The media's obsession with Iowa deepens the Democrats' whiteness problem
And then there were 12. On Monday, Cory Booker, the US senator from New Jersey, became the latest contender to drop out of the Democratic presidential primary. The field is still very big, but it has narrowed in one meaningful sense: it was once historically diverse, but with Booker out, just three candidates of color remain, only one of whom, the former Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick, is black.
Booker blamed the distraction of jury duty in President Trump’s impending Senate impeachment trial for his exit, as well as his winnowing finances, exacerbated by his failure to qualify for recent Democratic debates, including tonight’s. It will take place in Iowa, which is 91% white. Every single candidate on stage will be white, too.
As is ritual in campaign coverage, after Booker dropped out, reporters and pundits chewed over the reasons for his failure – among them, media obsessions with the campaign horse race (Booker never really cut through in the polls), and with shiny new objects (Exhibit A: PeteButtigieg).
“I think a big part of Booker’s problem, why he never had ‘a moment,’ was that he’d had so many moments before,” Olivia Nuzzi, Washington correspondent at New York magazine, wrote on Twitter. “He’d been on magazine covers and the subject of glowing profiles since the mid-2000s. The political media was overly familiar with Booker and voters weren’t familiar enough.”
Amid all the postmortems, we saw paeans to Booker’s personal decency and to his love-centered campaign rhetoric. On MSNBC, Booker emphasized that tone in a valedictory interview with one of his media admirers (and his old friend from Stanford), Rachel Maddow. “Uniting Americans to a larger purpose,” he said, is his “prayer” for the Democratic party. (Elsewhere on TV, Booker’s exit got buried under Elizabeth Warren’s allegation that Bernie Sanders told her, in 2018, that a woman can’t win in 2020 – a claim Sanders strongly denies. For all their avowed disapproval of division, political pundits often find fighting more interesting than peace and love.)
Monday’s Booker coverage also reupped conversations about the structure of the Democratic primary, and its effect on voters and candidates of color. In recent weeks, Booker complained repeatedly that their perspectives have been excluded by the party’s current debate-qualification rules, which prioritize polling and fundraising. Yesterday, pundits reiterated that critique, and there was renewed discussion, too, of Iowa’s place at the top of the primary calendar, which earns the state disproportionate attention every four years. “The whiteness of [the] donor class and early states really matters,” Astead W Herndon, a politics reporter for the New York Times, tweeted. “Their vision of electability impacts viability.”
These might look like conversations for the Democratic party, but they’re important for the media, too. We could do much more to mitigate the distorting effects of imperfect democratic structures, and yet, too often, we reinforce and amplify them. Our preoccupation with “electability” is one such distortion. The concept is a hydra of conventional wisdom and internalized biases, and its predictive value is flimsy. (See: Trump, Donald.) And yet so many of our discussions about politics rest on it. If you’ve listened to campaign reporters this cycle, you’ll have heard ample evidence – albeit anecdotal, for the most part – that many Democratic electors intend to vote not for their favored candidate, but for the one they think stands the best chance of beating Trump.
The press is integral in molding such judgments. And yet, as Sawyer Hackett, a staffer on Julián Castro’s shuttered presidential campaign, told the Washington Post’s David Weigel last week, voters of color are underweighted in its calculus. “I have to believe that if newsrooms were more diverse we wouldn’t be stuck with this narrative that’s made voters think they’re choosing between their minds and hearts,” Hackett said.
It’s not the news media’s job to advocate for given candidates – but it is our job to challenge assumptions that unfairly benefit some at the expense of others. (Errin Haines, national writer on race and ethnicity at the Associated Press, put it best in a recent piece for Nieman Lab: “Election coverage is about choices – of who gets seen and heard in our democracy.”) Similarly, it’s not the media’s job to change the primary calendar – but it is our job to ensure that issues pertaining to race, and its intersection with every other issue of substance, continue to shape the conversation, regardless of the demographics of the state that gets to vote first.
As the Times acknowledged back in September, as media focus started to turn in earnest toward Iowa (five months before any actual voting), the state’s caucuses “disenfranchise huge blocs of voters”, and yet, “to a greater degree than in recent campaigns, this unrepresentative and idiosyncratic state is proving that it is the only electoral battleground that matters for Democrats”. We should be counterbalancing that logic, not eagerly indulging it. And yet, as in so many cycles past, the Iowa feeding frenzy is kicking in again, to the exclusion of other issues, and voices, that matter.
Despite its homogeneous candidate lineup, tonight’s debate is an opportunity to be more inclusive. Its moderators will bear a greater responsibility than usual to channel the perspectives and concerns of communities that don’t look like most of Iowa – and not just in a one-off question halfway through the running order. Given all the noise around Sanders and Warren’s crumbling non-aggression pact, the temptation to center conflict, instead, will doubtless be strong.
Jon Allsop is a freelance journalist. He writes CJR’s newsletter The Media Today
This article was first published in the Columbia Journalism Review
We could do much more to mitigate the distorting effects of imperfect democratic structures, and yet, too often, we reinforce and amplify them
industrial model that has been identified by people such as former sailor Ellen MacArthur that is the real culprit. Her foundation argues that the plastic waste crisis is just the symptom of a single-use culture and that plastics should never become waste. It calls for a circular economy based on the principles of designing out waste and pollution by keeping products and materials in use.
Can consumption ever be contained? Easily. Stuff can be designed better to last longer; food chains and toy makers don’t have to make poor quality goods; producers can use fewer virgin raw materials; waste can be made a resource; the circular economy can be developed. Tax can make corporations more responsible; excess can be discouraged in schools and homes; identities do not have to be based on how much we buy.
We can shop hyper-locally, frequent secondhand shops, grow more food ourselves, become more self-sufficient. But above all, we can learn to just say no to buying ever more new stuff.
There is real hope, too. The secondhand economy of “pre-loved” goods is bigger in Britain than in any other OECD country, with charity shops and boot sales generating more than £700m and revitalising high streets. It is the antidote to the throwaway corporate culture and the chain stores, which take money out of the local communities.
Streets full of secondhand shops depress some people, but in an ecologically literate world they should be
tutes a Bond theme. If this song is as good as the director and producer are promising, then we could really have something special on our hands.
Better yet, a title like No Time to Die is a songwriter’s dream, in that lots of things rhyme with the word “die”. Daniel Craig’s Bond tenure has been littered with some truly abysmal titles that were no use to the musical art whatsoever. No wonder so many of them had their performers squirming around loopholes. Nothing rhymes with “Casino Royale”, so Chris Cornell sang a song called You Know My Name. Sam Smith, knowing that any song entitled Spectre would have had to at some point use the word “hectare”, chickened out and sang Writing’s on the Wall instead. Faced with the abomination that was Quantum of Solace, Jack White just made up his own Bond title with Another Way to Die. Only Adele took on the mantle of writing a song named after the actual film, and even she screwed it up by rhyming “sky fall” with “crumble”. So this is a golden opportunity for Eilish. No Time to Die is an open goal of a title, and she has the chops to really make it work.
However, let’s not get carried away here. This is James Bond we’re talking about, so we should never underestimate the franchise’s tendency to bungle a sitter. Because, yes, Billie Eilish is authentic and unique and unwilling to turn in a traditional theme. But that doesn’t automatically mean it’ll be any good. Remember when they got Madonna in to jazz up the Bond theme as a genre? Remember how horrible that was? Remember how Die Another Day sounded like a bad song being fed through a worse Bluetooth connection? Or remember how bad Another Way to Die was, with White almost rapping his verses and then Alicia Keys using the chorus to make a noise like she’d just found a dead snake in her bed? Remember Sheryl Crow? Of course you don’t.
And that’s the danger with No Time to Die. James Bond is such a creaky old antique of a franchise that change has to come slowly. A nudge here. A bottle of Heineken there. Altering the direction of the Bond films is like piloting a cruise ship. Every change of course has to be slow and incremental. Do a handbrake turn and you’ll kill everyone. Eilish’s minimalistic brand of clicks and whooshes might be good by itself but there’s a real risk it’ll be like painting Pikachu on a Chippendale when it’s set to the hoary old pervert psychedelia of the film’s opening titles.
Plus, as much as I hate to say it, one thing has got me really worried about Eilish’s participation in all this. When her involvement was announced, she released a statement saying: “It feels crazy to be a part of this in every way. To be able to score the theme song to a film that is part of such a legendary series is a huge honor. James Bond is the coolest film franchise ever to exist. I’m still in shock.”
Did you catch that? Billie Eilish thinks that James Bond is the coolest film franchise ever to exist. No, it isn’t. It’s trad and naff and a full 50% of its instalments are absolutely terrible. Even Daniel Craig wanted out at one point, and he actually is James Bond. This statement shows a worrying lack of taste, especially when the Mission: Impossible films exist. Maybe Eilish should try soundtracking the next one of those instead.