It appears that the media’s long (in news-cycle terms) honeymoon with Pete Buttigieg is over. Gone are the days of flattering coverage from, well, pretty much everywhere—stories about Buttigieg’s love of Ulysses, his faculty with languages, and affection for Phish and the Dave Matthews Band (well, I guess they weren’t all flattering stories). Over the last couple of weeks, Buttigieg has received scrutiny more appropriate to a leading presidential candidate instead of simply being rolled out like a new diet soda.

There have been stories investigating his time as mayor of South Bend, and deep dives into his decision to demolish hundreds of homes and to fire the city’s black police chief. Mayor Pete Mania has begun to falter, as has the candidate’s standing in some tracking polls. Instead of wondering whether he can knock off Joe Biden, journalists are now asking questions about his failure to connect with black voters.



Buttigieg’s meteoric rise owed a lot to his personal charisma and to his biography—an openly gay Afghanistan veteran, a Rhodes Scholar, old enough to have some executive experience, young enough to seem like a break with the past—but it also relied heavily on obsessive, often fawning media coverage. “I want him on everything,” Lis Smith, the political operative pulling the strings of Mayor Pete’s campaign told Politico. Other candidates sometimes say no to press availabilities; Buttigieg seemingly never did. He was on TV all the time. When he wasn’t meeting voters in Iowa and New Hampshire, he was doing podcasts.



However, Buttigieg might be finding out that strategy has its limits. He continues to appear on TV (he has a Fox News town hall scheduled for May 19), and churn out cable-ready soundbites (just yesterday he told the Today show that he “couldn’t imagine” God being a Republican), but this strategy seems to have diminishing returns for candidates not named Donald Trump. Instead, if Buttigieg wants to keep his seat at the big-kids’ table, he should try something new—he should stand for something.



Donald Trump dominated media coverage during the 2016 election. He relied on a vicious cycle that has continued, with some variations, into his presidency. He would spend the early morning hours either tweeting everything that came into his head or having seemingly endless conversations with his (now former) buddies at MSNBC’s Morning Joe. The insane things he said would then become fodder for the rest of the day on cable news, with pundits dissecting his every word and reporters chasing down members of Congress for comment. This approach “helped propel Trump to the top of Republican polls” during the primary, according to a study from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center.

