What I Am Reading: "All The Truth is Out" by Matt Bai

I expected this to be a work of history, but it was mostly a work of media criticism. Subtitled “The Week Politics Went Tabloid,” the book is Matt Bai’s argument that the 1987 Gary Hart scandal was the breaking point for the relationship between politicians and the media, when it dissolved into an effort by the media to uncover scandal and an effort by politicians to be as guarded as possible. I think it is possible, however, that the election of Donald Trump renders the book, published in 2014, obsolete. Trump has proven, through sheer shamelessness, to be immune to the forces of political gravity, ignoring dozens of scandals much worse than the one that brought down Hart. I do not think that this is the disruption of the system that Matt Bai would have preferred.

The story revolves around the character (in both senses of the word) of Gary Hart, candidate for President in the 1984 and 1988 elections. The book owes a lot to Richard Ben Cramer’s What It Takes, the definitive account of the candidates in the 1988 primaries. It takes up where that book left off in some ways, in positing that Hart’s famous and ambiguously proven sex scandal was the result of nothing more than a series of misunderstandings. Bai thinks that a cultural shift in American journalism came about after Watergate, as the previously intimate relationship between reporters and politicians was replaced in the new generation by an adversarial one. He stresses that Hart, born in 1936, was (unlike the reporters covering him) not a baby boomer, and did not share in that generation’s preference for emotional openness and accessibility, growing up instead as a Western child of the Depression. This helped lead to the media’s distrust of Hart going into the 1988 campaign, where he was the frontrunner as a result of his strong performance against Walter Mondale in the primaries of four years earlier. Eventually, it would lead reporters to stake out a townhouse where Hart was seen in the company of a young woman.

The media’s focus on character issues led them to pursue and uncover the kind of (alleged) scandal that, in previous eras, they would have viewed as off-limits. After Nixon, they fixated on “character” issues, which could mean anything from Hart’s affairs to John Kerry’s flip-flopping. This was a major detriment to the country’s polity, according to Bai. This did not just apply to the case of Hart, a Sorkinesque Big Thinker whom Bai clearly admires. It led to a downward spiral in which media hawkishness leads to candidate shallowness, which leads to media contempt, which leads to a candidate’s ability to denounce the media as hostile and disconnected. This is where Bai comes closest to predicting Trump, not that any of us predicted Trump successfully.

I have a complicated relationship to the political media. I consume a voluminous amount of it, but I also agree that a considerable amount of it is shallow or toxic. However, to pat myself on the back for a moment, I mostly consume political journalism and analysis in the form of the written word; the true boogeymen in the media are more likely (in my opinion) to be found on television. As someone who doesn’t watch TV, I admittedly lack the tools necessary for a full analysis of the political media-scape. Despite that, I must live in the world that it has created. One conviction that stands in my complicated and occasionally contradictory opinions on the media is that the media created Trump. They created him in the New York tabloids, they created him on the Apprentice, and they created him on the campaign trail, with endless rally coverage. Is it their fault that the system they had created, with endless Breaking News scandal coverage, didn’t work in his case? Had the boy cried wolf too many times? I don’t know. The flawed system that took down Hart should have taken down Trump as well, but it seems that we somehow ended up in the worst quadrant of the prisoner’s dilemma.

For some slightly more positive musings: the media is not the same as it was in 1987, prior to the internet. Whatever else the internet has done, it has taken some amount of “the narrative” out of the hands of the media elite and democratized it. Media criticism crosses my news feed all the time, whether of blatant spin on FOX news or of the framing of a story in the New York Times. I don’t know what the future of the political media holds, but I do know that it is unsettled, especially in the wake of Trump. I think it could be less bleak than Neal Postman thought in Amusing Ourselves to Death, a book written in the ‘80s before the internet that Bai returns to several times. I don’t have any better prescription than that I hope that the empowerment of a more media-savvy generation will improve the situation.