We are in the midst of watching the collective Washington media commit journalistic malpractice all over again this election cycle, with Nancy Pelosi taking over Hillary Clinton's starring role as their lead obsession while they give the GOP a virtual pass. In 2016, Donald Trump broke nearly every norm imaginable, from not releasing his taxes, to proposing a ban on people of certain religions from entering the country, to never really even bothering to lay out a cohesive platform beyond, "I alone can fix it." But it was Hillary's emails that captured that imaginations of political journalists and dominated the media scape, according to a meticulous study of press coverage reported on last year by Columbia Journalism Review.
In just six days, The New York Times ran as many cover stories about Hillary Clinton’s emails as they did about all policy issues combined in the 69 days leading up to the election...
During that period all the savvy Washington reporters knew Trump would never win, so why devote serious coverage to him? In fact, according to detailed findings by the CJR report, Clinton's email server and the hacking of her campaign and the Democratic National Committee got 25,000 more sentences—65,000 vs. 40,000—than all of Trump's scandals combined, including his bankruptcy, Trump University, Trump Foundation, Gold Star bullying, Access Hollywood tapes, sexual harassment and assault allegations, and his race-baiting nativist statements about Mexicans and Muslims, etc.
Fast forward to 2018. The man they said would never win is now president, majority control of the House (and perhaps the future of the republic) hangs in the balance this fall, and the new media fascination on the Democratic side is whether Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi will be the downfall of Democrats this cycle, and/or remain leader of the Democratic caucus. It's a narrative Republicans are pushing, partly out of a dearth of midterm messages that can move voters. There's no evidence it will play well in the swing districts Republicans need to defend to keep their majority—a CNN poll this week found Pelosi ranked dead last among 10 issues registered voters said were driving their choices this cycle.
But not to be dissuaded, news outlets are hyping her as a liability on the campaign trail, along with previewing the power struggle that could ensue should Democrats take back the House this fall. The Washington Post devoted two articles in the past couple weeks to GOP attack ads featuring Pelosi and invoking the word "liberal" as a smear (a Pelosi variation). NBC News is steadily updating a poll of Democratic nominees, candidates, and incumbents who say they will oppose Pelosi for Speaker if Democrats win the majority. The New York Times featured an article this week about a member of her own leadership team, Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina, waiting in the wings in case Pelosi "falls short" of the 218 votes she'll need to become speaker.
Is this a legitimate news story worthy of coverage? Sure it is. Republicans are clinging to it and they certainly hope to make it an issue that could, at the very least, excite their base. But the question about coverage of Hillary's emails was never whether it was a legitimate news story—it was. The issue was whether news outlets were putting the same effort into covering the Republican side of the equation. In Clinton's case, they clearly weren't. Sure, Trump was getting wall-to-wall Dumpster fire coverage, shooting off at the mouth about whatever he liked, inviting Russia to hack our elections, jeering at the cameras. But serious inquiries into his policies and the many scandals surrounding his professional and personal life were scant compared to the emphasis on Clinton's emails.
So I ask you: Where's the poll of GOP candidates being asked about who they would support as Speaker? They've got a leadership fight brewing and it legitimately involves a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, who is currently embroiled in a sexual abuse scandal and yet had the audacity to announce his bid for the Speakership anyway. It's not a small scandal—more than a handful of former Ohio State University wrestlers have stepped forward to say Jordan turned a blind eye to abuse being routinely perpetrated by a team doctor. It's now the subject of multiple lawsuits and a federal investigation by the Department of Education. Honestly, if reporters were really doing their jobs, Jordan might have resigned by now under the media glare, instead of brazenly seeing a window of opportunity.
And yet, even as the question about whether Ohio Democrat Danny O'Connor supported Pelosi became a big issue in the special election last week for that state’s 12th Congressional district, Republican Troy Balderson's refusal to say whether he would back Jordan for Speaker went largely unnoticed by the Washington media. Of course, O'Connor's admission that he would vote for "whoever the Democratic Party puts forward” came after MSNBC's Chris Matthews practically harassed him into a confession of party loyalty even though O'Connor had already said "No," he wouldn't vote for Pelosi. But on the other side of the aisle, Balderson simply refused to answer the question put to him by a Columbus paper, The Dispatch. Is it any wonder that the video of one candidate backed into a corner on cable TV became a bigger flash point than written questions submitted by a local outlet? No, it's not.
But when Neera Tanden, president of the Center for American Progress, pointed out on MSNBC last Friday that no Washington journalists were asking Balderson whether he would support a hometown guy implicated in a sex scandal for Speaker, journalist Chuck Todd of Meet The Press was quick to laugh it off.
"Nobody beyond Jim Jordan and Mark Meadows think Jim Jordan is a realistic candidate for Speaker, in all fairness," he shot back with a snicker. Does that rationale sound familiar to anyone: He doesn't have a chance of being elected and all the savvy journalists know it, so why should we bother? How'd that work out in 2016?
But let's review this logic—on the one hand, Washington journalists think Pelosi is such a huge drag on her party that she's worth polling every Democratic candidate about; but on the other hand, the fight for leadership of the Republican caucus isn't worthy of serious inquiry, presumably because they won’t be in the majority?
And just to be clear, Jordan isn't the only point of interest surrounding the GOP Speakership. The entire GOP leadership team, including California Rep. Kevin McCarthy, screwed over nearly two dozen vulnerable House Republicans this summer who were trying to force a vote on immigration measures. McCarthy and Speaker Paul Ryan promised them they would get a vote if they didn't force the issue and then scrapped it after the rebellion was quashed.
Two of the leaders of that effort, Reps. Carlos Curbelo of Florida and Jeff Denham of California, are among the GOP's most vulnerable incumbents this fall. Seems like their constituents might be interested in who they plan to support for Speaker if Republicans retain control. Same goes for Reps. Will Hurd of Texas and David Valadao of California. Not convinced? Here's a few other considerations.
The point is, there's plenty of reasons to be asking tough questions about the leadership fight on the Republican side of the aisle, and arguably a much larger swath of vulnerable Republican incumbents have a lot riding on who they might support if voters keep them in office. So why aren't we seeing the journalist feeding frenzy on the right that we are on the left?
The problem isn't one story—even the best journalists with the most meticulous editors can get one story wrong. To err is human. The problem is the snowball effect that happens when journalists collectively get caught in a cycle of pushing one narrative over another. This can also happen in one very consequential newsroom and did, I believe, at the New York Times during the 2016 election. And it can easily catch fire in Washington, D.C., where group think is pervasive and everyone strains to be "smart" by perpetuating the conventional wisdom. I lived there and I reported there on high-stakes legislation during the critical two-year window in which President Obama's legacy was carved out in 2009 and 2010. In most cases, being a truly independent thinker as a journalist or as a political operative does not win you friends or advance your career in Washington. So it's easy for a particular narrative to catch fire there and burn through the city, often mowing down more insightful and even more consequential inquiries in its process.
Think about where that got us in 2016. Can you even imagine what reporters might have found if they had devoted the same resources to uncovering Trump's endless malfeasance that they devoted to Hillary's server and the trickle of incredibly mundane Podesta emails that WikiLeaks released in the final weeks of the campaign? Maybe the country wouldn't be awash in headlines about the incessant contacts between Trump associates and Russians, and Trump's raft of hush-money payments to women with whom he's allegedly had affairs. It's hard to imagine that more of these stories couldn't have been unearthed in advance of the election if newsrooms hadn't been so convinced Clinton was going to win and so dedicated to chewing over the email story until it had become so soggy and pliable it bore no resemblance to its original features.
Political journalists undoubtedly play a part in shaping the outcomes of elections, and 2016 was a cautionary tale in what can go wrong when they let biased assumptions drive their coverage. Unfortunately, right now, Washington media appear to be blindly racing down the same rabbit hole they did last election, which is exactly how we ended up in the dangerously distorted reality we are now living.