The Future of Journalism is Basic
Following up on the President’s promises, and discussing journalism’s next steps with Guardian US senior reporter Tom McCarthy.
“I’m on Canal Street — I’m gonna get to the Holland Tunnel but the way the traffic is going, it might be a while.”
Reporter Tom McCarthy is en route to Northampton County, Pennsylvania, to work on the second part of his new online series, “The Promise.” McCarthy reports from the home of former industry behemoth Bethlehem Steel, once the second largest steel producer in the country.
“The Promise” is only one of the many projects McCarthy leads at The Guardian US. He also heads “The Politics Minute” (formerly “The Campaign Minute”), a daily roundup of political news distributed via email each morning. It’s a “quick and colorful wrap-up of the day in US politics for people who aren’t sitting in front of CNN all day, or aren’t on Twitter all day, aren’t refreshing every few minutes,” he says.
Keeping up on the 24-hour news cycle is near impossible for most Americans, especially considering the current chaotic environment in Washington. “The Politics Minute” serves as a guide to the madness — condensing the clutter to practical and digestible nuggets.
A professional requirement, McCarthy relentlessly follows the American “political circus,” but that wasn’t always the case. Originally from Iowa, McCarthy spent his high school years in Omaha, Nebraska before attending Cornell University as an undergraduate. At his first job on the copy desk at the Omaha World Herald, he served as a spot news reporter, covering courts, police, and the like. After graduating from the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, McCarthy spent two years at The Daily Star in Beirut as a rewrite editor. There, he primarily rewrote copy filed by reporters for whom English was “a second (or third, or fourth) language.”
He returned to the US as an online news writer for ABC News, and eventually, for their live weeknight program Nightline. McCarthy joined The Guardian US, an America-focused digital satellite of British newspaper The Guardian, as a national affairs correspondent in early 2012.
During the presidential campaign that year, McCarthy took on the newspaper’s live political news blogs (a method few media outlets were using at the time). Four years later, McCarthy would continue relaying constant updates of the 2016 presidential campaign to his readers. Now, he’s covering the Trump administration.
“The interest in all things ‘Trump’ for Guardian readers was intense from the get go,” says McCarthy. His first in-person experience was at Trump Tower in September of 2015, where the candidate was unveiling his tax plan. Though McCarthy never interacted directly with Trump, he spent time with him in small groups, and covers both his campaign and his presidency closely. “I didn’t think he’d rise to the level,” he says, remembering his early interactions with Trump.
Five days after the inauguration in January, chief White House strategist Steve Bannon urged the New York Times to “quote this: the media here is the opposition party.” Bolstered by Trump’s “running war” with the “fake news media,” the relationship seems as strained as ever.
“It’s not like we’re coming down from a perfect relationship between the White House and the media,” says McCarthy. “The Obama administration prosecuted more journalists under the Espionage Act than the past three administrations combined.” From 2008 to 2016, the Obama administration prosecuted nine cases involving government officials and whistleblowers who allegedly provided classified material to journalists.
“Trump has dragged us into new territory,” he says, alluding some of the legal threats the Trump family has made towards various media outlets. “Punishing political coverage is a deadly threat to press freedom.”
In September of 2016, Melania Trump filed a libel lawsuit against the UK’s Daily Mail. The suit was dismissed by a Maryland judge, but was refiled in New York in February, despite a retraction and apology issued by The Mail. These legal actions are “indicative of how this administration approaches journalism,” says McCarthy. “There is clearly an oppositional relationship, which is doubly concerning when Donald Trump now has all the powers of the presidency.”
“I can’t help but think that there is a certain mutually beneficial quality to the opposition between Trump and the media,” he says. Before entering the political arena, Trump was a famed reality television star, no stranger to media attention. His scandal-ridden political career has resulted in a surge in newspaper subscriptions, often referred to as the “Trump Bump.”
For “The Promise,” McCarthy investigates the motivations behind Trump voters. “We want to try to gauge how Trump supporters view his presidency over at least the first year,” he explained. Northampton County was one of 209 counties nationwide that voted for Donald Trump in 2016, after voting for Barack Obama both in 2008 and 2012. This curious voting pattern drove McCarthy to Pennsylvania, seeking voters’ thoughts on Trump’s infamous promise to “Make America Great Again.”
To many citizens and journalists, Trump’s victory came as a shock. “At face value, it’s difficult to understand,” says McCarthy. “The question is what does that movement of voters tell us about the top concerns in people’s lives; their needs; their hopes.” Using film, photography, and print, McCarthy seeks to illuminate voters’ motivations.
“In my experience, these voters are happy, they’re optimistic, they feel like they’ve won,” says McCarthy. They saw Hillary Clinton as a “miserable extension of the worst impulses of American politics…an extension of the present dynasty.”
Amid several controversies, voters on both sides of the political spectrum questioned whether Trump could exhibit the presidential qualities seen in past leaders. Trump’s bragging about sexual assault, for one, was a non-starter for much of the electorate. “The people I’m talking to are polite, well-educated, well-spoken…I can’t imagine in those lives this kind of discourse wouldn’t be rejected,” says McCarthy.
For the people of Northampton County, voting for Trump was not necessarily a condonation of Trump’s coarse and offensive campaign quips. “They didn’t like it,” he says, “but it didn’t make a Clinton voter out of them.”
Though “The Promise” was inspired by a particular county-level voting pattern, McCarthy’s articles dive into individual voters’ perspectives. He looks at the core issues in these citizens’ lives, trying to distill what really matters to them. Moreover, McCarthy wants to know “how they see the President, or the power of the presidency as playing a role in addressing those issues.”
“Where to go from here,” he considers. “Paying attention to voters should be the default perspective.”
After a turbulent first month with the Trump administration, journalists are reconsidering the type of coverage needed to keep voters informed. But even before Inauguration Day, journalism, and its role in the American political system, was being reconsidered.
Data journalism, in particular, came under fire following a seemingly universal conclusion that Clinton was the strong favorite. Though, McCarthy doesn’t see any reason to ignore the numbers. “If I’m covering US politics in 2020, I will be reading FiveThirtyEight’s Harry Enten,” he says, “I’m going to be reading that kind of analysis.”
Anecdotal or empirical? McCarthy sees a tension between the two forms of journalism, but thinks “there’s room for both.”
“In terms of the stories that the media need to tell right now, if we want to give ourselves an assignment, it’s not clear that we would have anything to gain by continuing to report in a way that sometimes happened in 2016,” he says. It’s not about covering every conference call an administration official takes, but about talking to as many voters as you can, and presenting thoughtful analysis of those interactions. We need to ask “whether the media developed a blind spot, or allowed a blind spot to persist.”
For McCarthy, what’s needed is “a return to the basics of reporting.”
“I thought the traffic would get better once I got to New Jersey,” says McCarthy, now 45 minutes (and one tunnel disconnection) into his journey. “Almost to the fresh air.”
