Fairness and empathy: 2 politics writers on how they anchor their work

Episode transcript

Gail Russell Chaddock: The first Trump win in 2016 sent protesters into the streets and many news organizations into the trenches. The Washington Post tucked a slogan under its masthead: Democracy Dies in Darkness.

But at a price. Trust in news media fell, especially among Republicans and Independents, fell even below approval ratings for Congress, prompting the question: How do we cover a second Trump term?

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Chaddock: This is “Why We Wrote This.” I’m this week’s guest host, Gail Chaddock. We’re talking today with Christa Case Bryant, the Monitor’s senior congressional correspondent, and Cameron Joseph, who joined the Monitor as a senior Washington reporter in June. They join us together for the first time this week, and next. Christa and Cameron, welcome.

Cameron Joseph: Thanks so much for having us. It’s really good to all be in Boston together today.

Chaddock: It is. I think we should notice that all just left an all newsroom meeting about the very subject we’re talking [about] today. So it’s fresh on our minds, not just...

Christa Case Bryant: Yes, a conversation that’s probably happening in many newsrooms across America.

Chaddock: That’s it. After the Trump victory in 2016, one of the big questions was, what’s wrong with Trump voters? Or, did the Russians steal the election? There seems to be an entirely different set of questions after this year’s vote, looking inward. Christa, on the eve of the election, you and Monitor writer Caitlin Babcock wrote an interesting piece: “Why both sides feel this is a tipping point for America.” Why that story at that time?

Case Bryant: Well, I think I was hearing a lot about and seeing a lot covered in the news about why Democrats felt like this was such an existential election. And I felt like maybe it would be helpful for our readers to understand more why conservatives or Republicans or Trump voters or however you want to classify them also felt like the stakes were very high in this election. So Caitlin and I found two characters. I found a Jewish woman in St. Louis who had lived through another tumultuous time in America. The 1960s occurred during her formative years. And she also was raised by an African-American housekeeper who really was almost like a mother figure to her, and that gave her a really interesting perspective as well.

The other person we found was a Hillsdale student in Michigan, a very conservative college, who came from a more conservative viewpoint. And we ended up getting them together on Zoom to talk, all four of us, which was the best part of reporting this whole story.

And it was really interesting to see how they sort of asked each other questions and explored “why do you feel that this is so important? Why are you so concerned about this?” Another way of doing this would have been to talk to a lot of different people, and have one quote from each of them, but you don’t get a sense of cohesion there. You don’t get a sense of, “well, what are all the life experiences and things that you’ve wrestled with that led you to say that one quote?”

Chaddock: And how did you find these two individuals?

Case Bryant: You know, this is like the one good thing that Mark Zuckerberg has done in my life.

Chaddock: [Laughs.]

Case Bryant: Um, I put a note out on Facebook, and someone that I went to college with and hadn’t been in touch with for more than 20 years wrote to me and said: “There’s this woman I’ve gotten to know, she’s fantastic, I think she would be perfect for your story.” And she was.

Chaddock: Cameron, you wrote recently about an unusual public debate within the Democratic Party about the loss of so many working class voters. You called it both soul searching and finger pointing. You wrote: “Some are griping that the party didn’t message effectively enough on the economy, and took for granted Hispanic voters until it was too late. They are also developing whether they fundamentally have too many college educated liberal white people who come off as insincere when talking to blue collar voters of all ethnic backgrounds.” What are you seeing in that debate?

Joseph: So that was a pretty quick turn right after the election. It was kind of the first visceral reaction from Democrats as they were just starting to sort through how they lost to Donald Trump and often what happens when you lose an election is everybody on their side says: “Well, you didn’t talk enough about my thing.” And I think that there’s some evidence of that this time around.

Um, a lot of the folks who worked on Kamala Harris’s race basically fall back to the dual defense of: Everywhere in the world, inflation was high, and parties in power are losing, because inflation is infuriating people. And that is a visceral, a fundamental thing that people look to before they look to ideology or other things. But then there’s this question about whether they did enough messaging to all these groups. And, you know, the response from some of the Kamala folks is: “We had 100 days. Joe Biden did this to us, essentially.” They don’t say that explicitly.

You know, it’s really been a fundamental shift in the party structure. In the 2008 election and the 2012 election, educational attainment had almost no bearing on how you were going to vote. Like how much you made, your racial background, uh, gender, those things, all of it, you know, long been indicators of how people were going to vote. And what we’ve seen over the years is by far the most clear determinative factor of how you’re going to vote is whether you have a college education or not.

And college educated folks have become overwhelmingly Democrat while folks without college degrees have moved successively to the right. And I think Democrats made the misassumption that: “OK, that’s happening with white folks, but that’s not going to happen with our core base voters.” But the big shift we saw according to the exit poll, he got 45 percent of the Hispanic vote. It’s the highest number of any Republican candidate since they started doing exit polls in 1972. It’s striking that Donald Trump likely did the best amongst Hispanics of any Republican candidate, running hard against illegal immigration. He said a lot of really controversial things about Hispanic folks in general, not just undocumented immigrants. And so Democrats are looking at this and trying to figure out “why aren’t they voting for us like they have been before?”

And I think that’s the thing they’re still trying to piece together, but it’s clearly that there’s, there’s a major cultural break, uh, between college educated folks and a lot of folks who aren’t culturally part of a community that’s heavily college educated. They talk and think pretty differently, and they feel like they’re being condescended to, even when it’s in good faith, the tonality of some of the messaging Democrats were putting out there wasn’t good.

Chaddock: Did you sense that there is much greater frustration within Democratic ranks in this loss than there was in the first one?

Joseph: The frustration that I’ve picked up from Democrats is at Joe Biden. But I don’t think they, at least the professional class of Democrats, blame themselves and blame each other in the same way that they did in 2016. They actually feel like they dug out of a huge hole. You have to remember how far back Joe Biden was in this race by the time he dropped out. You know, Donald Trump was looking at...

Case Bryant: Well, and then you had the double whammy of the assassination attempt and Trump making that iconic fist punch in the air.

Joseph: Yeah, I mean, you know, at the Republican National Convention, Republicans thought this was sewn up. They thought it was over. There was an almost, uh, religious tone in terms of the way they were talking about how God had “spared Donald Trump.” And then Kamala Harris came in, and it was a very different race. But it’s really hard to introduce yourself on the national stage and run a competent race when you’re yoked to the top of the ticket. Democrats, I think, they thought that they were stuck with Joe Biden and did as much as they could to protect him and keep quiet how much he had deteriorated. You know, the folks closest to Joe Biden, I think, are the most to blame for that.

But they don’t feel as responsible. They feel like they did the best they could and they came close. And the evidence is there. If you look at the swing states, Kamala Harris did significantly better in the swing states compared to the Joe Biden numbers from four years earlier than she did in a lot of red states and a lot of blue states. You look at the popular vote, there’s almost no difference between the popular vote in the tipping point states in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, as opposed to four and eight years ago, where there’s this huge gap in the popular vote. That’s because California ticked a little to the right. New York and New Jersey swung hard right. Florida swung hard right. Texas swung hard right. All the places they weren’t campaigning, Democrats did much worse than in the places where the Harris campaign and the Trump campaign actually competed head to head. The Harris campaign closed the gap. It just wasn’t enough.

Chaddock: That’s interesting. I remember The New York Times had a remarkable map of counties, all of them, and it had little arrows. Did they tilt right or left?

Joseph: Almost everything.

Chaddock: Almost everything was right. How did the party of the working man lose the working man? It’s a good question.

Christa, on the other side of that, one of the things I greatly admired about your reporting way back in 2016 was that you, from the start, saw beyond the MAGA hats, and treated Trump voters as individuals and with respect. Didn’t you and your editors define a specific beat to understand Trump voters about that time?

Case Bryant: Essentially, yes. Um, for the better part of the first year of the Trump administration, I was acting as our politics editor. This was a brand new field to me. I was getting up to speed learning from our veteran correspondents in Washington and elsewhere.

Chaddock: Coming off of Jerusalem.

Case Bryant: Coming off of Jerusalem, where there was also a very polarized conflict. And someone said to me, “you know, I think the experience you had there, shuttling back and forth between different perspectives, different folks will be really useful as America becomes more divided and more polarized.” At the time, I thought there couldn’t possibly be any similarities between what I did over there and here, but I actually did more and more start to recognize some of the same sort of tribalistic attitudes and fear based on ignorance about the other.

In September 2017, I started a new beat, which we called the heartland beat, and most of the areas I’ve traveled to were largely, you know, Trump-supporting areas. And it wasn’t necessarily just about Trump supporters or politics or whatever. I did a lot of stories about, sort of, what are the issues that these communities care about and are wrestling with. And it was just a fantastic two years of an education for me, really.

I went way deep into a forest with a Utah sheriff who was mad that, you know, those lands were still federally controlled, and so they weren’t allowed to cut out all the dead wood, which is like tinder for forest fires. And I went out with a guy in Oklahoma who was head of a water district, when he took over, like 50 percent of their water was getting lost through leaks, so he decided he was going to fix this. And he’d go out in the middle of the night when he figured almost nobody would be taking showers or running their washing machine, and he would just listen for rushing water in the pipes. And, he was able to find almost all of the leaks and reduce that loss from 50 percent down to less than 15 percent. And it became a model for the state and even other water districts around the country.

Um, another one was Michigan farmers who the previous year had lost something like $400,000 worth of crops. Just rotted in the field, because they couldn’t find any workers who wanted the job of harvesting. So they were participating in a new visa program that the Trump administration had set up to bring Mexican workers over for agricultural reasons. And, you know, learned so much about farming and how politics affects very hands-on things like picking pumpkins or whatever, you know. Um, so it was an incredible experience for me and I think what I learned through that is just to ask more questions, and make sure I’m getting the kind of nuanced view of things that I saw in that reporting.

One particular example that stands out is I was doing a story in Ohio about employers having difficulty finding workers. And one of the places I went to was a welding company, where they had resorted to hiring recently released felons from prison because they just couldn’t find anyone else. Somebody mentioned that one of the workers had been pictured on the front page of a major national newspaper. And he was kind of a guy that, like, stood out in that room, you know, as someone, he didn’t come across as educated or articulate or kind of put together as everyone else in the room. I felt like that was such a disservice to people who read that story. If they feel like this is the symbol of what all these welders are like. My sense is that most of the people there probably were Trump voters. But I felt like that tendency to caricature the type of person who was supporting Trump was unhelpful because it, that’s part of the reason why I think people were taken by surprise in 2016, and to maybe a lesser extent also this year.

Um, on the other hand, on the day of January 6, which was my third full day on the job as our congressional correspondent, I was in the building. I was in the Senate press gallery when they locked the doors and said, you know: “You’re either, stay in here or you’re on your own out there.” And so I got evacuated with a bunch of other journalists, and we ended up streaming out with all the senators as well and being taken to an “undisclosed secure location,” where I had many hours to sit and think about what was happening that day and why, and what my role was as a journalist.

And, you know, I thought of that guy in Ohio and another one similar situation in a diner in West Virginia, like the most stereotypical thing you can think of, who I didn’t quote because what he was saying was so crazy, you know. And I didn’t want to caricature all Trump voters to be like this guy. But then I thought, sitting there in the basement, as I watched these videos on Twitter of the people storming up the walls and crashing into the Capitol, I thought: “Was that the right thing to do? Like, did I miss something? If readers only read me, would they have seen this coming?”

And ... I think I could have done a better job in some regards in highlighting some of the strains of thinking within the larger Trump movement. And I think there’s a way of doing that that doesn’t say: This is how everybody who votes for Trump thinks. So it’s challenging, you know, and I don’t know that we’re necessarily better off for having been through one Trump administration. Um, I’ve seen a tendency within our field in the last month or so of: “Oh, I guess we just didn’t tell people strongly enough how bad Trump was, because they didn’t get the message and they still voted for him anyway.” That’s one interpretation. I think another thing to think about is: “Did the way we cover him actually maybe cause people to distrust us.” It’s an incredibly rich, fertile ground for investigating as journalists.

Chaddock: That’s a really great question. When you mentioned the photograph, I was thinking of my first year with the Monitor. Being in the newsroom, you get to see all aspects of it, including the photographers going over a thousand photos that they’ve taken of an event, and how easy it is to find a photo where the subject looks drooling, and eyes half shut, and not entirely there. And then others where they look noble and, uh...

Case Bryant: The same exact subject, right?

Chaddock: Exactly the same subject, the same speech, the same event, entirely different images. If you were gonna go back today on that beat, what would you do?

Case Bryant: The heartland beat?

Chaddock: Yeah.

Case Bryant: Not stop it? Haha. Keep going.

Chaddock: Both of you have heard reports, or seen the polls that say that trust in the media is plunging. Did you actually experience that in your reporting? And what can you tell us about that?

Joseph: I’ve absolutely experienced that. I find that, when I am just at political events talking to normal people, they immediately ask me: “What publication do you write for?” Sometimes they’ll pull out their phones to look at it if they’re not familiar, like to see if it’s biased in their eyes one way or the other. Uh, and then refuse to talk to me if they feel like it’s a publication that isn’t aligned with their worldview. Um, this happens more on the right than the left, but not exclusively. It’s tough. And, you know, look, I think there’s a lot of self-reflection, bordering on self-flagellation in journalism right now about how we cover America and Americans. And I think a lot of the things that are being said are true and need to be taken into account. I also think that the president elect of the United States has spent a decade attacking our profession and criticizing us and saying that we are the enemy and just there to lie.

If you believe Donald Trump, it kind of doesn’t matter what we do. It’s really hard to break through if somebody you trust is telling you that we are the enemy. And I’m not saying it’s every Republican, every Trump supporter. But when they meet you and they don’t know who you are, or they meet you and you’re at a publication that Trump has attacked, that is a visceral thing, and they are guarded, even if they’re willing to talk to you. You know, the amount of times that a conservative Republican I talked to and I send the story and they’re like surprised that they feel like I treated them fairly. I think that’s really good. But that’s a one-on-one battle that’s just an unwinnable battle when you’re talking about the power of the presidency versus, you know, one story emailed and interaction like that.

Chaddock: Let’s go to the question we started out with: How do we, going forward, cover a second Trump term? The Columbia Journalism Review had a piece I really liked. It talked about trying to be a really good international reporter, as if you’re going into a new country. You’re curious about it, and you approach it with some humility. How do you think that would work as a new template for covering the half of the country that journalists may not spend a lot of time in?

Case Bryant: I feel so fortunate that I had that experience as an international reporter when I was based in Jerusalem because it gave me three years to think about some of these questions of bias in a very polarized, high intensity environment, but in a way where I didn’t feel like I had a personal stake in how things turned out. You know, I could tell people “I’m not Jewish, I’m not Muslim, I’m here to understand.” And that was just such a good proving ground for thinking through some of my ideals of journalism about can I really be objective. When you’re in the middle of a conflict, and you have friends on both sides, like it tugs at your heartstrings in ways that you need to acknowledge.

But I think what it taught me is, be aware of your own biases and do everything you can to not let those get in the way of you getting the full story. And don’t be too quick to dismiss someone as not able to shed new light on something, whatever you might think of them personally, or think of their views. Sometimes truth can come through really unusual venues.

Chaddock: Cameron, what do you think?

Joseph: I mean, I think another thing that foreign correspondents often do well and better than we do internally is, recognizing when something dramatic is shifting within the higher power of government. It is important to be clear eyed about what is happening and not assume that the American system of governance is necessarily inherently more stable or different than other places. The idea that it can’t happen here I think is something that people intrinsically believe just because it hasn’t. And I think that, something that foreign correspondents are often quicker to realize, like, this isn’t normal. This mirrors other things that have happened in other democratic countries that are backsliding in other places.

More broadly, I think there’s a lot of talk about: journalists should do X, or journalists should do Y, or journalists need to be impartial, journalists need to take a stand for democracy, and journalists need to learn how the Trump voters are voting and, you know, Trump is right about this and no one gives him a fair shake. I think it’s really important that all of this exists. And it’s really important for readers to read across the political spectrum, especially things that challenge your own worldview. Please read and subscribe to The Christian Science Monitor, and also some other places!

Chaddock: Christa, you used a word that isn’t often used in journalism, “moral.” What did you mean by it and how do you think it is important at this time?

Case Bryant: Well, I think in the Middle East context, you know, I remember having a conversation with one of our Palestinian friends about like: Why don’t you call where we live Palestine? And I was like, “Oh, well, we have a style guide. And the style guide says, like, according to these lines, you know, we call this Israel and we call this the Palestinian territories.” And it’s like: “But it’s Palestine. It’s our land.”

You know, and this was during the 2014 Gaza war, and there was just so much killing and destruction. And, you know, I knew sort of cerebrally the Israeli point of view: “We can’t let terrorists attack our country, like Hamas has been doing with throwing rockets over the border. And there had been a few kidnappings of Israeli teenagers just before the war started.” And um, you know and from the Palestinian standpoint, it’s like: “We just can’t keep getting attacked over and over and over. We’ve been fighting this conflict for so many years now. Why isn’t the world coming to our rescue?” And then on the other side, we had a close Israeli friend who was, he was a rabbi, you know, and thought deeply about moral issues, and came to totally different conclusions than my Palestinian friend. And so I don’t feel like I have all the answers on that yet. It’s something I still grapple with.

But I think at a very minimum, you need to acknowledge that there are huge moral questions involved in what you’re covering, and at least give readers enough well-reported information that they can come to well-informed moral decisions themselves.

Joseph: I think it is really important work that we’re doing to help people understand other people. And we’re increasingly siloed in communities where people tend to think relatively similarly to each other, and have relatively similar life experiences. And one great way to break out of that and realize what other people down the road are thinking and experiencing is to read and see what they are going through. And I think it’s incumbent on us as journalists, and especially at this publication, something that I personally take very seriously is to tell people’s stories fairly and with empathy.

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Chaddock: Christa and Cameron, thank you for joining us for this podcast. And thanks to our listeners. Join us next week when we will take a closer look at the agenda of the first 100 days and prospects for moving cabinet nominations through a closely divided Senate. You can find more, including our show notes, with a link to the stories we discussed in this podcast, at csmonitor.com/WhyWeWroteThis. This episode was hosted by me, Gail Chaddock, edited and produced by Clay Collins and Jingnan Peng and Mackenzie Farkus. Sound engineer Alyssa Britton, with original music by Noel Flatt. Produced by The Christian Science Monitor, copyright 2024.