Does the Warren campaign have a case? Has the press really rubbed Warren out? If it has reduced its coverage of her, might there be a defensible reason for doing so? And if Warren desires additional coverage, isn’t the onus on her and her communications team to attract the press corps’ attention?

To make a short column out of it, no; no; yes; and you’re goddamn right.

As the National Review’s Katherine Timpf just pointed out, few candidates in recent memory—outside of Beto O’Rourke—have amassed as much swell campaign coverage from a broad cross-section of the press as Elizabeth Warren. Timpf cites one study of MSNBC coverage of Warren, Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders from last year that reported Warren had received the lowest negative and the highest positive coverage of the three candidates. Warren even received an endorsement from the New York Times (along with Amy Klobuchar).

The Warren camp’s real complaint right now isn’t that the press isn’t covering her, but that it’s not smothering her in coverage as it once did. And why is that? Because her campaign has been on the downhill since early October, when she peaked in Real Clear Politics’ average poll at 26.6 percent and led the Democratic pack.

Although her campaign remains newsworthy, she has since tumbled to fourth place in that aggregated poll, she finished a distant third in the Iowa caucuses, and a dismal fourth in the New Hampshire contest. The press has logically turned its eye to poll leader and New Hampshire victor Bernie Sanders and the shiny new thing, late arrival Mike Bloomberg.

Of course, horse-race results alone shouldn’t dictate which candidate gets ink. But like it or not, campaigns are contests decided by voters. The press can’t very well ignore the candidates who are churning the most interest among the people. It’s incumbent upon a candidate like Warren who has been left behind by voters, opinion polls and reporters to make herself newsworthy. And there are dozens of ways to do that: raise substantial amounts of money; draw large crowds; adopt distinguishing positions on the issues; collect endorsements; give interviews; stage news conferences; criticize the competition; provide access to reporters, especially to profile writers; and delegate authority to surrogates to speak for them—something Warren is reluctant to do.

It could be argued that the media shoved Warren aside to promote its alleged new favorite candidate, Pete Buttigieg. But that would be wrong. According to the GDELT campaign dashboard, Warren got twice as many mentions on cable news as Buttigieg over the last three months of 2019, when she experienced the steepest decline in her Real Clear Politics poll. But she still took second place in mentions behind only Biden. In the first two months of 2020, she’s neck-and-neck with Buttigieg, trailing new leader Sanders, Biden and within shouting distances of the TV-ad bingeing Bloomberg. In no way is the national TV press ignoring her.

Warren knows how the game works. On the way to winning her Senate seat in 2013, she was accessible to reporters and got lots of coverage. But after she was sworn in, she stopped feeding the press, blowing off reporters who would ask her questions in Senate hallways, which crimped coverage. One reason her presidential campaign got so much attention from the press is that she said newsworthy things. She practically force-fed the press with news. For example, she was among the first presidential candidates to call for Donald Trump’s impeachment, beating even Sanders to the punch, and held voters and reporters spellbound with her cascade of radical "plans" to remake the economy. But no candidate can coast forever on a few publicity surges. When a voter's interest drops and a campaign does nothing but replay its early hits, press interest will inevitably drop.

The senator appears to have figured this out on her own. She stole Tuesday’s Democratic debate in Las Vegas by skinning and then field-dressing a startled Bloomberg before a national TV audience. Next, she declared that if Bloomberg doesn’t release people from the NDAs they’ve signed, he is “disqualified from being president.” When the New York Times’ Shane Goldmacher chased her car on Thursday with frantic questions about her changed views on accepting PAC funds, her car stopped 100 yards down the road and she popped out to give him a quick video interview. Somewhere in Nevada, a Warren press aide is smothering in news clips about his boss.

As bad as things went for Warren on the press front, they could have gone much worse. Her camp’s appeal for additional coverage could have backfired. Reporters could have filed a bunch of negative coverage about her flailing campaign, instead of the laudatory, sympathetic, positive, cushy pieces it produced upon Warren’s entrance in the race. Or reporters could have started to write pre-obituaries for her campaign. Luckily for Warren, they were too busy writing pre-obituaries for Joe Biden.

Running against the media, which is one way to regard the Warren protests, is a long-established political tactic for a stalled campaign. It signals that you’re an outsider who “they” are trying to block from office. It was a Nixon tactic, it’s a Trump tactic, it’s a Sanders tactic, and now it’s a Warren tactic. The Warren protest could be heartfelt or it could be a standard move to purchase some late-in-the-game outsider cred. Stranger things have happened in politics.

The press deserves a daily drubbing for its many sins—for being fickle; for celebrating novelty over substance; for its early swoon for O’Rourke; for elevating Biden to frontrunner when he’s lost every presidential primary he’s ever entered; for underestimating Sanders; for overdramatizing the news; for overhyping gotcha stories—the list goes on and on.

But in politics, scapegoating the press is usually a sign of frustration; it has never solved a candidate’s publicity problems. Just ask Richard Nixon. If Warren wants to reap favorable coverage, it’s up to her to plant the seeds. Or stop whining and start winning. Reporters are suckers for winners.



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According to the New Republic, MSNBC has it in for Bernie Sanders, a view shared by Jacobin and In These Times. Who else is gunning for the Debs of Vermont? Send email to [email protected]. My email alerts and Twitter feed never get any positive coverage. They blame my defunct RSS feed.