10 months ago
“I’m appalled,” fumes U.S. Rep. and presidential hopeful Dean Phillips. “I’m disappointed. I’m disgusted that professionals who ostensibly have committed their entire careers to sharing truth and to providing facts and to sharing information with American voters … are fundamentally avoiding their responsibilities.”
Phillips is on the phone from icy New Hampshire, where he’s currently running 60 or so points behind President Joe Biden in Democratic primary polls. But he may as well be calling from the sidewalk outside MSNBC’s Capitol Hill studio, watching the fancy guests come and go, hoping in vain for Chris Hayes or Joy Reid or Jen Psaki to bring him in from the cold.
Phillips shouldn’t count on being ushered inside for hot cocoa anytime soon.
Since declaring his candidacy on Oct. 27, Phillips says, he hasn’t been interviewed once on the favorite network of his fellow Democrats. Ditto big Sunday shows. He’s been on CNN a handful of times, but never given the town-hall treatment afforded fellow single-digit candidates like Vivek Ramaswamy and Chris Christie, both of whom happen to have challenged Donald Trump rather than Biden.
The only broadcast outlets that seem to want him, Phillips tells me, are the ones that deploy him as a way of tweaking the Democrats.
“Right media has been more than invitational,” Phillips says. By contrast, “I don’t think there’s an MSNBC viewer that even knows that I’m a congressman, because what’s being portrayed is designed to prevent that education.”
As an Ivy-educated businessman whose three terms representing suburban Minneapolis have established him as a solid mainstream legislator, though not a Capitol Hill big shot, Phillips isn’t accustomed to being treated as a marginal or kooky figure — someone like, say, the onetime spiritual guru Marianne Williamson (who actually leads him in several national Democratic polls). “They’re trying to convert me from a person of principle and competency to a kook” who can be ignored, Phillips says.
The Minnesota congressman attributes the cold shoulder to influence from a Biden campaign that he accuses of using access to pressure the media into blackballing an opponent. He says it points to something undemocratic at the heart of the Democratic Party.
“I do know of specific cases where representatives of the Biden campaign have been very clear to others about trying to not attend events of mine, to not support me, and to not platform me,” Phillips says, declining to name names. “It is almost antithetical to democratic principles, which include debate, deliberation and ultimately compromise.”
Asked about the accusation, Biden campaign spokesperson TJ Ducklo offered a three-letter response: “LOL.” A CNN representative shared a list of seven bookings on the network since the campaign launched (Phillips’ side said two of them subsequently canceled). MSNBC declined comment.
I know, I know: Griping about insufficient coverage is an old standby of trailing candidates — just as it’s pretty standard for leading candidates to lobby media to ignore those pesky small fries.
But I think Phillips’ complaint is worth taking seriously — not for what it says about anyone’s campaign tactics, but for what it says about the information ecosystem of today’s Washington.
Consider a counterfactual: It’s January 2020, and a sitting Republican member of Congress has launched a primary challenge to incumbent President Trump. The challenger is not a household name like Liz Cheney, the political dynast who was then a member of leadership. But it isn’t a totally fringe figure, either. It’s someone like Adam Kinzinger, who was then in his fifth term representing Illinois. And even though the polls are awful and the Beltway pros give him no chance, he’s out there making the rounds in Iowa and New Hampshire.
In this scenario, is the challenger ignored or given short shrift in the press? Of course not! The liberal-oriented media would be full of tributes to his courage and independence. If conservative outlets declined to give him airtime, it would be held up as evidence of their pathetic Trump fealty.
Like any comparison, it’s not perfect. As last year’s sweeping Fox libel lawsuit showed, the kind of manipulation Phillips alleges is nothing like the terror conservative media felt about Trump’s base (even if Rupert Murdoch felt disdain for the man). On the other hand, non-Trumpy outlets remain chastened by the blowback from 2016, when they were accused of playing up sideshows instead of scrutinizing Trump.
It all points to an irony about our media moment: As people of the right and left gravitate to distinct news galaxies, it doesn’t necessarily mean those news outlets are trying to be useful for the ideological group that watches.
In theory, if you knew your audience was heavily Democratic or Republican, you could present them with all sides of the sometimes obscure debates roiling the party, making yourself especially useful come primary season. Among the Democrats, one of those debates was whether to have a new candidate — something significant numbers of partisans whispered about. They never got an A-lister, or even a B-lister. But in a different time and place, broadcasters serving a heavily Democratic audience might decide to use their tastemaking power to get some attention for the C-lister who had the moxie to step up.
Of course, in another time and place, platforms whose profits rely on Democratic eyeballs wouldn’t have to worry about being accused of having destroyed the country by virtue of hurting Biden and therefore helping elect Trump.
When we speak, Phillips — like a good midwestern moderate — decries the way America’s attention economy seems to reward conflict above all. “I’m just afraid that the market is no longer interested in anything that’s not deeply provocative,” he says. “I could be very well known by being a total jerk. It’s not my style.”
But the emphasis on how the current environment turns everyone into a bomb thrower actually misunderstands what a cloistered news ecosystem does.
Two decades ago, a lot of political content, particularly on television, involved bringing on a couple of guests who disagreed and then gawking while they wailed away on one another like sideshow freaks. The partisan model today, by contrast, is to have a host railing at some distant other, a bad guy who’s not even physically present.
In other words, we’ve evolved a system with less open conflict, not more.
Where people once tuned in for politics-as-Thunderdome, a polarized audience is now apt to worry about airing their side’s dirty laundry.
If Phillips is to be believed, this is bad news not just for him but for the partisan agenda he blames for his marginalization.
“There’s a story there that is literally being denied to the entire population, because they’re being deluded into believing that Joe Biden is just fine,” he says. “And I will tell you from our own research, in every market we’ve been, people don’t know how precarious Joe Biden’s reelection chances are. … And they’re not giving me any platform whatsoever” to say so.
“It’s gravely disappointing, particularly as a Democrat who wants to see us succeed,” he says. “And what has resulted is the ceding of hundreds of hours of primetime TV to the GOP, with not any Democratic answer, energy, debate, conversation or excitement. And that alone is a massive disservice to Democrats broadly across the country.”
Meanwhile, MSNBC did cover Phillips this week, albeit without an interview. A brief Tuesday segment on Alex Wagner Tonight included footage of the candidate at a New Hampshire event where “literally zero voters showed up,” according to the host. “The people you see drinking coffee around Mr. Phillips here are his own staffers,” she added, before switching to coverage of an Iowa storm.
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