The Story of Two Mayors: Buttigieg, Messam and the Power of Media
In the spring of 2019, the mayor of a small US city (population just over 100,000) announced his bid for president of the United States. His tenure as mayor had represented a historic step towards diversity in city leadership, and he felt ready to take his talents to the national stage. I am, of course, talking about Mayor Wayne Messam. The first African American mayor of Miramar, Florida, Messam is a former NCAA National Champion and the President of the National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials. In 2018, he made a name for himself after he sued the governor of Florida in an attempt to enact local gun legislation.
If you haven’t heard of him, you’re not alone. Messam, who suspended his campaign in November of last year, failed to qualify for any of the debates and raised under $130,000 in fundraising. Yet his story as a small town mayor running for president might sound familiar. Around the same time that Messam announced, Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana (a city of comparable size to Miramar), entered the race. As the democratic primary took off that spring, Buttigieg, a former veteran and the first openly gay mayor of his city, started to gain a foothold in the polls and collected impressive sums of campaign contributions. By the time the first state voted, Mayor Pete had solidified his spot among the top contenders for the nomination. He even managed to win the most delegates in Iowa. Buttigieg dropped out shortly before Super Tuesday in an effort to consolidate around fellow moderate candidate Joe Biden.
Buttigieg’s rise was no doubt remarkable. In less than a year, he went from being virtually unknown to winning the nation’s first primary (in terms of state delegates, not the popular vote). This rightfully earned him some praise. However, his sudden popularity should also be viewed with a level of skepticism — and the story of Wayne Messam indicates why. The two small-city mayors were both unknown to the public when they announced their bids, but as the election unfolded, their stories could not have turned out more different. The reasons for this reveal a great deal about the power of the media in shaping conversations and influencing outcomes during political elections.
By the start of April, Buttigieg’s campaign hauled in $7 Million and his rallies started to get bigger. For a candidate to attract large crowds and receive big donations, they need wide-scale name recognition. Obviously, if people don’t know who you are, they won’t show up to your events or contribute to your campaign — and especially for unknowns, a failure to build early momentum is often lethal. So how did Pete manage to boost his name recognition (seemingly out of thin air) while Messam did not? The answer, in large part, is due to the fact that the media overwhelmingly favored the story of the former. He appeared at a CNN town hall in March, was the subject of numerous articles in major national newspapers, and even made the cover of Time magazine. For Buttigieg, excessive media coverage first propelled him into the spotlight and then transformed him into a legitimately viable candidate. Messam never got that chance. He was rarely invited on air by cable news to make his case, and more articles were written about the suspension of his campaign than his announcement. His candidacy was essentially dead on arrival.
Pete is a Rhodes scholar, war veteran, and an openly gay mayor in Indiana. By comparison, Messam’s story is a little less linear, if no less admirable. A first generation American who almost played in the NFL, Messam started a construction company before serving on the city commission of Miramar and then beating a 16-year incumbent to become mayor. Regardless of whose story sounds more compelling, though, the fact is that in terms of their qualifications for the presidency, Buttigieg and Messam don’t differ all that much. Their political experience is nearly identical. Yet in an unsurprising and disappointing twist, this fact was ignored by the mainstream media, which unanimously elevated Buttigieg and ignored Messam.
When it comes to elections, it’s important to recognize the uniquely powerful role of the media. As the central arbiters of information to the public, news outlets have an unparalleled capability to shape, make or break a political campaign. The stories that they choose to cover, the angle of their reporting, the narratives that they impose on candidates — all influence the way people vote. Unfortunately, much of the institutionalized media all too often fails to accurately inform voters.
In many cases, American news outlets operate in a profit-driven media structure and sensationalize the news to increase viewership. In this context, political coverage is just another form of monetizable content — and a lucrative one at that, provided that outlets pick the right stories. The consequences of this business model were on full display during the 2016 election, when the mainstream media provided Trump (who had undeniable entertainment value) with a disproportionate amount of coverage in the run-up to the election, essentially handing him $2 Billion worth of free airtime and inadvertently helping his election efforts. Trump’s 2016 run perfectly demonstrated the power of coverage alone (maybe all publicity really is good publicity?), but that isn’t to say that media framing is inconsequential. The media’s treatment of politicians and their ideas is often the prism through which voters themselves assess them. By identifying the biases in news coverage, we can extrapolate the overarching political and ideological beliefs of the media establishment.
One notable example of media bias in this election cycle is the clear aversion of many news outlets to candidates that seek to challenge the status-quo and threaten the political establishment that the mainstream media has grown accustomed to and aligned itself with. The media’s obvious disdain for these subversives — chief among them, Bernie Sanders and Tulsi Gabbard — is manifest in its obsession with electability, a narrative which has openly favored Joe Biden over Sanders, his main opponent in the democratic primary (See: America has an electability problem). In turn, Sanders and Gabbard have been highly critical of the corporate media structure and the manner in which it guides political discourse, helping moderate candidates who are friendly to the media class (such as Biden and Buttigieg) at the expense of any perceived outsiders.
Another bias that the media is accused of perpetuating is white privilege. Cory Booker, like Buttigieg, was a Rhodes scholar and a former mayor. He is also one of only three sitting African American Senators (See: Cory Booker: A struggle for Love). Julian Castro, another former mayor, served as Housing and Urban Development Secretary during the Obama administration. During the primary election, Castro was also the only Latino candidate. Both Booker and Castro have more accomplished political records than Buttigieg, and both were mayors of much larger cities than South Bend (Newark and San Antonio, respectively). Yet, when it came to media coverage, both camps complained that Mayor Pete got a disproportionate amount, citing racial bias. If we accept this perspective, then racial bias could also explain why Messam, whose city of Miramar is slightly larger than South Bend, got relatively little attention.
None of this should be taken as a judgment on Buttigieg’s record or a repudiation of his political acumen. Nor am I arguing that Messam deserved far more media attention than he received. The primary election last year was overflowing with candidates, and many of them should have focused their ambition on the more tangible political battles taking place in local, state, and national legislatures, rather than opportunistically shooting for the nation’s highest office. The candidates with less viable bids could have more directly challenged the Republican agenda and the dangerous forces of Trumpism had they had enough perspective to recognize where their efforts would have the greatest impact. On that list are both mayors, who were arguably unqualified for the job to begin with. That being said, comparing the trajectories of Buttigieg and Messam offers a compelling case study of the media’s power to shape the presidential race and influence politics more broadly. Even amidst the rise of social media, members of the mainstream media remain the primary gatekeepers of news, and therefore wield enormous responsibility in preserving the lifeblood of democracy: public access to accurate and credible information. Unfortunately, all too often, this discretionary power of the media has been mishandled and mismanaged.
