The state of political journalism in an election year unlike any other

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DAN RICHARDS: From the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University, this is Trending Globally. I'm Dan Richards. Even for an election year, the political news in the United States has been head-spinning over the last few months.

MAN: Never has anything like this happened before. Historic, unprecedented felony conviction of Donald Trump, the 45th president of the United States.

JOE BIDEN: I decided the best way forward is to pass the torch to a new generation.

REPORTER 1: We're covering the attempted assassination of former President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania.

REPORTER 2: Vice President Kamala Harris made history yesterday officially becoming the first woman of color at the top of a major party ticket.

KAMALA HARRIS: I accept your nomination.

REPORTER 3: Law enforcement speaking about what is being investigated as a possible second attempted assassination of former President Trump.

DAN RICHARDS: For avid followers of the news, it has been a roller coaster. And for Americans who maybe don't follow politics as much, but are starting to as the election approaches, well, I don't know how all this sounds to them.

DONALD TRUMP: They're eating the dogs, the people that came in. They're eating the cats.

DAN RICHARDS: So, on this episode, we spoke with someone who could help us make sense of this election as it enters its homestretch. But more than that, this guest is also a deep thinker about how political news works in America, how it's made, how it's consumed, and how it in turn shapes our politics.

Isaac Dovere is a senior reporter for CNN based in Washington covering Democratic politics. Prior to working at CNN, he was a staff writer at The Atlantic. And before that, he served as Politico's Chief Washington correspondent. He is also a Senior Fellow at the Watson Institute, where he teaches a class on political journalism. We talked about how this election is being covered in the press, how political journalism has changed since Trump first ran for president, and how to stay informed without getting totally overwhelmed. Here's our conversation.

Isaac Dovere, thank you so much for coming on to Trending Globally.

ISAAC DOVERE: I'm glad to be here.

DAN RICHARDS: So a lot of people have been worried about the Twenty Twenty-Four campaign season for a long time. Not just the outcome, but the intensity of the race itself and its effect on our country. And now it's here. Here we are. As someone who covers American politics closely, how is this election felt to you compared to recent previous elections? Does it feel meaningfully different in certain ways, or is it a little bit more of the same compared to the last few elections?

ISAAC DOVERE: I think it's fair to say that we've been in existential moment for this country and American politics since Twenty Sixteen. And that has played out in a lot of different ways. But it taps into things that are going on specifically in America and some that are going on everywhere in the world with economic trends, and AI, and immigration, and all of these things that are changing the world that we live in and are reverberating through politics everywhere.

But this election for a long time, you're right, did feel like a major moment in itself, I think, because it looks to people like this would be an election where either Donald Trump will come back into office and be a less restrained, maybe truer version of himself and of the presidency that he wanted. In his first term, he talks a fair amount about how he feels like there were people that were holding him back, or that he didn't do everything that he wanted to do. I think that's only accentuated over the course of his own campaigning.

And truly, I think at its core, a question of are we going in a Trump direction or a not Trump direction? But the change on the Democratic side reflects something else, which is the possibility that Harris has tried to get people to believe in, that she would be what she calls, turning the page or unburdened. And what she means by that is, obviously, in a political sense, not doing more. Trump, though, we're not going back line that she uses at rallies.

But it actually represents a real break from the politics that we've been in for the last 10 years, which has been dominated by Trump, but by people who are older, are 75 and up. Joe Biden will turn 82 this November. And the way he thinks about the world, just like it's true for any of us, is shaped by the world that he was living in then.

It's true for Donald Trump, too, when he talks about make America great again. He's referring to what his idea of America was as he was growing up. And Harris is going to turn 60 in October. So she's not a new generation person, but she is a new generation compared to the generation that's been in power.

DAN RICHARDS: Yeah, so in a number of ways, it seems different from the last time in a little bit hard to predict how it's going to unfold.

ISAAC DOVERE: Yeah, definitely. And look, whatever one thinks of Joe Biden, good or bad, eloquent or eloquent, or whatever else, he has a line that he likes to use a lot, which is that we're at an inflection point for this country where the decisions that we make in the next couple of years will define and shape what happens for decades to come. He says, these don't come along often.

And that's true. That's just true. And it's true in discrete policy ways. What are we going to do about immigration laws in this country? But also what direction we're going in climate change and fighting it? What does the overall economic outlook of America look like? When it comes to Democratic rules and norms, what do those look like?

This will be defining in so many ways. And it really is a different world that we're living in. If you fast forward to two years from now if Harris wins versus if Trump wins.

DAN RICHARDS: You teach a class at the Watson Institute about the relationship between political journalism, and the media, and American politics. And I want to talk to you some about how you think about the relationship between how we get our news about politics, and how it shapes our politics, and how that's all been changing. So let's just start with something.

You reported on recently. You wrote a piece for CNN earlier this month that said that Vice President Harris, and her aides, or many around her tend to be, quote, "dismissive of the value of traditional media." And while her campaign says to expect more appearances in the press soon, at this moment, she's really only taped a handful of interviews and even fewer with traditional what we might call mainstream national outlets.

The same is true for Donald Trump. So what does it say about how political news works in the year Twenty Twenty-Four that both of the main candidates for president don't really feel that compelled to engage in traditional media events?

ISAAC DOVERE: I think what it says is that the attention is more diffuse than ever. That especially in this election with where politics are more broadly, and how people are pretty clearly set in their ways for the most part. The sliver of those undecided voters is smaller than ever. It's always a little bit overblown, the independents, the undecideds. Who's really undecided or who's decided? But they're not saying it out loud. Or who's an independent, but really only votes for Republicans, or really only votes for Democrats.

So that's always less in reality than the conversation about it. But when you think about the people who, at this point, weeks before this election, with everything that has gone down, and that we've all lived through and whatever. That wherever that's left you in thinking about Donald Trump, and wherever that's left you and thinking about Kamala Harris, I do think it's hard for most people to believe that there are folks who are still like, I don't know. Which one? But there are.

Now, if you think about who those people are, are they people who are plugging into any of the traditional news outlets or any of the forget about mainstream any of the slanted news outlets? And so it becomes ever more important for these campaigns to reach out to voters who either are truly undecided or are not engaged, who say, I don't ever vote, or I don't really feel like voting this time.

And it should be said that one of the things that powered Barack Obama in Two Thousand Eight especially, but also in Two Thousand Twelve, is that there are people who showed up only to vote for him. And in the Twenty Ten and Twenty Fourteen midterms, Democrats did very poorly. And they for a while couldn't figure it out. And there are a bunch of reasons why it happened.

But one big factor was that there were voters who turned out for Obama who just didn't show up for Democrats. Likewise, for Donald Trump, there are people who voted in Twenty Sixteen for Donald Trump, who had not voted before. They didn't feel connected to a candidate. And they turned out to vote for him. And then in Twenty Eighteen, the Democrats did really well. Why? Well, in part, because there was a backlash to Trump. But in part, it was that his voters were not showing up to vote for a House candidate, or a governor candidate, or whatever.

In Twenty Twenty, what we saw was that despite polls that showed Joe Biden much farther ahead in the final days than he ended up being, Trump did really well in a lot of places. And part of that seems to be that the polls at that point were not accurately measuring how many only Trump voters there were. My point on this is that you have Obama and Trump both demonstrating what happens when you get voters who are not the usual voters and are not the usual engaged voters to turn out for you.

It won Barack Obama two terms. It won Donald Trump one, and pretty close to a second term. And so that's why Trump ultimately is going the way that he is. And Harris is, too, of trying to reach these voters that are just not the ones that we usually think about.

DAN RICHARDS: And what about the debate earlier in September? Do you get the sense that it was maybe more able to break through to voters who are less engaged or undecided? Do you think it was a helpful display for voters of these two candidates?

ISAAC DOVERE: Well, it was watched by I think the final number was 67 million people. That's a lot of people. It's hard to tell still how much of an effect it had, and what the polling bump, as it's usually talked about, would be. But I should say the initial read from the Harris campaign is that it was going to benefit her because of how things went on stage.

That debate was a big moment for her because she had, at that point, been running for president for 50-ish days. And now, it's a little bit more, obviously. And most people, not just in America, most people in Washington didn't really know much about Kamala Harris before she started running for president. And so there was a lot to that debate of people just tuning in to see what they thought of her and whether they could imagine her in the role of president, which is not just about not knowing her, it's also about being a woman. It's about being a Black woman. It's all those things.

And seeing how she would be toe to toe with Donald Trump, most people at this point, whether for or against have a pretty set view of Donald Trump. But there is a feeling that among some people who were wavering and who any candidate would want to lock down, that Trump did not succeed in doing that. He spoke to his own people, his own voters already. But that there were not really the kinds of things in any of his answers that would take someone who was wavering, or undecided, and put them firmly in his camp.

Whereas for Harris, it does seem like it did some of that. And again, the larger thing that it did was make people feel like, OK, I see a little bit more of her. But yet when you talk to the still undecided voters, they say, OK, well, we saw the convention. We've seen all the stuff she's done in the campaign. We saw the debate. I still have some more questions.

And that's how this is going to go. And that's why there are 6 plus weeks here left in the campaign. And we'll see what happens over the course of them.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to look at one moment in the debate that I think gets to some of these issues of the relationship between politicians and political journalism and how they work together these days. One of the most discussed parts of the debate was around Trump's false statement that Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, had taken to eating residents' domestic pets, dogs, and cats.

DONALD TRUMP: Millions and millions of people to come into our country. And look at what's happening to the towns all over the United States. And a lot of towns don't want to talk. Not going to be Aurora or Springfield. A lot of towns don't want to talk about it because they're so embarrassed by it. In Springfield, they're eating the dogs. The people that came in, they're eating the cats. They're eating the pets of the people that live there.

DAN RICHARDS: The claim has been thoroughly debunked. But Trump and his vice president continue to really push it. And I wonder, what do you make of that moment? Was it a big mistake for Trump to go there, or did it in some way serve his purposes? How do you think about that?

ISAAC DOVERE: Well, Trump believes that whenever we're talking about immigration in any way, that's good for him. And there's outside polling and analysis that suggests that at least some ways he may be right. So he did turn the conversation to that. It is definitely pitting people against immigrants of color. Famously, if you remember when he was president, he would talk about how he doesn't mind immigrants coming from the right countries, but not from shithole countries.

And so the zeroing in on the Haitian population in Ohio does not seem to be a mistake, making people feel like there's something nefarious going on with these people who've come into their community. And it's false. It's just not a true story. This was an important thing, though, that happened because it is a false story that has been pushed with a very political agenda around it.

He and JD Vance, as you say, have stuck to it. But there's been a lot of journalism, whether it was a CNN reporter who's been spending time in Springfield, Ohio, talking to people there, or Wall Street Journal reporters who went a couple of days ago, and followed up with the people who were involved in the initial reports that there may have been pets missing. And found, indeed, this is a made-up story.

It should be the journalism is checking what politicians say. Politicians say things all the time that are not true. And they say it for their own political ends. Trump, he complained after the debate that he had been fact-checked, whereas Harris had not been fact-checked. Well, part of the reason for that, if not, the full reason for that, is that he said more things that were not true.

And that thing he said that there are babies that are being aborted after they're born, which is not true. That's why the fact-checkers jumped in there. The goal there was not to fact-check. But they did jump in at moments where they felt that it was egregious, clearly.

And I think the larger point is that it's been a complicated thing. We talk about this in class, what Trump has done for political journalism, and how it's intensified both the work of journalism and the scrutiny on journalists for not being biased, and that everybody is being held to the same standard, but being held to the same standard means that when someone is egregious in what they're saying falsely, then that means then they have to be checked more.

DAN RICHARDS: Do you think that the political press has learned how to better report on misinformation or lies? Particularly from Donald Trump, in this case, because he seems so effective at using them to promote his issues. Do you sense that journalists have gotten better at that over the last few election cycles, or have they changed their approaches?

ISAAC DOVERE: There have been changes, and I think that there's been an effort to get better at it. I think everybody is more seasoned in this. And there are a lot of things playing out over the course of Twenty Twenty-Four that are playing out differently than they were in Twenty Sixteen and even during the time that he was president. An anomaly, he is a singular figure, I think, in the history of this country, in our culture. I think that was true before he was president, certainly true after he's president.

And it's not like he does. He's one thing and hasn't changed himself over that time. So there is a constant process of adapting and learning. Are

DAN RICHARDS: There any examples that come to mind of journalists, or interactions, or stories that seem to you to have been like a really effective way of dealing with a lie from President Trump?

ISAAC DOVERE: Well, I think that the fact-checking of the debate was one way of doing it. I'm just saying, no, that's not true. But there are a lot of them. And I think some of it is internalized by reporters. It's not necessarily even things that are being explicitly said of just how to approach it when he says something. Even a lot of people who covered Trump in Twenty Fifteen and into Twenty Sixteen as if he were just a novelty and entertainment, have in the time since said that they made mistakes, that he was running for president. And he should have been treated as somebody running for president, and held to that same standard. And everybody else who is running for president.

DAN RICHARDS: I want to look a little bit more also at the changing mediums in the ways Americans are getting their political news. According to a recent Pew poll about a quarter of Americans now regularly get their news from YouTube, about 1/3 get news from Facebook. Roughly half of TikTok users under 30, which is a very coveted demographic for both campaigns seem to rely on the app for their news. What are the biggest ways that this transformation in how potential voters are getting news? What are the biggest ways it's changed the process of reporting on politics?

ISAAC DOVERE: I'm not sure it's changed the process of reporting on politics. Look, user, reader, viewer, whatever attitudes have changed, and habits have changed. And so you have to speak to that. I don't think that there is as big a share of people who are watching an hour-long news program, or a 10,000 word, or reading a 10,000 word article, or whatever it may be, as was the case, let's say, 30 years ago.

When I talk to my students, sometimes I say that the game for print journalists online, whatever, if you're writing, is making the movement with my hand, with my finger. But if you think about the thumb scrolling on a screen, that's what it is. And to keep the thumb moving.

And so you have to make sure that you are pulling someone through the article. And if you think that you're going to produce something, that is going to get someone to watch it for two hours straight without getting up to pee, or playing a game on their phone at the same time, or all the things that we know that we all do. Then you're not being realistic. And so you have to think in those terms.

I was reading about how in a lot of movies and TV shows now the device that is being used a lot is like a flashback. So that there's a lot of action right at the beginning. And then it goes, OK, how did we get here? Because viewers want to know in those first couple of minutes whether they care enough to watch.

And if it's just like the beginning of a story, as all stories begin, then they're zoning out. And so you have to cater to that. It doesn't work to do any of this. If people aren't consuming it, then it's just for your own aggrandizement, essentially.

DAN RICHARDS: Are there ways that these newer mediums that use more algorithmic filters and just shorter form content? Are there ways that they think have benefited us as news consuming public?

ISAAC DOVERE: Yeah, look, we have more information these days about how people are reading and consuming than we ever had, and viewing, and all that stuff. And so you can cater to that better. And I think you have to have some realistic assumptions about it, which is that no matter what I write about whoever Kamala Harris, or Donald Trump, or anybody in politics, it will probably not be as popular online as something that I would write about Taylor Swift, or Selena Gomez, or whatever.

[LAUGHTER]

And so you don't want to be a complete slave to the algorithm. But I think you do want to see do people actually care about that. Again, it can be informative. It's just what you do with that information.

DAN RICHARDS: And at the same time, the audience for a lot of traditional mainstream media outlets with a few exceptions has decreased. And as the audience has decreased, there has also been a long-running, gradual decrease in trust in mass media? According to a long-running Gallup poll, in Twenty Twenty-Three, only 32% of Americans expressed a great deal or fair amount of trust in the mass media. That's a tie for the all-time low in this poll.

And if you listen to voices on social media and more alternative media sources, you'll often hear a skepticism of national media outlets that they are large companies more interested in a profit or selling commercials than they are in spreading the truth. And it can feel more like you're getting a main line to the truth on some smaller, media outlet, or YouTube channel, or something. Is there any way that organizations are able to reassure news consumers that they can be trusted to be reporting the facts no matter where they point? Or is it a lost cause if someone just doesn't believe the organization?

ISAAC DOVERE: To me, it's just do the work. You have the facts, do your best to be correct. If it needs a correction, you make the correction. But the proof is in the pudding. And most of the news organizations, the mainstream, whatever, however you want to traditional legacy news, whatever word you want for it, that have succeeded are those that have excelled at bringing people news facts in a compelling way, but in a way that really does aim to inform the viewers as best as possible or the readers as best as possible.

DAN RICHARDS: What do you tell students at Brown University who are interested in getting into journalism? It's a challenging career in a lot of ways, and it's constantly changing. What advice do you give him, or do you tell them to maybe look somewhere else?

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ISAAC DOVERE: I definitely don't tell them to look elsewhere. I say that you should think about what it is that you want to do, and why you want to do it, and realize that it is a field that is going through a lot of changes because of the economics and because of the technology. But also, when it comes to the work that I do, political journalism, because of the politics. And that it's not clear where things are going to be five years from now.

And they need to go into it with open eyes. But that said, if they are committed to it, interested in it, then there is a lot of opportunity to do things. But I tell them, the standard thing that I say is to not start in Washington, but to get experience elsewhere, and learn how to do reporting outside of the wackiness that is national politics.

I started my career as a local reporter in New York. And I think that was really important for developing my approach to doing reporting. And so I will often say go find some smaller place geographically, by the way, and business-wise than a major news organization in Washington. if you want to report about politics. But really, if you to report about anything, it's good to just get your grounding in a place where you'll have the opportunities to do that.

Smaller newsrooms always are better for junior reporters because there are more opportunities there. You could go to journalism school. A lot of people I know who have gone have gotten a lot of value from it. I never went to journalism school. And I feel like I got a lot of the necessary training that comes at journalism school from being a community newspaper reporter from doing things in those early years, building up that you just can't get if you're in the middle of the national mix.

DAN RICHARDS: And then for viewers of the news, I wonder, do you have any advice for people who want to follow this election? They want to follow it closely. They want to stay informed, but they also want to maybe not be incredibly anxious or lose their sanity in the process. Do you have any recommendations for how to approach consuming the news?

ISAAC DOVERE: It's going to be a sanity testing couple of weeks in between now and November 5. And potentially afterwards, remember, we did not get a winner call to the election in Twenty Twenty until a couple of days afterwards. And that was a weird rough period. I spent it in Delaware waiting to see what would happen with Joe Biden. And then the months afterwards were also pretty intense, building up to January 6, which is, of course, pretty serene day in American history.

So I think if you're paying attention and you care about the results of the election, you're probably not going to have the least anxious period of your life into this fall. However, I think that if you care about the results and you want them to move one way or the other, the political people would say, well, then don't just care about it. Take your anxiety and feed it into pushing things one way or the other. I think that we are too engaged in all of this stuff all the time, whether it's through doomscrolling, or watching TV, or whatever it may be.

And you just create a level of helplessness. And so if you care enough about where it's going, then you can get involved, or just stop reading, or watching for a while, and go to the movies, or whatever it may be. But this is a pretty important election. And I think people should care not just about the final result, but what happens along the way, because it will, even in these final weeks here, continue to define what a presidency Harris or a second term presidency for Trump would look like.

And that's true both of what will happen with them directly, but also indirectly. There are a lot of races going on. What is Kamala Harris going to do as president is a question that is tied, in part, to is the house under Democratic control? Is the Senate under Democratic control? Is it under Republican control? What is Donald Trump's presidency look like? Likewise, it has to do with all of those things, and governors, and what they'll be doing.

And so it's going to be a time when a lot of people will be paying attention to the news. I support that. I will be producing the news or some of the news that they will hopefully be consuming. And it's good to pay attention, to be informed. But it's also good to pace yourself. And again, translate that anxiety into something other than just reading more or just watching more. Because the goal here is not for anybody to completely lose their minds.

DAN RICHARDS: That sounds like a great goal above all. So, Isaac Dovere, thank you so much for coming and talking with us on Trending Globally.

ISAAC DOVERE: Great. Thanks for having me.

DAN RICHARDS: This episode was produced by me, Dan Richards and Zach Hirsch. Our theme music is by Henry Bloomfield. Additional music by the Blue Dot Sessions. If you liked the show, leave us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. It really helps other listeners to find us. And while you're there, be sure to hit the Follow button, too.

If you have any questions, comments, or ideas for guests or topics for the show, send us an email at trendingglobally@brown.edu. Again, that is all one word. trendingglobally@brown.edu. We'll be back in two weeks with another episode of Trending Globally. Thanks.