On Politics:
Good evening! Tonight, my colleague Michael Grynbaum explains why the presidential candidates are spending so much time on podcasts. Plus, a story about a historian who once thought the label "fascist" shouldn't be used to refer to Donald Trump. He has since changed his mind. — Jess Bidgood
How the 2024 election became a battle fought by podcastThe latest, with 13 days to go
Presidential candidates used to visit 99 counties in Iowa. Now, it seems, they go on 99 podcasts. Former President Donald Trump is headed on Friday to the Texas studio of "The Joe Rogan Experience," where he will record an interview with a podcaster who commands 14.5 million followers on Spotify and 17 million followers on YouTube, many of them the young, male, low-propensity voters that Trump has been targeting. In a kind of split-screen that same day, Vice President Kamala Harris is also visiting Texas, where she will be interviewed by Brené Brown, a researcher who studies "courage, vulnerability, shame and empathy" and has 15 million followers across her social platforms. Her podcast, "Unlocking Us," is popular with a female audience that most likely includes plenty of undecided voters. This year, both candidates have embarked on a marathon of podcast outreach. Harris showed up on "Call Her Daddy," "All the Smoke" and "The Breakfast Club," often choosing podcasts that appeal to women and Black listeners. Trump has done Theo Von, "Bussin' With the Boys" and "Andrew Schulz's Flagrant," in a tour of the anti-woke manoverse. Readers may not be familiar with each and every one of these digital venues, many of which cater to niche audiences. That is by design. Both the Harris and Trump campaigns are zeroing in on tiny slivers of the electorate that remain undecided, calculating that the media megaphones of yesteryear — like network news and print newspapers — are consumed by voters who are already firmly committed. (And why not? Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida tried the 99-county thing during the Republican primary, and look where that got him.) One byproduct of the podcasting vogue is that the nominees are mostly engaging in more casual, less adversarial interviews, often with hosts who are only vaguely familiar with the nitty-gritty of politics. (Harris, it's worth noting, recently sat for interviews with "60 Minutes" and Bret Baier of Fox News. Trump reneged on a "60 Minutes" interview; his most recent encounter with a nonpartisan journalist was with the editor in chief of Bloomberg News.) A fragmented media environmentThere is also no widely accepted metric of how many listeners these podcasts reach. Subscriber counts and Spotify charts offer a hint, but not all subscribers click on a specific episode, and of those who do, many shut it off within seconds. There is no equivalent to Nielsen ratings for TV news, which gauge the average number of viewers for the entire length of a telecast. A poll by Suffolk University and USA Today, released on Wednesday, found that roughly 25 percent of likely voters had viewed Harris's recent podcast appearances, and about 20 percent viewed Trump's. Those figures may be overstated. Internal surveys by the Harris campaign found that no single recent media appearance by Harris reached more than one in three undecided voters in battleground states. But, overall, two-thirds of those voters consumed at least one of her interviews, the campaign said. All this is a symptom of the country's increasingly fragmented media environment, where Americans can curate their own bespoke feeds of news and information. It means that the hosts themselves — some of whom have extreme views, like Rogan's skepticism about vaccines — are playing a bigger role in politics, too. That is a relatively recent development. Just two years ago, Rogan repeatedly refused to host Trump on his podcast, calling him "a polarizing figure" and "an existential threat to democracy." Big moments in old mediaIt's also worth noting that the most consequential moments of this volatile 2024 campaign have occurred in the old-fashioned environs of mass media. It was the first debate, seen by 51.3 million viewers on every major TV network, that led to President Biden dropping out of the race. About 67.1 million watched the Harris-Trump debate in September, in which the vice president was widely deemed the victor. Trump has refused to debate his opponent again in front of such a huge audience. And Harris's contentious sit-down with Baier on Fox News was seen live by 7.1 million people and widely circulated after, even prompting a "Saturday Night Live" parody with Alec Baldwin. Podcasts will probably be a necessity for future presidential candidates. But the legacy media still has some juice in it yet. Jessica Testa contributed reporting.
Is it fascism? A leading historian changes his mind.Democrats and opponents of former President Donald Trump have grown more comfortable lately using the term "fascism" to describe his political outlook. Do historians agree? My colleague Elisabeth Zerofsky, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, spoke with one of the foremost historians of fascism about the current political moment. On Jan. 6, 2021, as rioters charged the Capitol, Robert Paxton spent the day glued to his television. "I was absolutely riveted by it," Paxton told me when I met him this summer at his home in the Hudson Valley. "I didn't imagine such a spectacle was possible." Paxton is perhaps the greatest living American scholar of mid-20th-century European history. His 1972 book, "Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, 1940-1944," traced the internal political forces that led the French to collaborate with their Nazi occupiers and compelled France to reckon fully with its wartime past. When Donald Trump closed in on the Republican nomination in 2016 and articles comparing American politics with Europe's in the 1930s began to proliferate in the American press, Paxton urged restraint. "We should hesitate before applying this most toxic of labels," he warned. Jan. 6 proved to be a turning point. In a Newsweek column that appeared online on Jan. 11, 2021, Paxton declared a change of mind. The invasion of the Capitol, he wrote, "removes my objection to the fascist label." Trump's "open encouragement of civic violence to overturn an election crosses a red line," he went on. "The label now seems not just acceptable but necessary." Until then, most scholars arguing in favor of the fascism label were not specialists. Paxton was. Those who for years had been making the case that Trumpism equaled fascism took Paxton's column as a vindication. "He probably did more with that one piece than all these other historians who've written numerous books since 2016, and appeared on television, and who have 300,000 Twitter followers," says Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins, an assistant professor at Wesleyan and the editor of a recent collection of essays, "Did It Happen Here?" This summer I asked Paxton if, nearly four years later, he stood by his pronouncement. Cautious but forthright, he told me that he doesn't believe using the word is politically helpful in any way, but he confirmed the diagnosis. "It's bubbling up from below in very worrisome ways, and that's very much like the original fascisms," Paxton said. "It's the real thing. It really is." Read past editions of the newsletter here. If you're enjoying what you're reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here. Have feedback? Ideas for coverage? We'd love to hear from you. Email us at onpolitics@nytimes.com.
|
posted by Goatz @ 3:56 PM
0 comments
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home