Is Donald Trump now unstoppable in his quest to secure the Republican presidential nomination, after kicking off caucus season with a decisive win in Iowa?
As Trump shapes up for another shot at the White House, Alan and Lionel ask how US media can pitch their coverage and analysis to ensure scrutiny of such an unreliable and divisive figure, without ignoring the election issues that matter to his supporters.
They’re joined by Alex Burns, who is now head of news at POLITICO and covered the 2020 election for the New York Times, to analyse how news organisations will and should cover the Trump campaign and question the record of President Joe Biden.
Plus, what is former chancellor George Osborne’s involvement with one of the key bidders for the Daily Telegraph, and what is going on at Reach plc as Alison Phillips departs as editor of the Daily Mirror?
Subscribe today to enjoy one-month’s free trial to Prospect’s digital content and get full access to rigorously fact-checked, truly independent analysis. No commitment—you can cancel at any time.
Click here to unlock your free digital trial today.
We’d love your feedback! Tell us more here.
This transcript has been edited for clarity.
Alan Rusbridger
Hello and welcome to Media Confidential, Prospect Magazine's weekly analysis of what's really going on in news and media in conversation with key people in this industry. I'm Alan Rusbridger.
Lionel Barber
And I'm Lionel Barber on this episode, what are the opportunities and the bear traps for US media covering this year's presidential election?
Donald Trump:
I just want to thank you all. There's a very special night. And this is the first, because the big night is going to be in November when we take back our country, and truly we do make our country great again. Thank you very much everybody. Great honour. Thank you very much.
Rusbridger:
Donald Trump decisively wins the Iowa caucus. Is he unstoppable for the Republican nomination? How about for the White House? And what are the news organisations learned from the presidential elections in 2016 and 2020?
Barber:
Listen and follow us wherever you get your podcast to make sure you never miss an episode. And Media Confidential is on X/Twitter. We are @mediaconfpod
Rusbridger
So Lionel, welcome to London, this quaint little city in Europe. Must be very disorientating for you after your jet setting travels.
Barber
Well, it's the cold really. After Lolling on a beach in Santa Monica, sort of the appeal of snowy London, it's not so great. But anyway, there we are. What have I been looking at? Well, I spotted a rather interesting item over the weekend in the mail on Sunday, reporting that George Osborne, former chancellor and former editor of the Evening Standard has been recruited as an investment banking advisor to the Abu Dhabi American group trying to buy the Daily Telegraph. Interesting. He'll be getting a fat fee for that. Interesting question or test of his clout in British politics and whether he can influence the discussions at Ofcom, the regulator.
Rusbridger
So what's that mean? Does that mean that he's backing the bid or is he just being engaged in a professional capacity?
Barber
I would say it's a professional decision. It's not that he wants to be... He quite enjoyed being an editor. I remember him talking about and wondering about The Great Power, which of course you know and I know, about being an editor, but I think it's actually just he's an investment banking advisor, works for this boutique investment bank called Robey Warshaw, run by Sir Simon Robey, great cultural figure, as well as a former Morgan Stanley banker. They've made a lot of money as the bank in London covering or advising on the biggest deals, things like AstraZeneca, ARM Holdings, bought by SoftBank, made a lot of money in the last few years.
Rusbridger
So we don't have to prepare ourselves for George Osmond, editor of The Telegraph, because it would certainly make him a king maker in terms of the ructions that we expect in the Tory party over the next two or three years.
Barber
Don't think so, but you can never rule things out. What have you been looking at, Alan?
Rusbridger
Well, I'm going to have a rant about Reach, which is the company formerly known as Trinity Mirror because they've just lost their editor, Alison Phillips of the Daily Mirror, having lost their editor in Chief, Lloyd Embley last year. It looks as though Alison Phillips, who seems to be universally admired and liked within the newspaper, you really can't face any more job cuts. They've done nearly 800 last year. It looks as though there are more to come, though they've said not in 2024. It's a big company. It's got something like 130 newspapers and websites. It owns The Mirror and The Express, but it just feels like a company with the death rattle. And I'm going to name the chief executive Jim Mullen, who will not be a household name to anybody. He came out of the betting world, he worked for William Hill, he was chief executive of Ladbrokes, and he joined Reach in 2019. And the first time he got on my radar was when he took a spectacular pay package in 2021.
He took home just over 4 million pounds having been at the company for two years at the same time as making all these layoffs. Somebody at the time worked out that pay package would've paid for 117 lower paid members of staff. And so you've got this thing which somebody who comes from the world of betting into newspapers, which I bet he knew nothing about beforehand, and it just feels like a company that has lost any sense of direction or any sense of what makes for a really great news organisation. I don't know if you ever read The Mirror, Lionel, but it's important because it's basically the only labour support organisation, but there are great titles like the Manchester Evening News, Livable Echo, all used to be great titles, which are really being laid ways to now.
Barber
It reminds me of what's happened at local newspapers in America, taken over by private equity firms, and then torched in terms of the workforce. So I do read or used to always take a look at The Mirror when I was at the FT, and also they produced some great stories, Pippa Crerar during the pandemic. She's obviously now joined The Guardian. So it does distress me somewhat. It certainly distresses me when I hear that kind of pay package when you've barely been there and all you're doing is cutting jobs.
Rusbridger
And the other thing is the experience of reading all these websites, these Reach websites is a horrible one. You land on them, and I don't know if you've done it, but they've got sort of pop-up ads and banner ads, and the journalism is almost secondary. I just want to read you out the memo that Jim Mullen sent the staff yesterday. He says, "That's why page views, imperfect to measure as they are, are our current currency and the biggest indicator of whether we're on the right track. They're what we should all be focused on every day and they are everyone's responsibility to deliver. Delivering against these goals, building our audience and our engagement with them sustainably growing page views and achieving our budgets will deliver us successful 2024."
Barber
I hate that. Page views as a metric, we never did that. It's about-
Rusbridger
What about great journalism?
Barber
Great journalism.
Rusbridger
What about great stories? What about important investigations, something that would give a person going into work on one of their titles, a sense of why they're doing journalism in the first place as opposed to thinking, how can I deliver page views today? Anyway, rant over.
Barber
It's a quality rant though.
Rusbridger
It's [inaudible 00:06:59]. They are quality papers and they matter to their local communities. They matter in the country. And there's bloke from Ladbrokes, I can't see any sign that he knows what he's doing. And to lose great journalists like Alison Phillips, it's heartrending.
Barber
I hope that members of the Reach board will be listening to our podcast.
Rusbridger
I'm sure they do. Don't miss Prospect Magazine's seasonal subscription offer. We're discounting the price of an annual digital subscription by an astonishing 50%. This isn't going to last long because the offer ends on the 19th of January. But to take advantage of this great deal, please search for Prospect new year offer or visit subscribe.prospectmagazine, all one word, .co.uk/ny.
Barber
Well, Alan, we've got a great guest coming up, one of the rising stars in American political journalism, Alex Burns, he's the head of news at Politico, formerly at the New York Times. And I guess I'm fascinated to hear what he has to say about the Iowa caucuses where Trump delivered a huge, just unequivocally big victory trouncing the opposition, and whether he really is now unstoppable for the Republican nomination, and even the White House.
Rusbridger
Some listeners won't know about Politico. It's a relatively recent incomer to the media landscape. Just fill in the background.
Barber
Politicos less than 20 years old, grew out of the Washington Post. Two very enterprising journalists, John Harris and Mike Allen developed a website, an online political operation designed to cover Washington Congress, and they've just grown like topsy. And they have a European arm now, Politico Europe. They employ hundreds of journalists, and have become really, I think the go-to, or one of the go-to sources for news about politics in its broadest sense. For the election, this is their big deal.
Rusbridger
That was a time when the Washington Post was retrenching and cutting mirror style and didn't realise what they were losing.
Barber
I think they didn't realise that they needed to think beyond the printed version that was appearing in the Washington suburbs, and they really needed to develop their digital operation. And there was a big summit, I remember, and Don Graham was then the proprietor. And the blueprint was put forward and he hesitated, and I think that was why these journalists left and set up their own operation, Politico.
Rusbridger
Anyway, Alex Burns is a great journalist, and it's going to be fascinating to hear his take on what is, I think, going to be the story of the year.
Barber
Well, we're delighted to welcome to Media Confidential, Alex Burns, who is the head of news at Politico, formerly national political correspondent for the New York Times. He covered the 2020 presidential election. And Alex is the co-author of the bestselling book, This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and The Battle for America's Future. Alex, welcome. You're coming on the back of a stalking win for Donald Trump in Iowa. Is he unstoppable now?
Alex Burns:
Well, thanks for having me on the programme. Look, I don't know that he's completely unstoppable, but he's awfully close. He's as close as you get in a presidential primary for a non-incumbent candidate. And I do think that's in many ways, sort of the big story of the Republican primary, is voters in that party see him as the default choice, the same way they would see a candidate who is already the President as the default choice. If Joe Biden faced a primary challenge of a more serious kind than he does right now, if he faced a primary challenge from the governor of Florida, he would still be the overwhelming favourite just by virtue of the fact that he's the president of the United States. I think there's a lot of evidence that Republican primary voters see Donald Trump. In similar terms.
Barber
Alex, we're going to talk about how the media is covering the race and particularly Donald Trump, but just a few words about Nikki Haley, she's hoping to win in New Hampshire, and DeSantis, who just a year ago was being built up, particularly in Florida, Ron DeSantis, the governor there, as the candidate who could take on Trump, and his campaign just seems to have sputtered.
Burns:
Totally. I don't know that I've ever seen, at least any time recently, a candidate enter a presidential race with such high expectations as Ron DeSantis and just totally fail to convert those into reality. It's not just that the campaign has been a disappointment for him. It's been, in so many ways, a humiliation. It is a great media story, actually, because for years, he was built up as this 20 foot tall political giant by Fox, by other conservative media outlets because of the role that he played during the COVID Pandemic. And then when he left the COVID era and left the very safe space of Fox platforms and associated conservative ideological platforms, he hasn't done that well. And for the duration of the Republican race, until very recently, his campaign took the view that, "I don't need to talk to the so-called mainstream media. I will talk to the platforms that my people watch and listen to."
And that has not worked out at all because it turns out that Donald Trump is actually very, very strong on those same platforms. And also when voters don't see you on the morning television shows and they don't read about you in the traditional newspaper or on traditional radio shows, you are leaving something very serious on the table.
Rusbridger
Nikki Haley?
Burns:
Well, she is sort of the opposite end of the spectrum. It's not that she's been super, super accessible to media, but she has, I think for really the entirety of her political career, has taken a much more just come at me approach to interacting with outlets and constituencies that a Republican would traditionally see as more challenging. I'll tell you, I remember, I must've been 22 or 23 at the time, meeting Nikki Haley when she was a member of the South Carolina House of Representatives running a long shot campaign for governor. I met her in a small conference room in Arlington, Virginia with pretty small group of other reporters because she was not capable of drawing a crowd at that time. And I was not impressed. I thought she's a sort of articulate animated person, but where's the vision? Where's the presence? And seeing her 15 years later, 13 years later, it's a totally different deal.
She has taken on this other kind of, not a sort of persona in the sense of she has changed who she is as a politician, but there's this perception of an aura around her that she is a big character that just wasn't there back then. And I do think that it has allowed her, in many ways, to skirt some of the ideological fault lines within the Republican party. She talks about issues like abortion or the war in Ukraine in ways that I think a less gifted politician would really alienate significant sections of the Republican base by saying, let's achieve a consensus on abortion that's anathema to much of the Republican party. But there is a way that she carries herself and a confidence in that she delivers this message, and I do think her identity as a woman, and as a person of colour, is part of it, that people hear her differently.
Rusbridger
Alex, in what you were saying about Ron, DeSantis implied that the big players, the mainstream media, the networks, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, I'm sure Politico too now in that basket, that they really still do matter. Can you just talk about that. Because maybe four years ago, the narrative was that their influence was fading and social media was more important. How do you map the overall landscape of media?
Burns:
So I don't know that Ron DeSantis would be... I don't know that his campaign would be doing so much better if he would only talk to the New York Times, or he would only talk to the Washington Post or Politico. But by limiting his focus to a relatively small and relatively narrow media universe, he totally left himself at the mercy of, again, a small number of media institutions and a relatively homogenous set of media actors. And so when something happens like Donald Trump is indicted, or something else happens, like Donald Trump is indicted a 90 more times, and that circumscribed world of conservative media just goes all in with Trump, the microphone you've taken for yourself just vanishes. So his ability to deliver a message, and frankly his ability to count on a certain presumption of good faith political abilities and political intentions on his part, it's just not there.
It's one thing as a towering candidate to say, "I don't need the media. I'm going to do this on my terms. And if you don't like it, well, that's tough." But then suddenly you're the third place candidate or the fourth place candidate, and you're asking people to cover your events, and the reservoir of, I won't say goodwill because it's not that personal, but the presumption that you are a serious person with a well-developed incredible strategy for the race, he just didn't put in the work to convince people that it was there.
Rusbridger
But the question about the media generally, what is the mainstream media, for want of a better word, what's their role? Is it that they... Because we know that lots of people don't trust them any longer, but it's as though they still have a crucial role in framing the issues and framing our perceptions?
Burns:
I think that's right. There are some issues where Politico or the New York Times or the Washington Post is just not going to, for a Republican primary electorate, they're not looking to those outlets to tell them what to think of the COVID vaccine or what to think about abortion rights or trans rights. But in terms of elevating a candidate as a formidable character, broadly, they do matter and they particularly matter in the world of political donors and political elites who do follow media coverage as a measure of is it worth taking the risk of going with Ron DeSantis? Is Nikki Haley the more credible challenger for Donald Trump? Is all of this a waste of time? I do think that Ron DeSantis' unwillingness to deliver his message across a broad spectrum of platforms, I think he has sacrificed a certain level of credibility with that world of elites, and with a certain community of swing voters and high information voters who actually do matter quite a lot in Republican primaries and general elections.
Again, there are people who are never going to pick up a newspaper and who just don't care whether Ron DeSantis is talking to the Tampa Bay Times or the Chicago Tribune or the Des Moines Register. But there's enough of a community there that if you're just deciding that you're not going to proactively engage them, period, you're making a mistake.
Barber
Let's talk about Fox News. How are they covering Trump? And is their brand tarnished after the Dominion libel case?
Burns:
Well, in terms of the vast majority of American consumers, news consumers, yes, I do think their brand is tarnished. I think their brand was very flawed in the first place. For the loyalist viewership of Fox, I don't know how damaged it is. I do think we saw in that lawsuit, in some of the private correspondence that came out, real private anxiety at Fox and at his parent company about, what happens if Trump just goes guns blazing against us as a media institution? I do think you see that anxiety still infusing the way a lot of conservative media, not just Fox, interact with Trump. It's not the typical relationship of a candidate and a very powerful media outlet that covers him, where ultimately needs to be careful about picking a fight with somebody who buys zinc by the barrel, right? That's true, but the reverse is also true, that Donald Trump does have this hold over so much of the viewership of Fox that he can quite credibly threatened to drive the viewership to Newsmax or OAN, other kinds of conservative media outlets.
You don't necessarily hear that anxiety in literal terms every day, but the way that network has gone from, about a year ago, delivering gentle but persistent message that maybe it's time for somebody new as a leader of the Republican Party. And by the way, have you met this guy Ron DeSantis? He was all over the shows in such a softball way. To today, when the message around Trump is Donald Trump is a singular figure in conservative politics, and the elites just don't get him and the Justice Department is out to get him. It is a hard pivot back in the direction of being the Trump network.
Barber
This is Media Confidential. And coming up, more from Alex Burns and further analysis on what could be a defining year for us news organisations, and yes, America,
John Curtis:
I'm John Curtis.
Rachel Wolf:
And I'm Rachel Wolf.
Curtis:
Trendy is all about what people think and why politicians do what they do.
Wolf:
So if you've ever wondered why Rishi Sunak says he wants to stop the votes, or who goes to university and how has it changed us as a society, then Trendy is the podcast for you.
Curtis:
With a general election looming, it's never been a more important moment to understand the underlying trends which shape our politics.
Wolf:
Trendy is available every Thursday on Tortoise News, wherever you get your podcasts.
Barber
This is Media Confidential with Alan Rusbridger and Lionel Barber. Today we're analysing how the US media is covering Donald Trump and this year's American Presidential elections.
Our guest today is Alex Burns, head of news at Politico. He was the national political correspondent for the New York Times during the 2020 presidential election, and he's the coauthor of This Will Not Pass: Trump, Biden, and The Battle for America's Future.
So Alex, you'll have noticed that Alan and I have been studiously careful not to have our show taken over by Donald Trump, but we do need to talk about how the media covers him. What lessons, first of all, do you think that mainstream media, you yourself, have learned about covering a candidate and a president like Donald Trump?
Burns:
It's a big question. I was somewhat accidentally... I believe I was the only reporter for The Times who was at Trump's campaign launch in 2015 when he came down the escalator at Trump Tower. And I remember telling my wife the night before that event, I need to write the hell out of this story because it's going to be such a crazy spectacle and it's obviously not going to last very long. And here we are almost nine years later. So the big lesson is you can just never underestimate the durability and persistence of Donald Trump. I think in 2015, 2016, there was a huge misapprehension, including by me, about the core of Trump's appeal and the role that his personal celebrity played in it. When we in the media talk about what the media got wrong or the media's role in Trump's rise, we tend to talk about it in terms of news coverage and what did the front pages of the papers get wrong, or what did cable news networks get wrong.
I do think you need to look at this over a longer timeline. When you watch old movies or old television shows from the 1980s or 1990s, there's Donald Trump in Sex in the City. There's Donald Trump and Home Alone 2. He is ubiquitous. He's everywhere. And when you talk to voters in the early primary states, I remember very vividly a man on the bleachers of it was a high school gymnasium in New Hampshire right before the primary in 2016 talking about Donald Trump's business career as though he was Warren Buffet or Steve Jobs, just a titan of our time. And so I do think there was a real misapprehension among people who know his real business record or followed him more closely as this sort of a clownish character in New York and the New York area, a real misunderstanding of the way he was perceived by the rest of the country, that he wasn't this sort of reality show buffoon who incidentally has some views on politics.
He was the man in the boardroom, this formidable a man of affairs who of course you could imagine him in the Oval Office because he's Mr. Trump. So I think obviously we have caught up with that reality now because he was in the Oval Office. He was the president. Look, I think that there's been a correction in some cases, an overcorrection in the way that Trump has covered in ideological and cultural terms, this sense that if only the media were more direct and more persistent in telling voters that he is dishonest and bigoted and irresponsible, that the electorate would see him differently. I'm not so sure that's the case. I think we should be clear and forthright that he is dishonest and bigoted because it's true, but I also think, covering 2016, talking to voters at the time, talking to voters since then, many, many millions of people who voted for Donald Trump know that perfectly well and vote for him anyway, right?
The strength of his appeal on cultural and ideological terms as this expression of contempt for the American political establishment and the global political and economic elite is so strong that many people will vote for him even if they do think he's kind of a crazy person or kind of a bad guy, or in fact a very bad guy. So I do think that there's been, again, an overcorrection in some places to think that if we just go all out all the time on what a dangerous character Donald Trump is, that that will break through to the electorate. I'm not sure that it will.
Rusbridger
The danger, I'm not telling you anything you don't know, is that you then normalise it. You overcompensate. And the fact that you've got somebody who is so extraordinary, who does lie, who regularly denounces what you do, what we do as fake, and that he's facing 91 charges, that you kind of... Because of what you've just said, which I wouldn't disagree with, you, then sort of write that off and say, "Well, we mustn't bang on about that because the voters know that." And then you begin to take him on his own terms.
Burns:
I think that's absolutely a risk. And to be clear, it's not that I'm saying we should just sort of price that in and move on and treat him like any other candidate, I don't think that he is different from all other candidates. It's that I think we need to explore his appeal and the implications of his election in sort of more specific and searching ways than just saying over and over again how reckless he is or how racist he is, because he is reckless and he is racist, and people know that. And so what's the next turn of the wheel on that storyline? What would it mean to have him back in office in terms of the substance of government. The fact that he believes climate change is a hoax, that windmills cause cancer, that it's all a Chinese plot, has massive implications for the future of all humanity.
Personally, I would like to probe that story more intensively than the question of, is he dishonest? Because the answer to, "Is he dishonest?" is yes. To the question of a sort of normalisation, my own view of this is I don't think there's much risk in Trump being normalised because he's so self-evidently this singular and extraordinary and unusual character in our politics. When you've seen other people in the US try to do the Trump thing, "I'm going to run as Trump but be a little bit less offensive. I'm going to run as Trump, but without the legal baggage," it just doesn't really work. There's no Trump, but Trump, and that's part of the appeal, right? The fact that he is abnormal is not necessarily a bad thing to millions of people who support him. What I think is much riskier, Alan, is that everything short of Trump gets normalised.
You see it in debates in the American media around how to cover other ethics issues in politics, how to cover other kinds of a bigoted, divisive behaviour that... Well, why are you going so hard on this guy? It's not like he's doing what Trump does. That really can't be the standard for a functioning democracy. If the idea is the line of acceptability is everything up to the red line that is Donald Trump, then you're in real trouble.
Barber
So as the head of news at Politico, can you instruct your journalists to say, "We need some balanced coverage here of the election?"
Burns:
Well, I don't know that I need to do any instructing that we need to have balanced coverage. I do think that Politico, just by virtue of who reads us, there's the imperative that we be non-ideological and non-partisan about it. People aren't coming to us for sort of an affirmation of their cultural preferences. They're coming to us for a really clinical read on the political environment and the business of government. In terms of balance in the sense of... Could you just sort of define that term as you want me to respond to it?
Barber
Well, here are the pros, here are the cons. Are you going to call him out every time he lies? How are you going to avoid inflammatory adjectives coming into the reporting, this kind of thing?
Burns:
Sure. In terms of inflammatory adjectives or sort of overwrought narration, my own view of that is that, just as a matter of good writing, it's better to avoid that kind of thing, not because it never serves a purpose, but I think particularly with a character like Trump who says shocking things nearly every day, every day that he's out in public, if every story is what a shocking thing Donald Trump said, what an unprecedented action by a presidential candidate, that is a form of normalisation too, right? Here we go again, the unprecedented, offensive. But to the broader point that you're raising about assessing pros and cons, I think we're really clear-eyed and need to be really, really clear eyed about what his supporters see as the value of a Trump presidency. And it's not all that.
They just want to burn everything down. And it's also essential in covering Biden and the Biden campaign that we not just default to the preferred frame that the Democrats want to put on the election, which is that this is a choice between a virtuous democracy led by Joe Biden and a thousand years of darkness led by Donald Trump, not because there's no validity to any of the underlying themes there, but because it's not necessarily how voters are going to process their choices.
Barber
So let's talk about covering Joe Biden. How much is his age and frailty a serious factor to voters? And how much is it a taboo for the American media in its coverage?
Burns:
Well, when you talk to any voter, and really strikingly across party lines across demographic groups, it's almost inevitably the first or second thing they bring up about Joe Biden. And it's interesting that it's not... It's clearly not just his literal age, because as a number, it's not that far apart from Trump. It's a perception of frailty, as you said, that there's just a lack of vitality there. And I do think there's a sort of a dynamic related to his relationship with the media there that Joe Biden does not do casual, constant communication the way Donald Trump does, the way Barack Obama did before him, right? Obama was everywhere, over sports media and sorry, entertainment media and lifestyle outlets. And Biden just barely does that stuff. So he's not a presence in people's lives the way they've been accustomed to over the last couple presidents. And I do think it reinforces this general impression of him as this remote old man.
Rusbridger
Alex, you'll be familiar with the criticism of people like Jay Rosen at NYU, that the American media is too obsessed by the horse race nature of this. I think Jay referred to it recently as not the odds, but the stakes, by which he means you are obsessed with who's up, who's down, instead of looking at policy and the effect that the election will have on voters and for people like us, the rest of the world. I think Jay's the first to admit that this is a very difficult thing to do because it's so compelling, the story of the horse race. But how do you guard against that?
Burns:
I'd say three quick things on that, Alan. The first is in terms of the stakes of the election, I think we at Politico are very, very focused on telling that story and telling that story from the policy angle and from the transatlantic angle. It is core to who we are as a newsroom to tell big stories about climate and tech and defence, and the transatlantic relationship, and all of that is coming to a head in this election. So yes, agree. I think secondly, it's very important that we define the stakes in clinical terms and not impose our framework for understanding the stakes of the election on the choice that voters face. For a lot of Americans, probably for most Americans, they're more preoccupied with questions of the cost of living and the availability of housing, and the cost and availability of healthcare and energy than they are with the comparatively abstract debates that people like us have about the future of democracy.
So I'm not saying we shouldn't cover the democracy angle. Of course, we should, but we shouldn't cover it to the exclusion of stakes as the voters understand them. And finally, in terms of the horse race, I will make a little bit of agreed is good argument here that the horse race coverage in so many ways is driven by demand, that when you talk to people anywhere about basically any election, the first thing they ask you is. Who's going to win? And when I go home for a Passover in the spring and my relatives ask me, who's going to win this election, I'm not going to respond, "I think that's not the right question. I think you should really be asking me, what are the stakes of this election?" Right? You do at some level need to engage your audience at the level that they want you to engage them. So we are going to tell the story of the stakes of the election, of the core policy consequences of either outcome as the central story of 2024.
And at the same time, you do need to give the consumer a sense of where do things stand? It's actually important. Horse race is a dismissive term. I use it myself, but it doesn't capture the sort of tumult and chaos and drama of democracy, which is part of the appeal.
Barber
Alex, I'm going to put you on the spot for my last question here. Is there going to be a kind of October surprise or a July surprise that either Joe Biden drops out because of health or whatever reasons? We know that there are a lot of unease in the Democratic Party about his fitness, if you like, health fitness for office, and then there's obviously Trump's 90 plus indictments that you referred to earlier. Is there a chance that one, or even both the candidates don't appear on the ballot in November this year?
Burns:
Well, just as an actuarial matter, there clearly is a chance that one or both of the candidates won't appear on the ballot. That's sort of in the hands of a higher power. I think it's less likely that one of them would voluntarily step back or be removed by mortal means than that we wind up with actually quite serious third party or multiple independent candidates disrupting the campaign. So many Americans clearly look at this choice with distaste at best and have the reaction that I think is sort of embedded in the question that this can't really be the choice in front of us. And ultimately, it probably won't be, not necessarily because one of the candidates leaves the ballot, but because this group No Labels puts forward a credible alternative in a number of states, because Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the independent candidate, draws actually a lot more support from disaffected voters than how we would currently anticipate.
The market does tend to respond to demand. And despite the best efforts of both political parties and legal structures of the American political system to suppress really dynamic competition of the kind that you have in a lot of other democracies. I think I share the underlying sensibility of your question that it's unlikely that we just wind up with a binary choice between these two guys.
Barber
Alex Burns, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast, and good luck in '24.
Burns:
Thank you so much.
Barber
Well, listening to Alex Burns, there are so many questions that appear in my mind. I covered three presidential campaigns back in '88, '92, and 2004, and I must say this one... We always say it's the biggest since whatever, but it really is big. Looks as though Trump is going to be the Republican nominee, perhaps likely, unless something happens to Joe Biden. It could be a repeat of 2020. And yet what's so incredible is it seems a majority of Republican voters are right behind Donald Trump, despite all the legal issues, despite the character and everything else. Pretty incredible.
Rusbridger
I think it's one of the hardest journalistic dilemmas that I can imagine, because we know this guy is a liar. He's probably a crook. And by the end of the day, he's probably going to be a convicted crook, probably. He's done this extraordinary thing of trying to delegitimize media entirely. It's almost a deliberate strategy of saying that the most trusted news organisations on the planet are completely fake. So you might as well believe me, because you certainly shouldn't believe them. It's a really dangerous thing. And yet as we heard Alex say, you can't keep on saying that because people seem to like him regardless, like him even more. And so how do you do that as a journalist? And you could hear in Alex's answers, that they're wrestling with that.
Barber
I do think that it's really important to convey first, what is it about Trump that appeals to the American voter and to listen to what voters are saying. Then you'll begin to understand part of the Trump phenomenon. I do think it's important to call him out when he's lying. In the wake of his big victory in Iowa, he was saying with a straight face, "Now it's time to come together," which is from the most divisive politicians standing in America is pretty... It's brazen, and that's one of the reasons why it makes it so difficult. I think the other thing-
Rusbridger
But how do you do that? Because I heard those clips, and they're broadcast. And depending on the channel, people can then offer a commentary on it. And it's so hard. You say we must call him out on his lies, but particularly on broadcasting when he's spouting these lies, it's very, very difficult in real time to have a sort of ticker underneath the moving pictures saying, "This is true. This is not true."
Barber
Well, if I was Mark Thompson at CNN, the ex BBC head and head of New York Times, I think I would be trying to do some contextual programming so it's not everything in real time, and say, "We'll just have a little segment here on Donald Trump as the unifying figure and just play back some of the comments that he made about the deep state, how he's going to take a contract out on the former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the top military man in America, Mark Milley. What he's also said, which is in total contrast, I think that's legitimate.
Rusbridger
Yeah, my worry is the old cliche that the lies halfway around the world before the truth has got the boots on. And of course, you can have huge fact-checking departments, and you can have... During the Trump presidency, the Washington Post had a great sort of tracker of how many liars, and they nailed every single liar, and they ended up calling them lies as opposed to mis-speakings or whatever the euphemism was, but that doesn't have nearly the impact of the original statement.
Barber
True. But I think also, you've got a responsibility, if you're running one of these networks, to make sure that voices, credible voices, articulate voices of criticism, like for example, Liz Cheney, a former congresswoman in Wyoming, Dick Cheney's daughter who stood up against Trump backed impeachment, that they are also heard just as an alternative voice. Look, it's not a silver bullet.
Rusbridger
He basically holds what we do in contempt. And the alarming thing to me is to see how successful he's been in de-legitimising news. And that's the thing that terrifies me about the next election, this sense of, which comes through in polling, that people now no longer have any idea of what is true and what's not true. And it might be obvious to you and me that the New York Times is an excellent newspaper, and by and large, what is printed in the New York Times is highly reliable and true, and yet we've arrived at a position where most Americans don't believe that any longer. They don't even accept that journalism is a craft that can reveal the truth.
Barber
Well, it's terrifying because a democracy depends on an informed citizenry, and that informed citizenry in turn depends on the media as a source of information, news, which help form news. So look, I'm as worried as you are about this phenomenon. I think Larry Summers talks about Perónism, referring to Juan Perón in Argentina, the autocrat dictator, and that's what he thinks is coming to America if Trump wins.
Rusbridger
The cheering thing first time round was that we saw so many institutions fail. We thought that Congress was going to be appropriate check on Trump. Not so much. He then captured the Supreme Court and went round appointing numerous judges at a lower level. And you think, well, that's gone as a check and balance, and yet the media did do its job. And at the end of it, the New York Times was paradoxically much stronger, and I was going to say maybe to some extent that the Post as well. Is that going to be the same this time round or is this going to be different?
Barber
I think it's different. I think that the Trump bump, so to speak, in 2016 and following four years really helped the New York Times and the Washington Post grow their audience. But I think that to a degree, I don't want to overemphasise this, but their reporting really sort of got tilted in the direction of reinforcing that base rather than keeping it broad. So I'm a bit fearful, frankly.
Rusbridger
Well, seatbelts on.
This Week's Prospect podcast is a conversation between deputy editor Ellen Halliday and the legendary journalist, political commentator and pollster, Peter Kellner. Peter's looking at the twists and turns that determine which party people choose to vote for and how that can change between now and the election. He's going to be writing a monthly column for us about that. If you listen carefully, you'll also hear Peter's suggested date of that UK general election.
Kellner:
If you have, on election day, the polls showing a two- or three-point label lead or a two or three point conservative lead, all you can sensibly say at that point is its neck and neck. If Labour or the conservatives are 10 or 15 points ahead on the morning of election in the final polls, they are almost certainly going to win that election. Adelaide Stevenson, who was an American Democrat, unsuccessful but bright and engaging American Democrat in the 50s once said, "Polls should be taken but not inhaled." So they should be watched and I'll be watching them, but I will try not to inhale.
Rusbridger
Follow and subscribe to the Prospect podcast so that you don't miss an episode. And Peter has a new podcast called Election Countdown coming out on the 29th of January that will follow the polls all the way to Voting day.
If you've got any questions for us about the media, email them to mediaconfidential@prospectmagazine.co.uk and we'll answer a few of them in a future episode.
Barber
Thank you for listening to Media Confidential, brought to you by Prospect Magazine and Fresh Air. The producer is Danny Garlic.
Rusbridger
Remember to listen and follow us wherever you get your podcast.
Barber
And we're on Twitter/X too @mediaconfpod.
Rusbridger
And there's another episode along next Thursday when we've set our sights on quite a scandal. Don't miss it.
John Curtis:
I am John Curtis.
Rachel Wolf:
And I'm Rachel Wolf.
John Curtis:
Trendy is all about what people think and why politicians do what they do.
Wolf:
So if you've ever wondered why Rishi Sunak says he wants to stop the votes, or who goes to university, and how has it changed us as a society, then Trendy is the podcast for you.
Curtis:
With a general action looming, it's never been a more important moment to understand the underlying trends which shape our politics.
Wolf:
Trendy is available every Thursday on Tortoise News wherever you get your podcasts.
