Democratic Conference in Chicago certainly offered a contrast to the nominating convention I covered in Milwaukee the previous month, where Donald Trump and his champagne-spewing supporters—with their violent, pornographic language—promised a version of Homer Simpson’s line about how “his campaign is a disaster… I hate the public so much. If they elect me—I’m going to make them pay!”
Now that the two party conventions are in the rearview mirror, the general election between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump is in earnest. There are about two months until Election Day in November, and the stakes—as everyone is probably tired of repeating—are insurmountably high. The fact that this has become a cliché doesn’t make it any less true. But as I walked through the halls of the Democratic National Convention last week, there was another feeling I found myself unable to escape. It kept nagging at me.
Much of what I witnessed and heard during my time in Chicago reinforced my preconceived belief that many of the so-called elite members of my profession—the national political media writers who imagine themselves speaking truth to power, but who often speak only words to Google’s financially ruined algorithms—are pampered pigs doing everything they can to fail in the face of the enormity of this moment.
There was a lot of resentment in the “traditional” media about the access and treatment that Democratic organizers and the Harris campaign gave to social media influencers. There were times when I thought I had been transported back to 2010, when we as an industry were debating how to deal with bloggers. Having an army of influencers or online personalities made perfect sense because the stated priority was “media access,” and influencers are an objective part of the media—not to mention that many social media stars have audiences far larger than dozens of well-educated reporters combined. While many of these influencers don’t hold up to the venerable fact-finding standards of the publications that helped justify the Iraq War, they should individually qualify for media credentials.
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There was a throbbing sense of entitlement and undeserved self-love that characterized many of the assembled writers and media figures. And there was a fundamental lack of understanding about how to deal with not getting exactly what you want, when you want it. And because of the high-profile attendance at this year’s Democratic convention—by the public, the press, and others—there were, of course, moments of logistical chaos.
I, too, was irritated by the long lines on the first day of the 2024 Democratic National Convention, a irritability that the Trump campaign tried to exploit with bated breath. On the fourth night—just hours before Harris was due to give her historic acceptance speech as a Black and Asian American woman—there was a period when access to unassigned and reserved media seats was abruptly cut off, apparently due to a degree of crowding that was unsafe. I eventually got to see Harris and others (not Beyoncé… sad) speak, but not before enduring the sight and sound of sweaty emissaries of America’s elite media wearing multiple ropes berating the lowest-level convention volunteers for letting them take their seats immediately.
I would like to mention names at this point, if I could tell you for sure who any of these people were, other than the fact that their behaviors indicated that they were accustomed to shouting, “Do you know who I am?”
One particularly egregious case involved a man who spent several minutes berating a young volunteer at a media outlet about having a seat reserved for him. Citing instructions he clearly hadn’t written, the volunteer stated that he could not let anyone in at that time unless they had a confirmation or email stating their assigned seat. The journalist repeatedly insisted that his name was on the “list,” which the volunteer politely confirmed, several times, that he did not have. The journalist angrily asked to speak to the manager—the manager! Jesus Christ lives!—shortly before leaving. (Not that it mattered, but Rolling Stone made sure to stay to apologize to the boy on behalf of others, adding that we knew it wasn’t his fault.)
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It probably didn’t occur to this man that if he hadn’t been so concerned about sitting at the top of the hall, where the press could barely see Harris when she spoke, he could have watched the speech on C-SPAN or on the televisions scattered throughout the halls. His view would have been much better, and I doubt that would have made much of a difference in his coverage of the acceptance speech.
Doing this job, journalism, right is all about having a certain moral clarity and not being rude to people who clearly don’t deserve it. It is a wonder of the modern world that so many in this pampered profession can’t help but find it in themselves to publicly fail this 101-level test, over and over again.
Throughout the four-day nomination process, there were plenty of complaints about how the vice president avoided lengthy sessions with traditional media, since President Joe Biden pulled back and threw stick at his successor who can form somewhat persuasive sentences on the fly.
Naturally, I personally—as a member of a news organization that values famous or influential people giving us on-the-record Q&As—would prefer Harris to sit down for long, hard interviews with all of these outlets, and I think she should do so now. (I will note that while Rolling Stone did an online interview with Harris in June, we’d also like to do another one now that she’s a candidate in 2024, so if her senior campaign staff is reading this, you know where to find me. I have questions about the war on drugs, drone warfare, and many other topics.)
But to complain literally about any of these inconveniences to any meaningful degree is, in the opinion of one political reporter, an act of extreme misery at a time when our readers and peers simply cannot afford it.
Anyone who knows me can tell you that I am not one of those who naively view the media as a bonafide vanguard of truth and inner beauty. Nor am I one of those who think it is my job to try to intimidate big-name, honest newsgathering operations into “picking sides” or to become a convenient propaganda mill for Vice President Harris or her current boss, whoever he is.
What I’m saying is that a large portion of the mainstream political press has been (correctly) policing its audience to believe that this year’s race is not a normal presidential election, and then a significant portion of the media elite are getting upset when the audience points out that they are covering it as if it were a normal presidential election, armed with the same petty obsessions and pathologies. It’s not just angry readers screaming at us that the stakes are too high in this election—it’s us who have been screaming at them for at least a year that the stakes are too high in this election!
Of course, the current vice president and her campaign are by no means paragons of virtue—quite the opposite. After all, they are mere window dressing for the modern Democratic Party that, through incompetence and morally criminal passivity, allowed Trump to storm the White House and define an entire generation of American politics, policy, and judicial dominance. Yet sitting on the presidential ballot is a political party and a leader who, if they regain power in November, essentially promise to turn the federal government into a bloody carnage scene from Event Horizon, even if the villain from Happy Gilmore played every cannibalistic alien demon in that scene.
I’m exaggerating somewhat, but Trump and his government-in-waiting have been making explicit, bloodthirsty authoritarian promises in plain sight for years, so as a certified member of the news media, it’s become a little hard to ignore. On top of that, Trump has made a fervent vow that if he doesn’t get what he wants in this election (because, among other things, he’s a man desperate to stay out of jail), he and his party are ready to steal it.
It is extremely painful—even disturbing—to hear politicians and the media insist that this year's election is the most important of our lifetimes, because all of these same figures have been saying this for the decades I have been living.
However, when we are at a crossroads in history like the one we are at now, it is more important than ever for the supposedly productive comrades of the Fourth Estate to ask themselves as calmly as we can: Why do so many normal-minded people — who are not degenerate MAGA patients — seem to think that we are failing at our jobs, focusing on ourselves and our comfort levels and our “access,” and not earning their trust at all, if we have their trust at all?
I should conclude these thousand words of indignant self-reflection by admitting that I am, in all likelihood, part of the problem—since I, too, am a follower of the elite media.
Running around Chicago during convention week, I spent an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out which after-party I could attend, how many Hollywood and music stars I could convince to have a drink with me and pretend to care about what I had to say. At one late Thursday night party, I was given (it must have been a coincidence) a VIP bracelet that allowed me to get yes answers to silly questions like, “Can you take me backstage to meet Common before he performs?” I was accompanied by two close friends—talented journalists who were there to keep me calm and remind me of how poor I was acting, as I pretended not to enjoy every second of the celebrity proximity and self-indulgence that the evening allowed.
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I’ve long understood the temptation that comes with certain levels of this job, where those whiffs of sudden arrival, political or otherwise, start to trick your mind into thinking that you, too, might be Frankie Valli or some sort of VIP—the opposite of what we are, who are largely nothing more than “little pigs… happily inhaling the sludge and empty calories from President Trump’s cesspool of madness.” (The key to preventing this temptation is being able to shout into the mirror something like, “You’re absolutely nothing, now go out there and tell some news.”)
Now, if Vice President Harris, Governor Tim Walz, and the Democrats go down in this election, they will have no one to blame but themselves. That is not inconsistent with the fact that a few prominent people – in national newsrooms, in Hollywood, and certainly not within the neo-confederate bowels of the Republican Party and the modern-day conservative movement – have covered themselves with minimal glory.
