Rebecca Solnit, the distinguished local author, notes on Facebook that there’s a fascinating discussion happening on Twitter about Vice President Kamala Harris and her refusal so far to do in-depth interviews with the news media.
From the UK Guardian’s Margaret Sullivan:
Even if you very much hope that Harris prevails in November over her corrupt, felonious rival, that’s not a good enough reason to cheer on her press avoidance.
If Harris is truly “for the people”, as she has long claimed, she needs to speak to their representatives – flawed as they may be.
From longtime journalist and media critic Jeff Jarvis:
NPR Media Reporter David Folkenflik:
Jeff, this just can’t be the stance for any journalist who cares about the profession or the nation to take.
From Norman Ornstein, the political scientist and scholar at the normally conservative American Enterprise Institute (full text):
David, I understand why journalists want to take this stance. But the fact is we have had no reflection, no willingness to think through how irresponsible and reckless so much of our mainstream press and so many of our journalists have bern and continue to be.
Watch how often the White House press briefings end up as embarrassing zoos. Consider for example at O’Keefe’s shouting at and hectoring the press secretary. Far too many questions have little to do with what Americans care about, and more reflect the egos of the reporters.
Watching the farce of a faux press conference with Trump, with not a single question about what should’ve been the big story of the day, an alleged $10 million bribe from Egypt, and few questions about what is most important, the stakes of the election and Trump’s approach to governance.
I do think that sometime in the near future Harris should do not a press conference with campaign reporters who will not distinguish themselves with what is important but ask a flurry of gotcha and horse, race questions, but one or two in-depth one on one interviews.
There are many good journalists who could do this really well.@yamiche @lawrence @GStephanopoulos @JohnJHarwood @AliVelshi @sbg1 to pick a few. But what I have seen over the past two weeks is a bunch of whining by self important narcissistic journalists who think it’s all about them.
For Kamala Harris, this first period as the Democratic nominee is about defining herself and rallying the party and other voters sick about Trump, carrying through the convention. The Interviews should come after that.
In the meantime, I watch with dismay as a press corps monomaniacally obsessed with Joe Biden’s mental condition almost completely ignoring the mental state of Donald Trump. His slurring, disjointed and embarrassing two hours with Elon Musk does not even get front page treatment.
While there are stories and even some powerful editorials about Trump’s unfitness for office or plans for mass deportation, takeover of the civil service, promise of retribution, dictatorship on day one and invocation of the insurrection act, they are piecemeal at best, often relegated to less prominent places.
Which means most voters have no clue what a second Trump term would actually be like. The stakes of this election should be the core of coverage. Including of course, what a Harris presidency would be like and what it would do. I would be far more sympathetic to the push for more access by Harris if that were the case.
Instead, we get the same insipid focus on the horse race and the polls, while normalizing abnormal behavior and treating this like a typical presidential election, not one that is an existential threat to democracy. The press does not have to side with Harris to do its job. It is falling so far short.
What frustrates me as much as anything is that the centers of excellence I have so long admired and relied on, including the Post, the Times, the Journal, most news networks, the real opinion leaders that frame coverage for most of the other outlets, have failed so often and somehow refuse to even consider their shortcomings.
Harris watched what the news media did to Biden. She watched what the news media did to Hillary Clinton. She saw how the news media made Donald Trump into a celebrity and made his election possible.
I’m a reporter, and I’d love to interview Harris—but I understand why she’s reluctant.
I hope, as Ornstein suggests, that this leads to a little reflection by the political reporters of this country, who are by and large not doing their jobs.
Reporters don’t write headlines. Anyone who has labored on that end of the journalism world knows the drill: You write a careful, nuanced story, going out of your way to be fair—and then some editor looking to sell papers (or get clicks) puts on a title that goes far beyond what you wanted to say.
I’ve been an editor now for decades, so I’m the one who does that job—and I’ll be honest, it’s not easy to summarize complex political and investigative stories in like seven words. And if the headline is boring (“City Council Maps Plan for Study”) nobody will ever read it.
The New York Post is famous, or maybe infamous, for its headlines, designed over the years to attract readers to newsstands. (“Headless Body in Topless Bar“ may be the most legendary.) The Village Voice, which also sold on the New York City stands, did pretty amazing stuff too: I remember in the fall of 1980, when I was just starting as a journalist, seeing a rather complex report on the race between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan summarized on the front page as: “Bozomania! Millions disappointed as fools vie for high office.”
Wish I’d saved that copy.
All of which goes to say that I don’t blame reporter J.D. Morris for the headline “Peskin failing to win voters,” which ran on the front page of the printed Sunday Chronicle. The online version, which has more readers anyway, was a bit more subtle: “Aaron Peskin trails in mayor’s race as he seeks progressive support.”
The story is, as these things go, balanced with quotes from Peskin and his campaign consultant.
The print headline was inaccurate, biased, and sensational.
Then there’s language like this (again, quite possibly the result of Chronicle editing, which is clearly pro-London Breed):
His well-documented resistance to unfettered market-rate housing construction has made him a villain of sorts to those who champion a dramatic expansion of residential development at all income levels.
Check out the link, by the way, to a very fair story by J.K. Dineen, who is always an honest reporter covering real estate in SF (and that’s hard to do).
The Dineen story makes clear that those who call Peskin “anti-housing” and a “villain” are ignoring his real record. (And where the hell does that word come from? Cambridge Dictionary: “Villain—a bad person who harms other people or breaks the law, or a cruel or evil character in a book, play, or film”).
But there’s a larger issue here.
The folks who decry Peskin, and their biggest champion, State Sen. Scott Wiener, always talk about “housing at all levels.” Then they advocate for state legislation that will only encourage housing at the very, very highest level.
To be fair, Wiener and some Yimbys (I give Mission Housing Director Sam Moss credit here) have worked hard to promote affordable housing legislation and bonds. But so has Peskin; in fact, Peskin was the primary force behind Prop. A, the March affordable housing bond. Breed was a co-sponsor but raised almost no money and did no work to pass it. That was Peskin.
The idea that Peskin doesn’t support “housing at all levels” is badly misleading. Peskin, and progressives in general, support affordable housing and are willing to spend money on it. Sometimes, the progressives (including Peskin) argue that new luxury housing won’t bring prices down and will damage existing vulnerable communities.
The city’s own data is very clear: In the last Regional Housing Needs Assessment cycle, this city approved, and developers built, more luxury housing than the state demanded—and far, far less affordable housing.
“At all levels?” Be serious.
From the Morris story:
Renters, who make up a majority of San Francisco households, are a core part of the winning coalition Peskin is trying to build. He has vowed to expand rent control in San Francisco if California voters pass a November ballot measure that would repeal a state law limiting cities’ ability to cap rent increases. He has been endorsed by advocates for renters such as the San Francisco Tenants Union.
He has also sought support from organized labor, winning the backing of SEIU Local 1021, the city’s largest public-sector union, and other labor groups representing teachers, hospitality workers and more. Peskin further plans to lean into his deep familiarity with the city’s Asian American communities, owing to his tenure representing Chinatown. And he hopes that key endorsements from progressive politicians and neighborhood advocates who share his preservationist views will carry him to victory.
True: But the story doesn’t note that the poll the entire story is based on has a big problem: Some 55 percent of those surveyed were homeowners, in a city where 65 percent of the voters are renters.
That ten percent changes the entire picture in a race that’s still very close.
I also have real problems with the term “moderate” as it’s used by the local media. In a world where political terms made sense, Breed, Mark Farrell, and Daniel Lurie would be called conservatives. Not Republicans, at least in sense of the modern party: Donald Trump isn’t a conservative, he’s a radical right-wing authoritarian. But conservatives in the sense that they support unregulated free-market solutions to issues like housing, support law-enforcement and prisons as solutions to issues like drugs and homelessness, and support low taxes and the deregulation of businesses like tech.
Those are, in traditional terms, conservative positions. The fact that they have become all too mainstream in the Democratic Party doesn’t make them any less conservative.
I noted this week that the LA Times took a very different approach, saying that San Francisco is going the wrong way on homelessness:
Mayor London Breed has chosen to follow Newsom’s example and undertake a “very aggressive” clearing of encampments in which police cite and move people along if they don’t take an offer of shelter on the spot. This ignores the fact that there are 8,300 homeless people in San Francisco, but the city’s 3,600 shelter beds are nearly at capacity. Breed followed that by ordering outreach workers to offer bus, train or plane tickets out of town to homeless individuals — if they have a connection to the destination — before offering any services such as shelter. This seems less about the mayor aiding homeless people than banishing them as she runs for reelection. …. Homelessness is the most stark example of wealth inequality in the country. It’s been suggested that some Californians are just tired of seeing it. They have “encampment fatigue.” Well, no one has more fatigue than the people living in encampments. … It’s encouraging that Los Angeles city and county leaders appear to understand what Newsom and San Francisco’s mayor seem to have forgotten: Simply pushing people off a sidewalk has never reduced homelessness, and it won’t work now.
I don’t think Breed cares.
So unless the mayor can figure out a way to send SF’s homeless people to other cities (this man is going to Salinas, and he has no idea why), the residents swept from one part of town are just going to go to another.
Not sure that’s going to help with her “surging support.”
Full disclosure: My son and daughter both work on the Aaron Peskin for Mayor campaign.
