What Does the Left Want From Maggie Haberman?

What Does the Left Want From Maggie Haberman?

By Jonathan Chait

The left’s critique of the mainstream media is an explicable — if not entirely sympathetic — phenomenon stemming from a combination of a belief in working the refs with a deeper critique of journalistic objectivity. Where this tendency goes from rational yet overheated to completely deranged is when the focus turns from the media generally to Maggie Haberman specifically.

As I’ve written, I think Haberman’s coverage of Donald Trump is probably the greatest White House reporting job in the history of the beat. She has exposed enormous amounts of misconduct by Trump and his inner circle. Yet she has become a fixation of left-wing media critics, who attacked her for “access” to Trump and “normalizing” his behavior.

A prototypical critique is expressed in a column by The American Prospect’s Eric Alterman:

I have been an eager consumer, though not a fan, of Maggie Haberman’s access-based reporting on Donald Trump and company in The New York Times. Her scoops were often eye-popping, but they often lacked the necessary context to explain why they mattered. The “he said/she said” pattern of daily journalism was partially to blame. But even more so, it was the Grey Lady’s commitment to an outdated notion of objective journalism that shoveled almost all political reporting inside an inappropriate “both sides” framework, one that had the effect over time of normalizing Trump’s most egregious (and sometimes insane) behavior.

Alterman goes on to concede that Haberman’s book is actually pretty good. And yet he criticizes Haberman nonetheless for failing to cite Alterman’s work on the subject of the media:

I didn’t see any books at all listed in Haberman’s notes and there is no bibliography. If she had, however, consulted one book, say, Lying in State: Why Presidents Lie—and Why Trump Is Worse by yours truly, it could have enriched her discussion of this point. In the first instance that Trump, as president-elect, was caught in an obvious lie—when he said, “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”—here is what I wrote…

(If you have any familiarity with Alterman, this critique is highly unsurprising, as his favorite mode of refutation is a version of the famous Annie Hall Marshall McLuhan scene, except the person Alterman happens to have right here is always Eric Alterman.)

The Alterman passage that Alterman wishes Haberman had studied more closely is this:

[O]nly the New York Times crossed the line and employed the word “lie” in its headline. The rest ranged from: “Trump Wrongly Blames …” (AP) to “Trump Falsely Tells …” (Chicago Tribune), “Trump Still Pushing Unconfirmed Claims …” (New York Daily News), “Trump Repeats Unsupported Claim” (Wall Street Journal), and “Without Evidence, Trump Tells …” (Washington Post). At least two allegedly neutral sources, CNN and The Hill, also repeated Trump’s lie without any qualification: “Trump Believes Fraud Cost Him Popular Vote” (CNN), and “Trump Continues to Insist Voter Fraud Robbed Him of Popular Vote” (The Hill).

The problem with so many of these headlines was that they took no position on whether Trump’s boast was true or not. The CNN and Hill headlines positively encouraged the lie. These news organizations apparently felt themselves helpless in the face of a phenomenon they had never faced before: a president who was an unapologetic, pathological liar and did not care who knew it. And yet the word “lie” remained off the table for most media institutions. As New York Times executive editor Dean Baquet would argue, “If you get loose with the word lie, you’re going to look pretty scurrilous. Right? It’s going to be in every story.”

Other journalists also worried about alienating Trump voters by telling the truth about his lies. “Every time he lies you have to point out it’s a lie, and there’s a part of this country that hears that as an attack,” wrote New York Times media columnist Jim Rutenberg. “That is a serious problem.” And so Trump’s lies, the scale of which had no precedent in American political history, were treated like politics-as-usual.

So Alterman is quoting a series of articles that describe various Trump claims as false, wrong, unsupported, and so on and castigates these stories for failing to use the word lie, which has totemic power among left-wing media critics. Of course, the difference between false and lie is that one can be proven and the other relies on inferences into a person’s mental state.

In this column, Alterman’s chosen example of what he calls an “obvious lie,” as opposed to a mere falsehood, is: “I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.” This strikes me as an example of the opposite of what Alterman claims. Of course Trump is wrong that Clinton won the popular vote because of millions of illegal votes in 2016. But how do we know Trump is certain of this? He is a moron who mainlines right-wing propaganda all day long!

Why so many leftists consider it crucial for the media to insist on speculating about Trump’s mental state — and present him as smart when he may well be ignorant — escapes me completely. It seems connected to a romantic and utterly fantastical vision of a reporter who denudes the power of a demagogue by saying, “How dare you, sir!”

But this strange belief helps explain the other buzzword associated with Haberman’s critics: access. As a political commentator who rarely leaves his home during the workday, I hardly believe access is necessary to produce useful journalism. But it definitely helps certain kinds of journalism, White House reporting among them. Haberman has achieved extraordinary levels of access, which she has used to pry open Trump’s inner circle and reveal its cruelty, cynicism, incompetence, and corruption. The criticism of her work is simply that she shows what is happening without attaching commentary.

Her critics want her to spend less time talking to people in Trump’s inner circle and more time reading Eric Alterman books. Needless to say, I am glad Haberman is ignoring this advice.

Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer. Photo: Getty Images

 

The dominant conservative tendency of the current political era is anti-anti-Trumpism. Unlike direct support for Trump, which is still a somewhat marginal tendency on the right, anti-anti-Trumpism supports Trump and his allies indirectly by discrediting every alternative.

A favorite method of anti-anti-Trumpists is to find and exaggerate flaws by Democrats that match up with Trump’s most famous flaws. Trump is known for boasting about sexual assault? Here is Joe Biden uncomfortably placing his hands on women’s shoulders. Trump tried to cancel the election? Let’s talk about Democrats who registered objections to previous election results. The point of this game is to show that Trump may be bad but he is not worse than the Democrats in any aspect.

An amusing new entry in the genre came last week from National Review’s Dan McLaughlin, a paradigmatic anti-anti-Trump conservative. McLaughlin was excited by news stories reporting that Biden had not yet spoken with Florida governor Ron DeSantis about Hurricane Ian. “Picture the media reaction if a Republican president refused to talk to a Democratic governor who was facing a major hurricane,” he declared, recapitulating some of the criticism of Trump for refusing to work with Democrats during national disasters.

You see? Biden was just as bad as Trump on this, too, but the media refused to criticize him like they did Trump. Another item on the vast scorecard of Trump offenses checked off the list as a tie with the Democrats.

As we now realize, this claim proved to be totally wrong. Biden spoke with DeSantis, and the two men appeared in public together, with DeSantis going so far as to commend the White House response.

In a narrow sense, McLaughlin’s error was to distort a preliminary report on Biden not having yet spoken with DeSantis. Reporters were simply noting that the two men had not yet had a direct conversation but had instead communicated through the staff level. Since then, they have spoken multiple times. Refusing to do something is obviously not the same thing as not yet having done it. The factual predicate for McLaughlin’s argument was made up.

The larger error, of course, is that Biden’s approach to working with the opposing party is completely different than his predecessor’s. Trump refused to even pretend to act like president of the entire country. He openly favored areas of the country that supported him and privately extorted Democratic governors by withholding disaster aid unless they gave him public support.

Biden has not done this. He has visited parts of the country affected by disasters even if they’re Republican and never attempted to apply discriminatory treatment or extort them for political gain. Clearing a bar so low wouldn’t have even been considered an accomplishment until Trump failed to get over it.

But again, the point is that Trump was an extraordinarily aberrant president who completely disqualified himself in numerous ways. Despite the efforts of the anti-anti-Trumpists to pretend the Democrats are just as bad, the comparisons all collapse upon inspection.

“The impulse to make coalitions smaller rather than larger is one I do not understand,” wrote Matt Yglesias on Twitter recently. The subject of his lament was one of those “Dear White Women” columns that continue to be churned out regularly. (“Dear White Women Cheering Iranian Women” was its headline, proof of this rubric’s infinite adaptability to turn nearly any news event into a scolding polemic about why white women should feel shame about failing to be more left wing.)

I suspect Yglesias does understand the impulse or at least would if he thought about it. It is true that deliberately trying to alienate allies is a bad strategy for political coalitions. But it is a good strategy for people who are engaged in factional struggles for control of a coalition. Yes, their rhetoric may drive allies out of the coalition, but this is an acceptable cost. Indeed, it’s more than acceptable, it’s desirable — the smaller the coalition, the easier it is to control.

In their defense, progressives who use this tactic do have a historical model in mind. The conservative movement’s takeover of the Republican Party is a precedent nearly every left-wing political activist has studied. Before the conservative movement took it over, the GOP was an ideologically (if not demographically) heterogeneous coalition open to compromise and adaptation, much like the Democratic Party remains today. Progressive activists wish to follow the right’s blueprint to turn the Democratic Party into the vehicle for a disciplined ideological movement.

One of the main hurdles to this process is political pragmatism. Moving away from the center brings political costs. When it began its takeover in the early 1960s, the conservative movement had an argument for why its strategy would work. There were tens of millions of conservative white Southerners who voted for Democrats but whose philosophical beliefs put them on the right. Moving the GOP sharply rightward might cost the party some moderates, the conservatives concede, but by polarizing the national debate along ideological lines, it would drive the white South into the Republican fold.

It turned out this argument was correct. Ideological polarization, especially along racial lines, cracked open the Democratic coalition. You can argue about the political efficacy and how much Republicans benefitted from temporary conditions, like the Vietnam War and inflation, as opposed to building a real majority. But it’s certainly true that they at least compensated for the loss of moderates by gaining conservatives in the opposite party.

But unlike the Republicans of the early 1960s, the Democrats of today have nothing like that to gain. There is no reservoir of left-wingers who vote Republican. If Democrats lose moderate voters, they won’t gain anything from the opposing side. (And no, mobilizing nonvoters is not an answer — nonvoters are less ideologically progressive than voters, not more.)

I don’t think strategy is the main driver of the progressive movement’s impulse to move the party to the left. Activists are driven by moral impulses that they may backfill with strategic rationales. Usually, they are not reasoning toward an overarching strategy but feeling their way forward. And when you are engaged in factional struggle, driving away people allied with rival factions feels like a victory.