michelle goldberg

I’m Michelle Goldberg.

ross douthat

I’m Ross Douthat.

david leonhardt

I’m David Leonhardt and this is “The Argument.” This week we take a look at the current list of Democratic presidential candidates.

michelle goldberg

She really speaks to, my sort of like, aspirations for this country.

david leonhardt

Then what does media bias look like in the Trump age?

ross douthat

This — this — this is an insane — this is an insane take!

david leonhardt

And finally a recommendation.

michelle goldberg

I’ve never for a moment thought that I lost out on anything.

david leonhardt

Over the past few weeks a handful of candidates have said that they are running for president.

news clip (senator kamala harris) I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States. news clip (representative tulsi gabbard) I have decided to run and we’ll be making a formal announcement within the next week. news clip (julián castro) Yo soy candidato para presidente de los Estados Unidos. news clip (senator kirsten gillibrand) I’m filing exploratory committee for president of the United States tonight.

david leonhardt

For now there are two frontrunners among the announced candidates, Senators Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren. From the outside they seem cut from the same cloth: two liberal women from two liberal states, California and Massachusetts. But Harris and Warren are less similar than they may seem at first. We have a new colleague in the Opinion section, Jamelle Bouie, and he’s a keen observer of politics. So he’s going to join us for this discussion, and I’m going to step out. Then I’ll come back for segment two. Here are Jamelle, Michelle and Ross on the 2020 race.

ross douthat

So Jamelle, we’re really glad to have you. It’s going to be a trial by fire and hopefully Michelle and I will survive.

jamelle bouie

Thank you.

ross douthat

So let’s start by talking about Kamala Harris who had a pretty successful kickoff for her campaign and in the world where there is no frontrunner, suddenly a lot of people are talking about her as if she is the Democratic front runner. Michelle, why is she such a strong figure?

michelle goldberg

You know in some ways it’s a little bit amorphous, right? I mean, it’s not like Elizabeth Warren, who has this economic populist agenda and history that clearly speaks to this moment and to some degree maybe straddles some of the divides between the Bernie wing of the party and the Hillary wing of the party. I think, you know, she is an immensely compelling personal figure, right? She’s charismatic, beautiful, multiracial, right? I mean, she embodies the America that, that Donald Trump is trying to extripate and she’s sort of pitched herself as the candidate of the resistance, right? And yet at the same time, she’s not making the same sort of broader systemic critique as Elizabeth Warren. She’s making a sort of like patriotic argument that our America is better than this.

ross douthat

You know, she’s she’s a figure who, unlike some of the other Democrats, has some obvious problems with progressive activists. And so she has to arguably work harder than some of the other possible frontrunners would to reassure and win people over. Do you think that’s right?

jamelle bouie

Yeah, that’s exactly the thought I had about that sort of willingness to say, “Yeah my proposal would abolish private health insurance.” That because of her prior career as a prosecutor and a prosecutor in a state, right, where African-Americans are, as they are everywhere, disproportionately the targets of the criminal justice system. It’s a major obstacle, major blemish, for left wing activists in the party, for younger black voters as well. And so she needs to figure out some way to either neutralize opposition from her left or recast her career as a prosecutor into something more positive. I think she’s trying to do both. I don’t think she’s yet been terribly successful with regards to the prosecutor part. But I’ll be interested to see how much she leans in the direction of trying to present herself as onboard with sort of like the more radical policy thinking circulating within Democratic politics. Having said all of that, I do think that Harris has this like one glaring weakness and that is, I don’t actually know why she’s running to be president. Right? Like she’s very charismatic and compelling and there’s something inherently compelling and interesting and novel in the fact that she is the most high-profile, well-connected black woman to ever mount a presidential bid and that’s very important. But if you were trying to figure out what sort of like core problem in American society does Kamala Harris think needs to be attacked and overcome for the United States to better represent itself, I would be hard pressed to give you an answer. I don’t really know what the answer to that is. I know the — I knew what the answer to that was for Barack Obama. I know what the answer to that is for Elizabeth Warren or Bernie Sanders, but for Kamala Harris I don’t quite know what that answer is, and I think that is kind of her rhetorical challenge over the next, you know, eleven months or so, of trying to really present to the public a critique, a vision, something that points in a larger direction than just kind of like, “I think I’d be really great at being president.” Which may very well be true.

michelle goldberg

But Jamelle, don’t you think she’s sort of set herself up as, like, the opponent of reactionary ethnonationalism? I mean it’s not, not direct but implicit in all of her criticisms of Trump and the Trump administration and then when she talks about what, you know, what “our America” is.

jamelle bouie

That’s true. Because it’s implicit, I think it loses, I don’t know, some of its value. I think it ought to be explicit and maybe, you know, I’m not the one with the pollsters so maybe the people advising Harris have good evidence to say that she can just embody that opposition and not have to say anything about it. But I don’t know. I think that candidates are well served if they can articulate kind of a clear and unambiguous vision about where they want the country to be.

ross douthat

I think there’s a touch of, you know, the sort of Hillary Clinton, “America is already great.” I think she literally said a variation on that in her campaign kickoff speech. This sense of sort of like Trump has been this sort of terrible accidental interregnum that has gotten in the way of the gradual upward march of progress as embodied by a African-American California female senator ascending to the highest office in the land, and let’s get back on that track. And I think I agree with you Jamelle that there is a danger in assuming that just by being the kind of candidate you feel like your party should nominate, you can win the nomination. I mean, this was, you know, the story of the Marco Rubio campaign, where the people running that campaign said, you know, “Look, Rubio embodies where a lot of Republicans want their party to be and that’s going to be enough to carry us to victory and we don’t necessarily need a clear argument for the candidacy or line of attack against another candidate.” Which he ended up not having.

michelle goldberg

Correct me if I’m wrong, but Rubio was not drawing huge crowds right? He certainly wasn’t getting 20,000 people out for his kickoff rally. You know and I think the reason that she is the front runner is not because pundits decided that she checked a lot of boxes but because she’s generating a lot of real enthusiasm.

jamelle bouie

No I agree with that. And I think, I mean I think I wrote last month or two months ago that if you were going to sort of try to figure out at an early stage who is most likely to kind of jump to the front of the race, it’s going to be Harris. Just because Democratic primary voters over the course of 2018 clearly demonstrated that they were looking for candidates like Kamala Harris. Having said that, I think the Rubio analogy is apt. I think she’s probably in a better position in part because a large chunk of the Democratic Party looks like Kamala Harris and that is like a profound advantage. I think her problem may be is that once other candidates start jumping in, and specifically Cory Booker, I think she will have to find some way to distinguish herself. Because Booker can similarly make the kind of claim that he embodies the opposition to Donald Trump, and he is much more forthright about the kind of vision for America that he has. It’s sort of a beloved community, United States is bereft of sort of fellow feeling, and that’s manifest in our politics and et cetera, et cetera. And so right now in the absence of sort of anyone with a comparable kind of following I think Harris looks very strong. But if Booker jumps in, if Bernie jumps in, right? Like those are also politicians I think — as a kind of parenthetical — similar to the ways in which it’s easy to miss the extent to which Harris has a dedicated mass following, I think Booker has one too and Bernie certainly does. And so if they jump in then I think Harris will have to find a way to keep up I don’t think she can just kind of be her.

michelle goldberg

Jamelle, I’m curious if you share my feeling of being sort of like reluctantly or like guiltily drawn to Harris. I mean when we were having an editorial meeting for the podcast I mentioned how I sometimes feel like, you know, the like distracted boyfriend in that meme who, you know on the one hand I’m, you know, all for Elizabeth Warren and as I’ve said on this show before, you know, my husband has been working for Elizabeth Warren. And, you know, we’re not like the Conway’s, right? Like he wouldn’t work for her if we didn’t both believe in what she was about. I totally take all the critiques of Kamala Harris to heart. And yet when I saw, you know, that rally — was it on Sunday? You know, it like brings up a lot of feelings for me. Like there’s part of me that just, you know, she really speaks to my, sort of like, aspirations for this country.

jamelle bouie

So I don’t think I’ve had a similar experience there. I mean I think I sort of intellectually see Harris as a very compelling candidate. But I’ve at least been persuaded that what is really missing in American politics is a, like, systemic critique of American capitalism. And for me — and I guess this is a way to get to talking about Warren, right? That Warren offers that in a way that may even be more substantively trenchant than what Bernie Sanders had to offer in 2016.

michelle goldberg

Oh I think that — I think it absolutely is true. I mean, but mostly because she’s kind of — it seems like she’s thought through the mechanics of things much more.

jamelle bouie

Right. And so that that’s what kind of like attracts me to Elizabeth Warren. That like I think she’s a perfectly capable politician. This is extremely superstitious but I think I think she’d be perfect if she weren’t from Massachusetts. But the track record for any party electing a president from Massachusetts is very bad. [LAUGHS]

ross douthat

Well let me push you guys a little bit though, because I think there’s no question that out of the existing field and really out of the potential field, Warren has one of the clearer arguments for why she should be the president. She has one of the clearer agendas. Everybody agrees that she’s ready to be president on day one, I think, in a way that we can’t be sure that other Democratic — potential Democratic nominees are. But I’m looking — the Washington Post just did this interesting presidential poll for 2020, where instead of giving people a list of candidates they just asked Democratic primary voters to volunteer a name, or say that they had no opinion. And one lesson of this poll is that the field is incredibly open because 43 percent had no opinion. But then if you ask people, when people gave a preference, Joe Biden had 9 percent, Harris had 8 percent which is, again, a case for her potentially catching fire early. And then everybody else is clustered at 3 and 2 percent and Elizabeth Warren’s down there at 2 percent. Why is Elizabeth Warren only at 2 percent?

jamelle bouie

I mean my only guess is that she’s simultaneously been around for a while but outside of D.C., like outside of people who are really in to politics, as sort of like not a major public figure, she had the moment, you know, “Nevertheless, she persisted.” She had that moment and I think that may have been something of a breakout moment for her. But I’m not sure that she has the kind of public impact that Harris has had.

ross douthat

To me her big moment so far, engineered by herself, has been the Native American sort of attempted rebuttal to Trump that I think it’s fair to say didn’t go well. [BOUIE LAUGHS] Do you think that that had — I mean seriously, do you think that that — I mean I wouldn’t be surprised if for the average Democratic voter right now, that’s a drag on her support? And the question is does the memory of it sort of wear off over the course of the next nine months or so?

jamelle bouie

I don’t think it does. I mean I’m sort of very — that was not just a blunder but I think it’s sort of, it’s one of those blunders that may end up weighing more heavily and in a general election than in a primary. I think Democratic primary voters will probably get past it, no problem. But I do think there’s this, you know, there’s the attack that Warren basically sort of gamed identity politics to get ahead, might end up being potent in the general election.

ross douthat

You don’t think it’s potent in a Democratic primary too?

jamelle bouie

I don’t know. I mean, what’s difficult about trying to game these things out is I’m not sure anymore what things catch fire by way of media, social media and thus like a broader universe of people and what things don’t. Like I have no sense of how to gauge that anymore. You can imagine a situation in which Warren gains some ground, does well in debates, is beginning to maybe move away from the larger pack in that Warren opponents begin circulating this back in social media and it becomes an object of critique from, say, Native American groups, from people who see themselves as allies of Native American groups. And by virtue of that kind of social media conflict becomes a media story, becomes a national story and then she has to deal with it. Maybe that happens.

ross douthat

So we’ve been talking about Harris and Warren because they’re the two most front runner-ish of the candidates who’ve jumped into the race. But let’s wrap by each choosing another candidate who is either a minor candidate who deserves more attention than they’re getting, or just someone who’s underrated in the current analysis. Jamelle, do you want to go first?

jamelle bouie

Sure. I think looking at the field of actual and potential candidates, I think Cory Booker is probably underrated. I say that because he, similar to Harris in fact, has kind of an actual following among Democratic voters. He’s always been a in-demand surrogate across the country. I think Booker is taking steps to try to fix his reputation with Wall Street skeptics by offering kind of ambitious policies and in signing on to like the Sanders-adjacent agenda. You know, I think he’s kind of fallen by the wayside somewhat. So I would say if I were going to, you know, say you should put money on someone, not to win but to do better than you expect, it would be Booker.

ross douthat

O.K. Michelle, your turn.

michelle goldberg

You know, I’m interested in Kirsten Gillibrand. I don’t know if her strategy is a winning one, but I think it’s interesting that in a field that has several women, she’s really pitching herself as like the feminist candidate. And she’s built up a network of women in local elected office all over the country. And so she does, I think, also have a following. And to some extent I wonder if she sort of splits the difference between Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren, right? I think she’s able to speak to a lot of the members of “the resistance” who are, like her, middle-aged mothers who are morally outraged by Trump and who have been somewhat radicalized by their experience of the Trump administration.

ross douthat

I think that’s a good choice. Well I’m gonna say a word for one of the minor candidates which is Hawaii Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard. And I want to say a word for her just because she has an incredibly weird profile as a Hindu daughter of an anti-same sex marriage activist who is both the sort of would-be spokeswoman for the anti-war portion of the Bernie left, and she’s been attacked as an apologist for the Assad regime. And she’s from Hawaii, and she’s a veteran. And she’s young and telegenic and attractive, and it’s just a strange combination. So she combines this weird mix of far left positions with some cultural and foreign policy stuff that appeals both to some conservatives and to the far right. And it’s just a weird mix and obviously she’s not going to be the Democratic nominee for president. But I wouldn’t be surprised if she ended up playing some bizarre role anyway. Jamelle, thank you again so much for joining us.

michelle goldberg

Yeah, thanks Jamelle. Welcome to the Times!

ross douthat

Welcome to the Times!

jamelle bouie

My pleasure.

ross douthat

We’re going to take a quick break now, and when we come back David will rejoin us, and we will talk about the media.

david leonhardt

I’m back now with Michelle and Ross, and we’re going to talk about a few of the big media controversies over the last few weeks. One was the BuzzFeed News scoop that may not actually have been a scoop about the Russia investigation.

news clip President Trump directed Michael Cohen to lie in his testimony to Congress about negotiations to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.

david leonhardt

Shortly after it came out, Robert Mueller’s office publicly denounced the scoop.

news clip In an extremely rare move Mueller’s team released a statement denying the report.

david leonhardt

The other big controversy, of course, involved the students from Covington Catholic, who came from Kentucky to Washington and had an encounter on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial with a Native American activist. [DRUMS AND CHANTING] Ross, you’re gonna get the first word here because I know you have a fiery take about the media controversies, and then Michelle and I are excited to take it apart when you’re done.

ross douthat

Okay here’s my rant. I think that there are some recurring temptations that the media faces in the age of Trump and we saw the two major ones at work in the controversies of the last couple of weeks. The first temptation is to leap on any story that seems like it’s going to finally provide the slam dunk, Russia-related evidence for the impeachment of Donald Trump. And the BuzzFeed story is the latest in a long line of scoops going back through scoops related to Michael Cohen supposedly going to Prague, and Paul Manafort supposedly meeting with Julian Assange that have been reported by a single outlet, recycled through the Twitter and cable news ecosystem, and then maybe just aren’t true. And this happens again and again and again and it’s a problem for the media’s credibility. And the other temptation is a temptation to leap on any sort of cultural or culture war story that seems to sort of have easy, privileged, white male villains who can serve as sort of the embodiment for everything that’s wrong with whiteness and white privilege in the age of Trump. And this isn’t just a Trump era phenomenon. It goes back to the famous Rolling Stone story about rape at the University of Virginia that turned out to be bogus. But I think it was an undercurrent in the Kavanaugh hearings and I think the way the media leaped on this story that seemed to be about a bunch of white teenagers mobbing a Native American activist and turned out to be way more complicated, is a good example of how there are stories out there that the media just wants to be true and it runs with them way too quickly and damages its own credibility in the process.

michelle goldberg

The part I want to respond to is the part about these Russia stories because, you know, you say that again and again and again these stories have been proved not to be true but that’s not really the case. I mean we don’t know exactly what in the BuzzFeed story about Trump directing Michael Cohen to lie — what part the Mueller investigation was refuting because their statement was sort of vague. I mean in some ways, nothing has come forward to disprove these stories. We’re sort of just saying, “Well these are second tier outlets and if nobody else got it then can we really believe it?” And you know, I’m just, I’m not sure that’s the case. You know, McClatchy has broken a ton of news on the Trump-Russia front. And I actually think that what we’ve seen is that a lot of the Russian reporting has turned out to be true. Once we start seeing it sort of fleshed out in indictments. Right? I mean, when Michael Cohen was charged with lying to Congress and we saw, you know, that indictment sort of walking us through the plans for Trump Tower Moscow, well all of that had been reported in BuzzFeed. I mean like really to the letter. It just — it hadn’t been confirmed but it was all there and we’re just seeing it sort of confirmed in an indictment, you know, months and months later and I think again and again we’ve seen stories that started out in the media then you see confirmed by this series of indictments.

ross douthat

Well, I mean, we can take our own wonderful employer as an example. I think that in the run up to the Iraq War, for instance, there was a period when some New York Times reporters were getting a lot of scoops that weren’t reported elsewhere that fit a particular narrative — in that case a pro-war pro-invade Iraq narrative. And the fact that some of those scoops weren’t corroborated elsewhere did actually turn out to be really meaningful. Like I’m not, I’m not just trying to cast aspersions on The Guardian here or McClatchy or Buzzfeed in particular. I think in general, scoops that are really big deals, that relate to an ongoing investigation where every major newspaper has lots of sources, that come out and just sort of hang there, unconfirmed for long periods of time, should be treated with a certain amount of suspicion. And I think I would say that about our own newspaper as well as some of these other outlets.

david leonhardt

I think you’re being a little unfair here, Ross. I mean first of all reporting this stuff is really hard, right? You’re dealing with foreign intelligence services. You’re dealing with a lot of people who’ve spent decades lying, like Roger Stone and Michael Cohen. And yet as hard as it is, we can’t name a single story that the Washington Post has gotten wrong in any major way. We can’t name a single story The New York Times has gotten wrong in any major way. We can’t name a single story that a lot of organizations have gotten wrong in any major way. Most of them—

michelle goldberg

Actually David, but let me interrupt because we can name a story that The New York Times got wrong in a major way, which is the story about how — written during the campaign — that the FBI saw no links between Trump and Russia. Right? That was like the sort of like big journalistic error of this, you know, recent history and I think it cuts against sort of Ross’s argument.

david leonhardt

That’s totally fair Michelle. And so I think yes we’re left with a few stories that are unconfirmed. I probably am closer to your skepticism, Ross about whether they’re going to be true if they haven’t yet been confirmed by others. But it’s not like other news organizations are running with these stories so—

ross douthat

Well that’s one area where — part of this is just my rant is against the media ecosystem rather than the outlets themselves.

david leonhardt

Meaning social media?

ross douthat

Meaning social media but also meaning, above all, cable news, right? Because yes, when the BuzzFeed story comes out our newspaper and other newspapers don’t immediately report that it’s been confirmed because our reporters can’t confirm it, right? I mean if you just — if you read BuzzFeed and then you read The New York Times and you read the Washington Post, you would have a sense that, O.K. this was an unconfirmed story that one place reported and I shouldn’t put too much stock in it.” But if you live, as maybe only political journalists do but I think other people as well, in a world of not only Twitter but the morning shows on cable and so on, where it’s like, “Well we have to talk about this scoop because it’s out there,” you know. You spend, sort of, 24 hours in a world where the default assumption is, this is it.

david leonhardt

I guess, Ross, what I would quibble with is that somehow the media are making the big mistakes here. I actually think much of the media was very sober in dealing with the BuzzFeed report. If you wanted to say lots of Trump’s opponents were too quick to believe the BuzzFeed story, I would agree with that. But I actually think large parts of the media were among the most cautious about whether the BuzzFeed story was true and we’re still cautious about whether it’s true.

ross douthat

I disagree. I don’t blame, like, my random, hyper-resistance-y friends for retweeting the BuzzFeed scoop in this sort of hopeful sense—

michelle goldberg

Do you have random, hyper-resistance-y friends?

ross douthat

Oh sure. Yeah, absolutely. Michelle, I’m friends with everybody. Everybody.

michelle goldberg

O.K., you’re a friend to all.

ross douthat

So anyway I don’t blame—[LAUGHS] I don’t blame people with that mentality for leaping on these scoops and being like, “Is this the moment? Is this the moment when our national nightmare is over?” I do blame the journalists on Twitter, real journalists, for sort of upcycling these stories with a certain intensity and the cable news producers for upcycling them and so on. And yes lots of institutions, ours included, do a good job of not just chasing these down. But there is a level of this hysteria that the press, especially on Twitter and cable news, leans into.

david leonhardt

Okay I think we agree that there are there aspects of the press that do it, and I also agree that’s a mistake. Let’s move on to the second case. Look, the Covington Catholic case got so much attention, I assume most of our listeners are familiar with it now. You should listen to the episode of “The Daily” podcast or go online and read any number of things about it if you’re not. To me there’s more room in that for media reflection than on the Russia stuff. Which is the case that yes, absolutely, huge numbers of people leaped to blame these students from Covington Catholic for being bad kids. And I guess what I would say is, I think if you’re wearing a Make America Great hat or T-shirt, you can’t do that in total innocence and these kids were, because that’s a symbol of the most outwardly racist presidential campaign of our lifetime. And I don’t think you can wear that and pretend otherwise. But other than the hats and shirts, I didn’t see these kids—

michelle goldberg

Oh and the “tomahawk chops.” I mean, come on! So I’ve watched a lot of this footage, right, and I mean I can sort of understand why, if your first exposure was like, “Oh my God these kids swarmed this man, you know, out of nowhere and it proves the sort of feral nature of the young MAGA generation,” then you would say, “No, it was more complicated.” I feel like by the time I came to this story everybody was saying, “Oh all of this, this viral Twitter thing has been debunked. In fact these kids did nothing wrong.” And I watch these videos and these kids were terrifying. You know, they looked like this like, angry white bread mob making fun of this Native American man. It’s certainly true that he approached them, instead of vice versa. But the way that they behaved was, I thought, despicable.

ross douthat

Despicable? That is— this is— this is an insane— this is an insane take! A couple of the kids did “tomahawk chops” and some, I’m sure, you know, it’s a gang of high schoolers roaming the Washington Mall. I’m sure that some of them did despicable things or said despicable things because they’re teenage boys. But they were a bunch of teenage boys who were getting, you know, who had a group of black nationalists who - those of us who’ve lived in Washington D.C. have gotten used to having this group, you know, yelling imprecations at you when you get off the Metro. But if you’re a bunch of kids from like a random school in Kentucky you have no idea what’s going on. You’re waiting to meet your bus. These guys start yelling homophobic slurs at you. I mean this was, this was like a colossal, like, culture war, identity politics, like, worlds-colliding kind of insanity. Which is why it was so perfect for this kind of media freakout. But describing their behavior as despicable just seems. I understand, but I don’t understand, I guess, that kind of reaction. It just feels like a reaction to, as I said at the beginning, like some idea of like feral white male privilege.

michelle goldberg

Again the idea that they were sort of innocent in this ridiculous confrontation of clashing signifiers just also seems like a whitewash.

david leonhardt

Ross this is the thing that I want to push you, on which is — and I’ll admit I’m playing with “what aboutism” here, but you had huge numbers of people on the left engage in some version of reflection after this. Right? People on the left came out in different places. Michelle you’re in one place, I’m in another. But you had large numbers of people basically say, “Hey you know what, I got this wrong initially.” And that strikes me as something we just don’t really see very much from the right. We don’t see a lot of people on the right do versions of that on, say, birtherism with Obama or with other crazy conspiracy theories that occupy vast amounts of time on Fox News. And so it seems like we end up with much more, kind of, wringing our hands about versions of the left going too far in media, and we just accept this notion that right wing media is going to be filled with non-fact based crazy stuff without any such reflection.

ross douthat

Well two — let me make two points O.K.? One, I think there is a division within the right in terms of the level of reflectiveness you get. I think when you have these kind of culture war controversies and, you know I mean I think an equivalent thing would be like how the media covers young black males or something, you get a big difference between how writers for National Review or the now defunct Weekly Standard would handle it, and how Fox News and talk radio would handle it. So I think there is reflection on the right, but I agree with you there’s a big segment of the right wing ecosystem that doesn’t engage in very much reflection. At the same time, a big chunk of the media that I’m critiquing here is not left media. I think a lot of the immediate mainstream news stories that were written about this story, a lot of the immediate CNN coverage and so on was ridiculous coverage. And again these are outlets that are not left outlets. They make a claim to be mainstream outlets. And I think the right’s critique of the mainstream media, that I think is often correct, is that the mainstream media has a lot of virtues, it does correct itself, it does a lot of things right. But when it makes mistakes, the right’s view is — especially on cultural war related stuff — it’s always racing in one particular direction.

david leonhardt

That may be right. I don’t think it’s right about straight political stories. I think on straight political stories the media airs to the right and to the left, right? Michelle mentioned the media got wrong how important Russia was. The media, I think, overplayed Hillary Clinton’s emails. You mentioned, Ross, that the media banged the drums for wars without exactly meaning to on Iraq. And so I think on straight politics stuff I don’t think the errors go only one way. But I agree with you that on cultural stuff they do, more often than not, go one way.

michelle goldberg

I think that the overcorrection to the Covington Catholic story was itself a distortion. Although, you know, I certainly don’t want anything that I’m saying to be construed as in any way a defensive like, doxxing these kids or even of the huge amount of significance that this strange momentary standoff took on in the broader culture, right? And to me it all kind of fundamentally comes back to the incredibly toxic nature of Twitter which is a problem in our politics and in the politics of societies all over the world, right? I mean, it’s this like machine that we’ve invented for generating and multiplying anger, you know. And it has this sort of intermittent reward structure of a slot machine, except what comes out is like indignation instead of money. And I think that, you know, we sort of have to either figure out how to deal with Twitter or, you know, I wish somebody would just figure out how to burn it to the ground. [ROSS LAUGHS]

david leonhardt

Well we’ve done enough self-flaggelating during this segment. We want to hear what your criticisms of the media are. So why don’t you give us a call at 347-915 4324 and give us a criticism about the mainstream media today. We may just play you on the show. Now it’s time for our weekly recommendation: something meant to take your mind off of politics and the media and all that stressful stuff. Michelle, you get to go this week. So what do you have for us?

michelle goldberg

My recommendation is that you elope. One thing that I have never regretted, one of the best decisions I ever made was both eloping and then taking the money that my husband and I would have spent on a wedding and instead spending it on a trip around the world. And I understand that you know our ability to do that, to take that trip around the world, was a function of our extreme privilege. But it did cost less than what most people spend on their weddings. And was, you know, one of the just best decisions I’ve ever made. And also I think a good way to get a marriage off on a good foot.

david leonhardt

So I - the last thing I want to do is criticize your wedding ceremony, Michelle but I have one question about it, which is: Did you feel like you were missing something by not essentially saying your vows in front of your closest friends? Because that to me is the biggest argument for a wedding.

michelle goldberg

So some of my closest friends were there. Like basically my husband and I just sort of like called people that we knew that morning and were like, “We’re going to city hall if you want to come! You know, be there a couple hours!” You know, I’m not - I’m not someone who ever sat around fantasizing about my wedding or, you know. So no I had never thought that I lost out on anything.

david leonhardt

What you spun out is really romantic, right? The idea of running away, getting married, eloping. To me the one thing that I would have a hard time about it with was not having that community aspect, because you guys now know me well enough to know that I don’t use the word “sacred” very often. But I think the most sacred thing I’ve ever done is say my wedding vows with my wife in front of basically all of our collected friends and family.

ross douthat

And the correct and reactionary - but I repeat myself - take on all of this, of course, is that the money is being spent in order to compensate for the collapsing sense of tradition and the sacred. So people don’t have those senses in their lives to the extent that they should. And this one moment comes along that still has this residue of the sacral about it. And so people are like, “Well I have to literally make it heaven on earth, spare no expense,” and so on. So in fact the rising costs of American weddings is linked to the decline of marriage as an institution in this paradoxical but not really way. [MICHELLE LAUGHS]

david leonhardt