A trusted anchor for the CBS Evening News and a defining figure of the 20th century, Walter Cronkite was the man whose voice could be heard reporting the nightly news in Americans’ living rooms for decades.
Since his death, Cronkite — or “Uncle Walter,” as he was affectionately called — has become symbolic of a bygone era in American journalism when news used to feel objective, when the public trusted more of it. Eulogizing Cronkite at his funeral in 2009, President Barack Obama excoriated modern journalists for focusing too much on “instant commentary and celebrity gossip and the softer stories that Walter disdained, rather than the hard news and investigative journalism he championed.
While I agree that we could all benefit from the press doing a little more Cronkite and a little less “Man Bites Dog,” it’s not as if hard journalism died with Uncle Walter. The CBS Evening News still exists, after all, and its current host Nora O’Donnell is no less objective, no less thorough and no less trustworthy than her predecessors. The only difference is that today, essentially no one watches the evening news.
The way I see it, the mainstream media’s oft-cited decline has had less to do with a change in the content of reporting and more to do with a change in the attitudes of the American public. Far from being disillusioned by bias, data suggests that the American people are actively choosing to disengage from political news en masse. And among those still paying attention, social media is the most popular source of news, followed by opinion-based cable news shows.
Besides worsening political polarization, these shifts in media consumption have made it next to impossible for political campaigns to actually reach voters where they are. Increasingly, experimentation and risk-taking are the name of the game for political strategists who want their message to break through to the public. And the current campaign for president is no different. Both Donald Trump and Kamala Harris have maintained agile social media operations and appeared as guests on non-political podcasts in an effort to reach younger, more disengaged voters.
Harris sat down for one such interview Oct. 6 with Alex Cooper, host of the hit podcast “Call Her Daddy.” Cooper and Harris covered a wide range of topics, from womanhood and the modern family to reproductive rights and sexual assault. Many of the issues covered had largely been left out of national news coverage of the election, providing interesting insights about Harris’s background and perspective.
Astonishingly, though, many D.C. pundits criticized Harris for her appearance on the podcast, dismissing the show as vacuous and accusing the vice president of avoiding the media. To be certain, Harris has rather notably declined to sit down for extended interviews with print news outlets like the New York Times — a departure from tradition for a major-party candidate. But to say Harris is ducking the press is absurd. The same week Harris’s interview with Cooper aired, she held her own in a tough interview on 60 Minutes and responded to voter questions at a town hall hosted by Univision. She also sat down with Fox News’s Bret Baier a few weeks later, standing her ground in unfriendly territory. The only reason Harris isn’t chomping at the bit to sit for a three-hour print interview with a beltway dinosaur is because hardly anyone reads print media anymore, let alone undecided voters.
For what it’s worth, Cooper took her job as an interviewer seriously. She began the episode by addressing her “Daddy Gang” directly, telling them that while her show was not usually political in subject matter, she felt she had a duty, as the host of a podcast largely for and about women, to discuss women’s issues ahead of the election. Cooper also made clear that an invitation to interview had been extended to the Trump campaign. (Evidently, though, he has yet to accept it.) In these and other moments, I was struck by Cooper’s unyielding seriousness. As a non-member of the “Daddy Gang,” I was unfamiliar with her show — and perhaps I underestimated her.
But I also couldn’t help but feel like the world was asking too much of Cooper by insisting that she play the role of “journalist” while sitting opposite Harris.
The problem here, after all, is not with the press, the candidates or even the podcast circuits. It’s with the American public. Certainly, this new media environment often blurs the line between information and entertainment. But that’s only because the American public increasingly has a strong preference for the latter. Campaigns have thus found themselves in the impossible position of having to disguise vital messaging about our democracy in attention-grabbing packaging — like smothering a dog’s heart-worm pills in peanut butter.
This is worrisome and deeply cynical, I know. But it is also empowering. Because if we are the problem, that means we can be the solution, too. The CBS Evening News, of course, is still on. Every night. Usually, it’s no longer than half an hour — which is (on average) about three-fourths of an episode of “Call Her Daddy.”
That’s a small price to pay for an informed citizenry. I say we pay it.
Contact Beatrice Neilson at neilson@oxy.edu
