Republican candidates and officeholders are increasingly excluding establishment media outlets such as Politico, the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal from their events. This isn’t a completely new phenomenon, but it has increased in recent years.
“I just don’t even see what the point is anymore,” a Republican candidate recently told New York’s David Freedlander. “We know reporters always disagreed with the Republican Party, but it used to be you thought you could get a fair shake. Now every reporter, and every outlet, is just chasing resistance rage-clicks.”
Freedlander doesn’t give much credence to this explanation. Instead, he asserts: “There is really not much Republicans can say. The past six years have seen them rally behind a person almost all of them once denounced as dangerously unfit for public office.”
And there is no doubt that many reporters’ obsession with former President Donald Trump has driven Republicans to avoid journalists as much as possible.
But that doesn’t mean “there is really not much Republicans can say.” Republicans have tons of opinions they’d be happy to share about subjects other than Trump, subjects that readers of the New York Times might even be interested in. Maybe if journalists asked fewer questions about Trump and more questions about literally anything other than Trump, more Republicans would talk to them.
But there is more to it than just Trump or the fact that journalists as a whole have proven to be overwhelmingly liberal and their biased echo chamber absolutely affects how they do their jobs.
Leaving that aside, I’d like to tell a little story from my time serving as Sen. Mike Lee’s (R-UT) communications director that might better frame the problem a bit.
As an office policy, Lee did not give hallway interviews because they are a chaotic environment prone to misunderstandings and misquotations. But we always made an effort to either get a journalist a comment on a specific question or, even better, a sit-down interview with the senator.
We did many of these sit-down interviews every week with outlets including the Associated Press, the Washington Post, Politico, National Review, and the Washington Examiner, but there were some outlets we would avoid.
One Washington Post reporter whom I had always been able to get on the schedule with Lee moved from the Washington Post to NPR. She was a good reporter who had treated Lee fairly on contentious high-profile concerns. Nothing about her work changed when she went from the Washington Post to NPR, but when she called to get time with the senator, I had to say, “No.”
Our uniform experience with NPR stories was that even if we were treated glowingly in the story, and even if the audience agreed with us on the issue the story was about (like criminal justice reform, for example), the reaction from the NPR audience to our presence in the story was always extremely negative.
This has to change a politician’s calculus when deciding whether to spend his or her time talking to a journalist. If a journalist’s audience is so far-left that a conservative who agrees with that audience on a policy can’t even talk about where they agree, then what is the point of talking to that journalist about anything ever?
As long as this calculus holds, as long as the audiences of more and more outlets are so captured by a far Left that refuses to even listen to conservatives, then Republicans will only shut out more journalists.
