David Plouffe, a top adviser to the Kamala Harris presidential campaign, this week explained the failure to inspire independent voters: “This political environment sucked, okay?”
But political environments don’t just happen. They’re driven by governance, campaigns, culture, and the media. Including journalism.
According to a New York Times post-mortem of the Harris campaign, a Trump campaign ad and its followup had a devastating effect. The first ad described even liberal media as “shocked” by Harris’s 2019 support for “taxpayer funded sex changes for prisoners and illegal aliens.”
The ads were so devastating that the issue is now part of the conversation on the future of the Democratic Party. Adam Jentleson, a former Democratic Senate aide, wrote in the New York Times that candidates should stop offering up positions on “every issue under the sun.”
According to the Times’ post-mortem:
The ads were effective with Black and Latino men, according to the Trump team, but also with moderate suburban white women who might be concerned about transgender athletes in girls’ sports.
Those were the same suburban women Ms. Harris was trying to mobilize with ads about abortion.
Democrats struggled to respond.
But the ads didn’t just happen. And it’s worth understanding where they came from and how they snowballed.
The earliest citation in the ad comes from CNN. In that CNN article, CNN reported on Harris’s responses to a 2019 questionnaire from the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
The headline read, “Harris told ACLU in 2019 she supports cuts to ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] funding and providing gender transition surgery to detained migrants.” The article juxtaposes Harris’s 2019 positions with her 2024 platform.
Transgender health care was a big focus of the article, which characterized care for transgender detainees and prisoners as a left-wing cause. The questionnaire, the article said, “has received scant media attention.” That was about to change.
The article was posted at 3pm on Sept. 9. That night, it got a subjective framing on CNN’s air.
“She actually said she supported that?” anchor Erin Burnett said. “These are things that, you know, you would be hard to think that you would come up with; taxpayer funding, gender transitions for detained migrants.”
Burnett, reportedly an observant Catholic, concluded that Harris’s 2029 positions were “pretty incredible stuff.”
Only one side of the transgender-care issue was presented. No one was quoted defending the policy or explaining the moral and legal imperatives for governments to care for those in custody.
The segment aired in CNN’s 7pm hour. Trump campaign adviser Alex Pfeiffer posted it at 8:01pm, noting that “Burnett is shocked.”
CNN’s article appears to be the first time the 2019 information resurfaced. In fact, CNN said they were first to report it.
It came the day before the Trump/Harris debate. And Trump used it.
Responding to a question about Harris’s policy flips, Trump said, “Now she wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison. This is a radical left liberal that would do this.”
That gave more media reason to talk about it; namely, fact-checking. The first Trump ad cited several of the fact-checks, creating the impression this was a big issue.
The ad also quoted the New York Times, which named Trump’s claim the debate’s “Wildest sounding attack line that was basically true.”
As the Trump ad accurately observed, “Even the liberal media was shocked.”
Jentleson said in his New York Times op-ed that questionnaires like the ACLU’s are “where opponents go to mine for oppo, as they did for Ms. Harris.” There’s no evidence that the Trump campaign fed the 2019 questionnaire to CNN, and regardless of how CNN got it, the issue is still CNN’s judgment of its relevance.
So what made it relevant? And to whom?
The issue has negligible material impact on most Americans. The funds are an infinitesimal fraction of federal spending.
As the CNN article noted, the first inmate gender-affirming surgery didn’t even occur until 2022.
Out of America’s 1.8 million incarcerated people — a number that itself deserves far more attention — in 2021, an estimated 5,000 were transgender. That’s 0.28% of the prisoner population. The number of surgeries would be even lower.
Undocumented immigrants who are transgender are estimated to number no more than 50,000. That’s all of them, not just detainees.
Compare those numbers, in terms of material impact on the country, to the 1,300 people who die every year due to heat. Or the $165 billion that climate change cost us in 2022.
The issue’s relevant not because it affects people, but because some people care about it. Transgender issues have been controversial forever. So any journalist spotting that 2019 questionnaire would rightly think, ah, some people will care about this, or this could put Harris in a tight spot so it’ll be interesting to see what she says about it now.
Both of which are true.
And, without context, the policy might be genuinely shocking to people who haven’t thought about it. Journalists, though, are supposed to educate themselves before issuing pronouncements like “Wildest” or “pretty incredible.”
And it’s worth considering why people care about it. One reason is transphobia, which overlaps with another reason: Christian extremism.
In April, for instance, there was outrage over the White House recognizing the Transgender Day of Visibility on the same day of Easter. It didn’t matter that Pres. Joe Biden wasn’t in charge of scheduling either of those days.
But even the fact-check noted only that it was being portrayed as an attack on Christianity. The idea that the outrage was an attack by Christians isn’t contemplated.
That almost doesn’t matter, because the primary goal is to get the media to confirm that Wild Story X matters. Even fact-checking it accomplishes the right’s goal: Establishing that it merits attention.
Too often, media bias is scrutinized in light of what’s reported or said about a topic. But the most pernicious media bias expresses itself in the initial choice of topics.
When any journalistic outlet decides to cover or report on something, that’s a subjective decision about the topic’s importance. In this case, the media decided that the government providing professionally recommended health care for some prisoners was important. And wild.
Trump’s ads rightly inferred universal consensus on the issue’s importance.
Today’s Democratic deliberations aren’t addressing the media dynamics at the root of these issues. So they’re looking at this as a problem that can be solved by moving right. But the media dynamics will follow them.
As progressives expand the circle of social justice, Democrats will be asked to take stands on issues affecting smaller and smaller groups. Defending these groups will become more politically risky as their causes are seen as increasingly fringe.
The media will elevate those defenses as newsworthy because they’re interesting — especially in a non-contextual, subjective framing — even if they have no bearing on the daily lives of 99% of Americans. And the right will continue to weaponize media pronouncements that Democratic positions are wild or incredible.
Former Pres. Bill Clinton reportedly suggested how Harris should have responded: “We have to answer it and say we won’t do it.”
But if Harris had done that from the start, it might have been an even bigger story. The premise of the original CNN piece wasn’t that Harris advocated an outrageous policy, it focused on issues where she had flipped.
Transgender issues made the cut because her campaign didn’t clarify her current position. Running from her 2019 position would have made it an even bigger flip, conforming much better to the article’s conceit.
We can’t know whether CNN would have paid less attention if the Harris campaign said its position hadn’t changed. But there’s no doubt the original article focused on confirming a rightward shift. Look at the first sentence:
As Kamala Harris pivots to the political center in her campaign for president, a 2019 questionnaire from a leading civil rights organization spotlights her past support for left-wing causes…
The whole point was to gotcha the political shift. No shift, no gotcha.
So an endless Democrat flight from news outlets elevating fringe issues isn’t the answer. Flips won’t placate a media that considers flipping newsworthy. The only effective response is to address the root cause: The journalism itself.
In this case, the Harris campaign essentially tried to stonewall CNN, not confirming her current position. They might, instead, have asked whether CNN was saying the government should deny recommended medical care for everyone in custody, or just for people CNN doesn’t like?
Political denial and shame are media chum in the water. Give them nowhere to go.
Democrats also could elevate alternative media that provide contextual, empathetic, proportionate coverage of material issues. (TFN operators are standing by.)
The right built its media ecosphere by treating unserious outlets as credible and immaterial stories as newsworthy. Those media then dragged along a corporate media committed to staying in a middle that’s constantly moving rightward.
Democratic leaders and activists can do a lot quickly to undo this dynamic. But letting the current dynamic steer the party just empowers the right to do this with more issues affecting more people.
Published with permission of Jonathan Larsen, The Fucking News.
