Yes, The Media Needs To Talk To Conservatives

The views of right wing voters are newsworthy

Awhile back, I did a post titled “The Media Is Going To Talk To People You Don't Agree With”. It was about 60 Minutes talking to detransitioners, but I think it’s time I talk about the broader principle involved. Michelle Goldberg, a columnist I really like, wrote a piece in which she talked to Canadian protesters, and some liberals on Twitter blew their stack.

The criticism that they are making of Goldberg is commonly made. The Times, it is said, goes on “Cletus Safaris” (a term I find pretty offensive, but that’s the Internet), where they talk to conservative voters in coffee shops, and supposedly sanitize their offensive views and even sometimes get rolled by a conservative activist posing as a voter.

It is a really weird criticism. Let’s get the basics out. The views of different blocs of voters are newsworthy. Traditionally, journalists, like political campaigns, have a couple of different ways to find out what people think. One is to take polls. Polls, of course, are plagued by various accuracy problems, they are often sensitive to the wording of the question, and they can easily be manipulated by activists to make it sound like things have a lot more support than they have. Famously, polls weren’t very good at predicting President Trump’s election in 2016. But also, even if polls are accurate, they are general: they can tell you what percentage of the public supports overturning Roe v. Wade, but they can’t tell you very much detail about people’s beliefs below the topline numbers. To do that, you need to talk to voters.

A “focus group” is a fancy, somewhat controlled experiment in talking to people, but you can also get much of the same information by just talking to people individually, especially if you are good interviewer (and journalists often are). So while politicians will generally convene focus groups, reporters will just go out to places where voters are and interview them. I realize that there’s a certain amount of silliness built into this process- hanging out at the bowling alley, going to the greasy spoon diner, heading over to the shooting range, etc. But the basic notion is you go to places where ordinary people are and talk to them, and if you talk to enough of them, you may be able to piece together some detailed narratives about how people feel.

If you think this is all very unscientific woo, I would indicate to you that nobody’s really invented a better way to do this, and everyone in the political world, Republicans and Democrats, believes in it. All hard fought campaigns employ focus groups and talk to voters, and they all think it yields useful information- like, for instance, that a voter doesn’t mind having to wear a mask at work but worries about her kid having to wear one all day at school. That’s useful for political campaigning and posturing.

So reporters are doing nothing more than gathering information about what voters think. What could be wrong with that? Well, you run into the racket that is the media criticism industry. As I discussed in that earlier piece, the media criticism industry isn’t about how to actually run a newspaper and make editorial choices: most of those media critics have no workable theory at all about how to make such decisions. Rather, it’s about the fact that there’s an enormous demand among political hobbyists for criticism of the media, for saying that their political problems are the fault of the Big Bad Lamestream Media and not a result of the unpopularity of their political positions, and, also, just saying that whatever it is that they don’t like to read shouldn’t have run in the paper.

And this is an example of the latter sort of criticism- and the “media critics” have run with it. Every time the New York Times talks to conservative voters, they blow up and say how outrageous it all is. They never really give a cogent reason for this. But it’s pretty clear that what is actually going on is simply that Democratic partisans have extremely low opinions of Republican voters, who they think irresponsibly at least give aid and comfort to and perhaps even openly support fascism and white supremacy. “Why should you legitimize these people and talk to them and write about their concerns?”

But the fact that some people don’t want to read a story doesn’t mean it isn’t news. And what conservatives think is news, just like what liberals think is news. When Donald Trump was elected, it was such a surprising and unique event in American history that of course the media was going to ask itself “how did this happen?” and go try to find out by talking to voters who voted for Trump. And- by the way- of course those voters, like all voters, would probably spin their own choices in the best possible light. But remember something about spin: just because someone is spinning doesn’t mean the underlying point does not have validity. All politicians spin, and all lawyers spin. And yet, beneath the spin, sometimes, they are right on the merits.

And further, even if the conservative voters are wrong and are understating their own support for bad causes, what they are saying would still be newsworthy. The arguments that are presented in politics are themselves newsworthy. The fact that the Republican Party made an appeal in 2016 to disaffected Democrats in Rust Belt states was newsworthy, even if you think that what the issue really did was give white supremacist voters an excuse to vote for Trump. The appeal is still news.

I suppose beyond not wanting to read stories about conservative voters, there’s also a notion that somehow if the mainstream media humanizes them it could persuade more people to join up with conservative causes and elect conservatives. But, even if that’s somehow a legitimate consideration of a media organization (and I don’t really think it is- it isn’t the media’s job to try and change votes), it seems fanciful to me. Nobody in Ohio or Wisconsin changed their vote because of what the New York Times wrote about conservatives- they don’t even read the Times!

The bottom line though is that whenever big political events happen, whether it is the election of Trump, the election of Glenn Youngkin, or the trucker protests (or, on the left, the election of Obama or the Black Lives Matter protests), part of the job of the media is to get people on the ground talking to participants and finding out what people are feeling and what might be motivating their decisions. Thankfully, the journalists at the Times (including Goldberg) continue to understand this and ignore their critics.