Change Your Media Filters

Even in the hardest-fought US House races, between three and six percent of voters will ever meet their representative. Sadly, pundit portrayals do us no service.

It’s funny what you remember as you look back.

I’m blessed to have been involved in more than three dozen US Senate and House and, tangentially, a few presidential campaigns covering more than half the United States. I’m one of the fortunate ones who has visited every one of our 50 states, most provinces of Canada, and close to a dozen countries on most of our continents, some during election seasons, most recently in France, Italy, and Portugal. My first visit to Canada in 1974 was in the midst of an election involving a Liberal leader named Trudeau.

One of the most memorable things from one elected officials I worked for in 1982 came from then-freshman US Representative John Hiler (R-IN). As his press secretary, I was driving him early one morning from LaPorte, Indiana, to a speech on the other side of the congressional district. I’ve long said the best job in any campaign is to drive (or fly with) the candidate. You get to know them, see and hear what they see and hear, and get a feel for their interactions with the people they represent or want to.

Iowa’s Senior US Senator, Chuck Grassley, travels to all of Iowa’s 99 counties yearly, sometimes conducting town halls. Such meetings have become increasingly rare because of security concerns and uninvited demonstrators and agitators.

I’ve done that in almost every campaign or congressional office I’ve worked in, no matter my role.

During a drive across northern Indiana, Congressman Hiler mentioned something that stuck with me as we discussed the importance of media and scheduling a candidate’s time. He first said that the national environment dictated more than what individual campaigns do. “We might influence, maybe, three percent of the vote,” I recall the 30-year-old congressman telling me. And only about three to, maybe, six percent of people will ever meet their congressman.

The election of 1982 was not kind to Republicans, especially those running as freshmen who were part of the Reagan landslide just two years earlier. After having won 34 seats in 1980, they turned around and lost 26 just two years later. The Federal Reserve Board forced America into a recession to wring Carter’s devastating double-digit inflation out of the economy. It was distasteful medicine. The national unemployment rate hit ten percent in early October, just four weeks before the election; it was even higher in our district. Hiler eeked out a 50.2% win after Dan Rather, on CBS National News, gleefully declared him the first congressional incumbent loss of the election. Late arriving election results from the heavily Republican Elkhart County swung the difference. That was an interesting election night.

Only a few voters may ever meet a candidate, much less a Congressman or US Senator, but they all have access to media. While most never meet the politicians they vote for or against, we know who they are and have impressions of them. That’s why in our democratic Republic, the media matters. So do the ads.

And wow, we are pummeled with impressions daily, more so today than 40 or more years ago. Back then, the average American was hit with 12-16,000 impressions daily, on which they may act on 12, mostly negatively. You can more than triple or quadruple that today with the advent of social media and those obnoxious Facebook ads for cheap Chinese-made junk that dominate your feeds over posts from friends that you’re trying to follow.

As a full-time campaign operative and congressional aide over most of two decades, plus a couple of decades more as a lobbyist, I’ve been blessed with lots of face time with elected officials and candidates, Democrats and Republicans. I’ve met every president since Ronald Reagan, including Donald Trump. Most pundit portrayals of them, especially in recent years, are off the mark, disingenuous, often wrong, and frequently harmful. They contribute, if not exacerbate, our divisions and hostilities with specific candidates and those supporting them.

It’s time to revisit our media filters and demand changes. Or, make changes ourselves.

When Donald Trump calls the media “the enemy of the people,” he has a point. What you have to do is look at the media’s reaction to his most recent assassination attempt, where he was blamed for it by legacy media, particularly NBC News. For all his faults and foibles, love or hate him, give Trump credit for making himself more available to the media than any previous major presidential candidate. That’s not always to his benefit, and sadly, most anything that smacks of a positive portrayal, the media personality is punished by the pundit class and trying to “humanize” Trump. The same is true for much of the media on the right, which portrays him as doing no wrong. We know better.

I’ve never met Kamala Harris or Tim Walz, so I can’t speak to their media portrayals, such as they are—they rarely engage, if ever, in genuine, unfiltered interviews. But I suspect anyone elected to statewide office three times in California or twice in Minnesota is not the clueless imbecile many on the right perceive. But it would help if real journalists would make an issue out of the Harris-Walz campaign’s failures to subject themselves to serious interviews with serious, fair-minded journalists. They do exist, by the way, just not at Comcast-owned NBC or Disney-owned ABC. CBS has at least one in Major Garrett, the network’s chief Washington correspondent, but we rarely hear from him. That same network canned one of the best reporters in modern times, Catherine Herridge.

The best journalists are the ones whose political leanings you really can’t define. The Dispatch’s David Drucker, Fox News’s Brett Baier, Herridge, and a few others.

The First Lady, Jill Biden, leads the first Cabinet meeting in nearly a year, apparently because her husband could not do so.

After all, their failure to make an issue out of media availabilities is how we have wound up in a Constitutional crisis with an 81-year-old incapacitated President who turns rare Cabinet meetings over to his wife and consistently loses his train of thought after about 15 seconds when speaking off the cuff. We saw that firsthand during the CNN debate on June 23rd.

It’s no wonder that America’s (and the Western world’s) enemies are wreaking havoc right now, from Iranian-inspired and supplied surrogates launching attacks on ships in the Red Sea, ramming Philippine coast guard ships in disputed waters, or building nuclear enrichment facilities. Weakness is provocative.

Since we all rely heavily on the media to know and evaluate candidates, it’s long past time that we demand they do their job—and the candidates, too. We should not reward media outlets that refuse to do so. A focus on personalities over policies, which has forever plagued every election, seems particularly lazy and harmful during this one when so much is riding on the outcome.

A great example of that failure is the recent brouhaha in Springfield, Ohio. Trump’s provocative and unproven assertions that pets (“They’re eating the cats; they’re eating the dogs”) were being consumed by Haitian immigrants is unproven and “garbage,” asserted Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH). So were the Democratic partisan claims that Trump inspired bomb threats. DeWine exposed them for the hoaxes they were. True, Trump can be his own worst enemy, but again, he has a point.

A real journalist would spend time trying to figure out what the underlying issue was - a community of 58,000 people experiencing a sudden influx of 15,000-20,000 immigrants from a very different culture and language being imposed on their community with no federal assistance and sudden strains on services, from law enforcement to schools. It was a point made by vice presidential candidate and Ohio US Senator JD Vance in a hostile interview with CNN’s Dana Bash that the media shamefully took out of context, accusing Vance of “creating stories” about the issue. Here’s what he said, in context, as reported by Fox News.

"The evidence is the firsthand account of my constituents who are telling me that this happened and, by the way, I‘ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months and the American media ignored it. There was a congressional hearing just last week of Angel Moms who lost children because Kamala Harris let criminal migrants into this country who then murdered their children. The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I start talking about cat memes. If I have to, I mean, create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast."

You may never meet Donald Trump, Kamala Harris, or your local congress critter. So, it’s time to check and hold your media filters responsible. Fortunately, a few nascent online media outlets are emerging that try to do that, or at least present both sides so we, the voters, can make our judgments. You know, like the media used to do. Exploring the vast treasure trove of Substack writers is also a good place to find balanced and insightful contributions, especially from independent outlets like Michael Shellenberger or Bari Weiss’s The Free Press. If you find yourself in total agreement or total opposition to what you read, watch, or hear, someone is doing something wrong.

Meanwhile, you will have to stop taking the media’s word for it and do your research, or at least find those you trust who do and encourage those around you to do the same. Your future depends on it.