After Republicans take the House
Challenges for media coverage and how the rest of us make sense of things
I wrote last week that there are a host of conflicting data points as we approach tomorrow’s election. Early voting is up, but so is inflation and perceptions of crime (more on this in Wednesday’s newsletter). It’s the first election since January 6th and election deniers are literally on the ballot but there’s been a lot of messaging about furries and CRT and trans kids. So who knows?
Still, historic patterns suggest that the odds are good that the House of Representatives flips to Republican control. That will likely make Kevin McCarthy Speaker of the House.
How the political dynamics shake out depends heavily on what happens in the Senate. My operating assumption is that Democrats will at least hold their 50-50 position and may pick up one or two seats.
Republican control of the House will likely bring lots of message bills, angry committee hearings, and maybe even an impeachment or two. It will be 2010 all over again. Lots of noise, a government shutdown, attempts to leverage policy positions as poison pills into necessary legislation (like the debt ceiling limit).
Actual legislation arising from the House will not move forward in the Senate — even if I’m wrong about the outcome there — because of the filibuster. And President Biden still has a veto pen and there will not be sufficient Republican strength for a veto override.
Media critics — like Jay Rosen, Dan Froomkin, and Margaret Sullivan1 — have long observed that the way political reporters cover issues is seriously flawed. They are drawn into horserace reporting, using a “he said — then he said” style of writing (with the reporter giving a ¯\_(ツ)_/¯), trying to look objective to maintain their access to politicians. This will not be sufficient in covering the Republican House. In fact, continuing this past practice will play in to the hands of the new leadership by elevating their talking points even though they won’t show up in law.
Here’s a good (bad) example of that that current journalistic practice leaves us with. In a story in today’s Washington Post, a team of reporters wrote about the various closing statements made by politicians of both parties (fair, right?). They talk about claims made by Biden and Obama. They quote Josh Hawley and Nikki Hayley (who said we should “deport Rafael Warnock”). They discuss insights from Al Sharpton on the left and a former Romney campaign aide on the right.2 None of these quotes were given any kind of context. When Josh Hawley said that “they” say that America was founded on slavery by people who have “something wrong with them”, there was no effort to distinguish between supporters of the 1619 project3 from the actual candidates for office who have made no such claims. Nobody asked how or why Warnock could be deported (although this is likely campaign hyperbole and not a serious statement).
The CNN interview with speaker-in-the-wings Kevin McCarthy provides a similar example. He starts the interview by talking about legislation to secure the border and stop fentanyl smuggling (which mostly happens at legal border crossings but he pretends not to know that). He suggests that they will cut government spending, provide funding for more police, and increase border security personnel.4 You have to read down to the 16th paragraph of the story to find the limits on legislation I described above:
Most bills will be primarily messaging endeavors, unlikely to overcome the president’s veto or the Senate’s 60-vote threshold, though they would have to pass legislation to fund the government and raise the national borrowing limit at some point next year. McCarthy, however, signaled Republicans will demand spending cuts in exchange for lifting the debt ceiling, teeing up a risky fiscal showdown that could lead to a disastrous debt default.
Imagine that instead of waiting until halfway through the story, the interviewer had begun with “Representative McCarthy, even if you prevail in the House you will be far short of the 60-vote threshold necessary to clear a Senate filibuster and would still face President Biden’s veto pen. With that in mind, what is the House’s priorities for addressing the needs of the American people.”
And then there are the potential hearings. McCarthy suggests that they might want to explore the August 2021 exit from Afghanistan, the origins of Covid-19, and the Department of Justice threats against parents speaking up at school board meetings. Oh, and Margorie Taylor Greene will likely be on the House Oversight Committee.
How will the press likely cover such hearings? They will use the talking points of the majority, sprinkled with counterarguments from the minority members. They will highlight incendiary comments made by witnesses, without providing context as to who those witnesses are or what their background is.5 That will be fine with the majority because this potential public relations win was what the hearings were for in the first place.
There are members of the media who don’t get sucked into this trap. Last week minority members of the House Judiciary Committee announced that they were releasing a 1,000 page report on abuses by the FBI and DOJ during the Biden administration. When it came out on Friday, Philip Bump of the Washington Post was ready. When he looked closely at the “report”, he found the following:
There’s just one problem with this assertion: The report itself was less than 50 pages. Most of the rest of the document was letters sent by the minority members of the committee to various people. In fact, there were more than 1,000 pages of material that wasn’t the report itself, instead mostly those letters.
Included were pages with nothing but signatures on the letters: There were more than seven times as many pages that had nothing of substance on them except signatures than there were pages in the report.6
The purpose of the “report” was to generate exactly what happened. Headlines about how the Judiciary committee claimed that the FBI/DOJ was not to be trusted. It had no other purpose.
Bump reminds us of the questions that should be asked. What’s the purpose of this hearing? Is it fair? Does it cherry-pick its “experts”? Is there anything of substance here or is the point simply to generate headlines that embarrass the administration in advance of 2024?
If the political media won’t do this — because as Tim Miller suggested in his book, they enjoy the “game” — we’ll have to do it for ourselves. It means not getting triggered by the latest video clip of MTG, or Lauren Boebert, or AOC, or some random liberal activist. It’s distracting and serves no purpose. We may need to break down and watch C-Span. We should certainly use our various networks — whether social media or face to face — to at least counter the senseless back and forth takes.
I’ll close by observing that the non-political media do know how to cover matters in depth. In my morning read of the Washington Post, I came across this story about Alex Spiro. Turns out that Spiro is Elon Musk’s attorney and has, in the words of the story, “done a lot of the heavy lifting behind the scenes on virtually all legal matters.” It was news to me that Musk had hired Jay-Z’s former attorney. But what struck me about this story was how much actual detail it contained. We learn about Spiro’s background, his approach to cases, and how he has learned to work with Musk’s volatile (to say the least) personality. I can honestly say that I was more informed after reading this story even though it was my first exposure to Spiro.
As Rosen, Froomkin, Sullivan, and scores of others have been arguing for the last several years, it doesn’t have to be this way. We can actually see the media playing a significant role of providing context for our politics rather than centering the politics itself.
And if they won’t do it, then we must.
Assuming Twitter survives until January 3rd, you can follow them at https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu?, https://twitter.com/froomkin?, and https://twitter.com/Sulliview?
Who took the opportunity to contrast Josh Shapiro’s Jewish faith with opposition to Christian Nationalism.
And even then, he’s demagoguing their work.
It’s amazing to me that all claims to curtail government spending are immediately followed by initiatives that require government spending.
This will be especially problematic in the Covid hearings, where non-scientists have dominated the lab escape theory largely rebutted by actual virologists.
Follow Philip at https://twitter.com/pbump? and make sure to check out his excellent “How To Read This Chart” every Saturday.