Depth Charge Duds
The Resistance cult of “deep reporting” enables the grifters and lowers the bar for everyone.
By Aaron Timms
Of all the words and catchphrases to gain currency during the Trump era — whataboutery, gaslighting, bothsidesism, Overton Window — none matches the quiet influence of “deep reporting.” Journalists have been complimenting each other on the depth of their reporting for years, of course; the phrase is not new. But under Trump, a figure uniquely resistant to explanation, the idea that journalists can uncover hidden truths by going deep has taken on a special power, especially among liberal media and the “Resistance.” Journalism is not worth paying attention to anymore unless it has been described as “deeply reported,” a benediction testifying to the extreme depths to which the reporter went to generate the story that you, the grateful reader, ignorantly existing at the mere surface of things, now face the choice to click on.
Across the mediasphere, on political cable and in the Twitter shout-outs between prestige print reporters, not a day goes by without a windy tribute to some hack’s feat of athleticism in reaching journalism’s hallowed demersal zone, the deepest of the deep. MSNBC stalwarts Rachel Maddow and Ari Melber hand out praise for “deep reporting” to their reporter-guests like it’s a cookie; it’s their ultimate accolade, the sign that we are talking to Someone Serious. Rather than thinking about the compromises and tradeoffs necessary to secure information off-the-record in the Trump era, our media gatekeepers are interested in one question only: how deep is your reporting?
No journalist embodies this cult more than Jonathan Swan, the Trump era’s closest thing to a reporter laureate. Swan’s stories for Axios regularly come with the stamp of “deep reporting,” and he’s quick to extend the compliment to others as well. As Axios co-founder Jim VandeHei tweeted last year, “I have been at this 25 years and never seen a reporter consistently deliver more genuine, deeply reported scoops than @jonathanvswan week in, week out.”
There’s nothing wrong with deep reporting, of course. All good reporting should aspire to depth. What characterizes this era, and so much Resistance media, is the relentless boasting about deep reporting in the absence of any actual depth. The phrase “deep reporting” has become a cliché, and as with all clichés, overuse has degraded its value. Look more closely, and you’ll see that what’s fussed over as “deep” and “comprehensive” and “thorough” reporting is, more often than not, plain regulation-depth reporting. Many of the stories lauded for their depth are nothing more than regular news reports leavened with off-the-record gossip. Often, it’s the power of the masthead, rather than any special excavatory skill of the reporter, that accounts for the use of the adjective “deep.”
Consider this Washington Post piece that Swan tweeted out in January with the commendation, “Deep and comprehensive reporting here from WaPo team.” The story was a standard account of negotiations between Democrats and the Trump administration to end the federal government shutdown, mixing information already on the public record with some reporting on discussions taking place behind closed doors. It included off-the-record quotes from a number of lawmakers, most of whom, it’s fair to assume, offered comment because The Washington Post is a powerful media outlet with national reach. The reporting, in other words, was fairly shallow. It wasn’t a bad story, but did it deserve to be lavished with praise as if the reporters were Jacques Cousteau? Look close, and most “deep reporting” looks a lot like standard-issue access journalism.
The great reportorial challenge of the Trump era is to figure out what Trump will do next, even though the evidence suggests no one knows, least of all Trump himself. Trump is not an enigma. Two years into his administration, we can agree there’s nothing in his head beyond random flashes of resentment, self-love, entitlement and rage. Often, it is the futile quest to find something, anything, inside the presidential cranium that could act as a firm and predictable basis for executive decision-making accounts for today’s cult of “deep reporting.” The Trump administration is an informational scarcity economy unlike anything in recent political memory. The more impenetrable the president appears, the stronger the media’s drive to go deep becomes — a drive that only looks more doomed with the passage of time. This leaves us with an endless parade of “revelations” about the Trump administration that reveal trivia or, as is usually the case, nothing at all.
Think back to Rachel Maddow’s hilariously overdone “release” of the Trump tax returns, or Bob Woodward’s 2018 book Fear: Trump in the White House, which rewrote two years’ worth of Trump reporting by other journalists, but in prose of unprecedented ugliness. In retrospect, many of the stories celebrated at the time of publication as triumphs of deep reporting in the Trump era — stories dealing with the president’s early business dealings, say, or nearly all the reporting on Russiagate — have been trails to nowhere.
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The class of media grifters to emerge in the Trump era are best understood as an unconscious pastiche of the Deeply Reported Media. The more outre of them (Louise Mensch, Seth Abramson, and Eric Garland) are widely mocked in the mainstream media, and rightly so, since much of what they say is ridiculous. But part of the reason for their otherwise baffling durability is that mainstream reporters have made “deep reporting” a good in itself rather than a means to an end. It is less as an exercise in actually going deep than a series of boasts about exclusive access to confidential information, insider knowledge, and off-the-record trivia from a long list of “credible” sources. Hence the proliferation of stories including sentences like, “We spent eighteen months interviewing 58 people on three continents, both on and off the record, while investigating this story,” with little regard for the result.
The grifters have cottoned on to this and appropriated all the postures of deep reporting. They understand that the information taken most seriously in the Trump era is the information that says it must be taken seriously, that touts its exclusivity, and boasts the labor that went into its production. The most laughable of the grifters are the ultimate triumph of self-marketing over journalism. But they learned it from someone. Their pastiche of journalism is effective because mainstream journalists have fetishized deep reporting to the point of parody and beyond.
By rights, these should be tough times for the grifters. So much of their efforts over the past two years has focused on teasing out the case for collusion between Trump and Russia, or finding proof that Trump obstructed justice. But the completion of the Mueller report has not slowed them down. On their social media accounts, they continue to release streams of insufferably pompous threads, bad jokes, links (usually to their own work), and requests for money. In other words, they’re no different to any other journalist out there.
One point where they do diverge from members of the mainstream media is in the absolute certainty of their convictions. Seth Abramson, the University of New Hampshire writing professor best known for his long Twitter threads that *explain* everything while saying *nothing* and committing *grievous crimes against italics,* has a book called Proof of Conspiracy coming out in August, such is his confidence that the Russiagate truthers will be vindicated. Forget the Mueller inquiry. The conspiracy has been proved — it’s right there, in his book. Louise Mensch, the former UK Conservative Party MP, has a long history of making bold and incorrect predictions on the basis of her “reporting:” she once claimed that her “sources” indicated that the death penalty was being considered for Steve Bannon. (Steve Bannon remains tragically alive.) In recent days, she’s confidently tweeted that “the attorney general can’t save Trump now” and expanded this take on her blog, Patribotics.
What’s most interesting about these predictions is not that they mark her as a conspiracist. It’s that they are couched in the language of investigative journalism, of deep reporting. The writing works hard to sound measured, objective, reportorial, and is studded with positively Swanian touches: “according to my sources,” “I reported at the time,” “my analysis suggests,” and so on.
Or consider the Krassenstein brothers, the airheads of Resistance grift. Many of their tweets read like bad Trump parodies, punctuated with “BOOM!” or “Now shut up!” One recent tweet from Brian Krassenstein, about Attorney General Barr, ended with a call for the FBI to “LOCK HIM UP!” But they, too, see themselves as journalists. Their house publication, Hill Reporter, claims to cover “politics, world news, and more!,” but is mostly a chronicle of Trump administration officials the Krassenstein brothers think are going to jail. Eric Garland also seems himself as engaged in a unique battle for the soul of journalism. In between his frequent volleys of ALL CAPS INTERNETESE, he can usually be found pausing to berate the “Mediocrity Stream Media”or dismiss Wikileaks as “not journalism.”
How can people this unserious continue to command the attention of millions? The answer might be found in another question: In their relentless pushing of Russiagate, their coltish love of the sources and inside connections that ground their self-declared journalistic authority, their addiction to social media and the adulation of the crowd, are they really all that different from the grandees of our “acceptable” media? Rachel Maddow has spent the whole Trump era advertising her access to insiders and prosecuting collusion between Russia and the White House. Almost every mainstream journalist predicted a Clinton victory in 2016. Meanwhile, the ethical codes supposedly binding professional journalists have been shown up as bullshit, while plagiarists and fabulists sit at the top of the industry. Is it really any mystery that trust in journalism has suffered? Only now we can identify the beneficiaries of that breakdown. When all the mainstream media has to offer is misplaced confidence, failed predictions, and the smirking self-promotion that is “deep reporting,” conspiracy theory and journalism cosplay will flourish in the void.
Aaron Timms is a freelance journalist. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Baffler, the Daily Beast, and many others.
Production DetailsV. 1.0.1
Last edited: April 14, 2019
Author: Aaron Timms
Editor: Alexander Zaitchik
Artwork: The Rachel Maddow Show / MSNBC
