Democrats’ convention in Chicago undoubtedly provided a contrast of sorts with the nominating convention I had covered in Milwaukee the month prior, where Donald Trump and his champagne-vomit-belching cultists were promising — in their own pornographically violent words — a version of Homer Simpson’s line about how his “campaign is a disaster… I hate the public so much. If only they’d elect me — I’d make them pay!”
Now, with the two party conventions in the rearview mirror, the general election between Vice President Kamala Harris and Trump has kicked off in earnest. There are about two months left until Election Day in November and the stakes are — as everyone is likely dead-tired of repeating — insurmountably high. The fact that this has become a cliche to say doesn’t make it any less true. But roaming the halls of the Democratic National Convention last week, there was another feeling I found myself unable to escape. It has continued gnawing at me.
Much of what I witnessed and heard about during my time in Chicago reinforced my preexisting beliefs that far too many so-called elite members of my profession — national political media scribes who fancy themselves as speaking truth to power, but more often just speak words to financially destructive Google algorithms — are mollycoddled hogs who are doing everything they can to fail to meet the enormity of this moment.
There was the bristling levels of “traditional” media resentment towards the access and treatment the Democratic organizers and the Harris campaign afforded to social media influencers. There were times when I thought I had been teleported back to 2010, when we as an industry were debating how to treat bloggers. The presence of an army of influencers or online personas made perfect sense in that that the stated priority was “media access,” and influencers are objectively part of the media — and many of these social media stars have significantly larger audiences than dozens of egghead reporters combined. Though many of these influencers do not maintain the august fact-finding standards of publications that helped justify the Iraq War, they should individually qualify for media credentials.
There was a pulsating sense of entitlement and unearned self-love that defined many of the assembled writers and media personalities. And there was a fundamental lack of understanding about how to deal with not getting exactly what you want, when you want it. Due to the high level attendance at this year’s Democratic convention — from the public, the press, and others — there were, of course, moments of logistical clusterfuckery.
I, too, was displeased by the long lines on day one of the 2024 DNC, a displeasure the Trump campaign has giddily attempted to exploit. And on the fourth night — just hours prior to when Harris delivered her history-marking acceptance speech as a Black and Asian-American woman — there was a period when access to both unassigned and assigned media seats were abruptly cut off, apparently due to a level of overcrowding that wasn’t safe. I eventually got in to see Harris and others (not Beyoncé… sad.) speak, but not before enduring the sights and maddening sounds of multi-lanyard-wearing, sweat-flecked envoys of the U.S. media elite berating the lowest-level convention volunteers to let them into their seats at once.
I would be naming names at this point, if I could tell you with certainty who any of these people were, other than the fact that their respective demeanors entirely suggested that they were accustomed to bellowing: “Do you know who I am?”
One egregious case featured a man who went on for minutes scolding a young volunteer at a media entrance about how he did, in fact, have an assigned seat. The volunteer, citing instructions he clearly had not written himself, gently stated that he couldn’t let anyone in at that time, unless they had a confirmation or an email showing their assigned seating. This journalist repeatedly insisted his name was on “the list,” which this volunteer politely stressed, multiple times, he did not have. The journalist huffily asked to speak to the manager — The Manager! Christ alive! — not long before storming off. (Not that it matters, but Rolling Stone made sure to stick around to apologize to the kid on other people’s behalf, adding that we knew it was not his fault.)
It may have not occurred to this man that if he were not so invested in sitting in the least desired, highest section of the arena, where the press could barely see Harris when she spoke, he could have watched the speech on C-SPAN or on the arena TVs dotted throughout the halls. His view would have been much better, and I doubt it would have altered his coverage of the acceptance speech all that much.
So much of doing this job, journalism, the right way hinges only on having some sense of moral clarity and not being an asshole to people who clearly don’t deserve it. It is a wonder of the modern world how many in the pampered ranks of this profession can only find it within themselves to publicly flunk this 101-level test, again and again.
And throughout the four-day nominating process, holy shit was there ambient complaining about how the vice president has avoided doing lengthy sit-downs with legacy news outlets, ever since President Joe Biden dropped out and hurled the baton at a successor who could form semi-cogent sentences on the fly.
Naturally, I — as a member of a news organization that values it when famous or influential people grant us on the record Q&As — would personally prefer it if Harris sat down for tough, long grillings with all these media outlets, and I think she should do it now. (I will note that even though Rolling Stone had our own Harris interview that ran online in June, we would also like another one now that she is the 2024 nominee, so if her senior campaign staff are reading this parenthetical, you know where to find me. I have questions about the war on drugs, drone warfare, and many other topics.)
But complaining about literally any of these inconveniences to any meaningful degree is, in this one political reporter’s judgment, an act of decadent misery at a time when our readers and peers simply cannot afford it.
Anyone who knows me can tell you that I am not someone who naively views The Media as a sworn vanguard of truth and inner beauty. I am not someone who thinks it is my duty to try to bully the big-name, straight-news-gathering operations into “picking sides” or becoming a cushy propaganda mill for Vice President Harris or her current boss, whatever his name is.
What I am saying is that much of the mainstream political press has been (correctly) programming its audience to believe this year’s race is not a normal presidential election, and then too many in that media elite get upset when the public points out that they’re covering it like a normal presidential election, armed with the exact same petty obsessions and pathologies. It is not, per se, an angry readership screaming at us that the stakes are too high for this shit — we are the ones who’ve been yelling at them, for at least a year now, that the stakes of this presidential contest are that high!
Of course, the sitting vice president and her campaign are not, by any means, paragons of virtue — far from it. At the end of the day, she is a mere hood ornament on the contemporary Democratic Party that, through incompetence and morally criminal passivity, allowed Trump to storm into the White House and define a whole generation of American politics, policy, and judicial dominance. And yet, sitting on the other coin-toss of this presidential election is a political party and leader who are essentially promising, should they reconquer power in November, to turn the federal government into the blood orgy scene from Event Horizon, if only every cannibal space-demon in that scene were played by the villain from Happy Gilmore.
I am being mildly hyperbolic, but Trump and his expected government-in-waiting have been making blatantly authoritarian, explicitly bloodlusting promises out in the open for all to hear for years, so it has been getting a little harder to ignore, as a credentialed member of the news media. On top of all of that, Trump has stridently vowed that if he doesn’t get his way in this election (because among other factors, he’s a man trying his damndest to stay out of prison), he and his party are prepared to steal it.
It is excruciating — annoying, even — to have to hear politicians and the news media insist that this year’s is The Most Important Election Of Our Lifetimes, because all those same figures have been saying this for the decades for which I’ve been around.
Regardless, when we are at a juncture in history like the one we’re at, it is critical as ever that supposedly productive comrades of the Fourth Estate ask themselves as calmly as we can: Why is it that so many normal-brained people — who aren’t degenerate MAGA psychos — seem to think we are falling down on the job, fixating on ourselves and our own comfort levels and “access,” and absolutely not earning back their trust, if we even had it to begin with.
I should conclude these 2,000 words of disgruntled navel-gazing with an admission that I am, very likely, part of the problem — given that I, too, am an Elite Media Shithead.
While sprinting around Chicago during convention week, I spent far too much figuring out which after-parties I could fleece my way into, and how many Hollywood and musical A-listers I could con into throwing back a drink with me and pretending to care what I had to say. At one of the late-night Thursday celebrations, I was given (surely it must have been an accident) a VIP bracelet, which allowed me to get “yes” answers to ridiculous questions like “Can you take me backstage to meet the rapper Common before he performs?” I was accompanied by two good friends — talented journalists who were there to keep my head on straight and remind me how lame I was acting, as I pretended not to relish each second of proximity to celebrity and overindulgence that this evening permitted.
I have long understood the seduction that comes with certain echelons of this job, where those cocaine whiffs of surprising access, whether political or otherwise, start tricking your own brain into thinking you, as well, might be Frankie Valli or some kinda big shot — as opposed to what we largely are, which are little more than “little piglets… gleefully inhaling the muck and empty calories at the trough of President Trump’s lunacy.” (The key to forestalling the effect of that seductiveness is being able to shout at yourself in the mirror mantras such as: “You’re a fucking nobody, now go out there and break some news.”)
Now, if Vice President Harris, Gov. Tim Walz, and the Democrats faceplant in this election, they will have no one to blame but themselves. That is not mutually exclusive from the reality that vanishingly few people of any prominence — in national newsrooms, in Hollywood, and definitely not within the neo-Confederate entrails of the modern-day Republican Party and conservative movement — have covered themselves in the slightest glory.
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