving forward.

Regardless of what happens with the presidency, the GOP gained seats in the House no one expected them to gain; probably held the Senate; held every one of their state legislatures and gained the New Hampshire Senate; picked up the Montana Governor’s seat; and made some solid gains at the local level.

While that momentum was building on the right, much of the political press was entertaining fantasies about Texas going blue and Lindsay Graham losing South Carolina. If our political press is unwilling to have a moment of self-reflection now, after this, the free market will raise up new entities to compete and Fox News will also continue its dominance. Frankly, I worry that what will come after will be even less credible and more prone to conspiracies. But something will come and deservedly so.

Imagine if there were, in 2020, a national news network that was headquartered in, hypothetically, Atlanta, GA, instead of New York and Washington that actually took the time to understand the people who live there. It’d probably revolutionize the news.