Katie Herzog on What the Media and the Left Gets Wrong
Katie Herzog, co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast, talks with Matt about what the media and the left continue to get wrong.
Last week, I had co-host of the Blocked and Reported podcast, Katie Herzog on the podcast. We talked about what the media and the left continue to get wrong.
Click here to listen to our full conversation.
Here’s a lightly edited excerpt:
Matt: Donald Trump barely won the presidency last time, right? He won three states by like 77,000 votes. Since then, he didn't do anything really to do outreach or try to persuade new people—like save for maybe some outreach he did to Cuban-Americans in South Florida. Why did so many people still vote for Trump in 2020?
Katie: There are lots of reasons to vote for Donald Trump. I mean, like, my neighbor voted for Donald Trump because he likes The Apprentice. You know, I think that's a terrible reason.
Matt: This is your best friend, right?
Katie: My best friend. He's an 86-year-old Trump supporter, and he also likes guns too. And when I asked him, “Who was your favorite president?” his favorite president was John Kennedy. Why did he like john Kennedy? Because he was a Navy man. Right? A lot of this stuff isn't about policy… there are lots of reasons that people vote the way they do. For one thing, Donald Trump is an incumbent. He's also a celebrity. We live in a low-information country. We live in a country that worships celebrities. I, you know, this is speculation, but I do think that Democrats have failed to reach particularly the working-class. And when you say the term working-class, right now, there's this assumption from a lot of people that what you mean is the white working-class. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying the working-class and the working-class is a broad group of people across races, across sexes, across incomes. But let's say like, you know, non-college educated people who work with their hands primarily.
Matt: Henry Olson, who's a friend of mine, has been on this podcast several times. He wrote a book called Working Class Republican, about Reagan being more populist than a lot of people remember. And Henry's argument is that the future of the Republican Party is to become populist, but that doesn't just mean white people. He thinks that you're gonna have to have like working-class African-Americans and Hispanics or Latinx, if whatever.
Katie: We don't…they don't want us to call them that. Nobody wants—NPR wants us to call them that—
Matt: Only white progressives? But here's the interesting question. Did African-Americans and Hispanics vote for Trump because of his machismo? Like, in other words, did they specifically vote for Trump because he's Trump? To put it another way, could populists like Tom Cotton or Josh Hawley attract their votes? Or do you have to be Trump to get that vote?
Katie: I suspect that you have to be Trump. That's what I mean. I think that the rules don't apply to Trump, he exists in a, you know, Barack Obama was perhaps a once in a generation or a once in a lifetime politician in terms of his ability to cross ideological lines. And Trump might also also fall into that category. I think that the fact that he's a celebrity has a huge, huge part to do with it. America loves celebrities. And people think that he's rich—I don't think he's as rich as people think—but there's this idea that he's a successful businessman. And voting isn't always rational, right? He has these policies that, you know, that probably aren't going to actually be good for the little guy, for the most part. But it doesn't matter because we don't always vote based on policy. In fact, I think people rarely vote on policy. It's about party affiliation. It's about personality. It's about, you know, honestly, I think the “fuck you” vote was a huge factor. I got an email from a guy who told me he voted for Trump. He was one of the undecided voters who didn't decide who he was going to vote for until he got into the voting booth. And the reason he told me that he voted for Trump was because of the way the media handled the Hunter Biden laptop story. It's not that he believes that Joe Biden was involved in some sort of corruption. For him, it was just, it was an FU to the media—to what he sees as the liberal establishment—because he doesn't separate the media and from the Democrats. He sees them as one entity, and I think that was true for probably a lot of people.
Matt: OK, let's say that you were running a major media company, and you had already fired all those millennials, who were trying to tell you what to do. So you actually had control of this. What would your message be to your employees? Like, you're saying, “Look, we've, we've blown it so many times you've gotten so many things wrong. Half the country hates us half the country doesn't trust us.” What would you do differently?
Katie: Well, I think first of all, firing half the staff would be that would be the first step. I think there's a real, you know, journalism used to be reporting, right? It used to be a trade. It used to be a working man's job. And now it isn't. It’s pundits, it's opinion writers, it's bloggers, it's elites, it's people like us, who are not actually in touch with working people. And I think that's a huge problem. So what I would do is, I would, I would fire all the Columbia Journalism School grads, and I would hire a bunch of beat reporters from, you know, like, 40-year-old beat reporters from, like, from nowhere in Nebraska, and try to actually understand the middle of the country, not just the white middle of the country. I would also, you know, hire a more diverse group of people, but not diverse, because you're like a black Smith [College} grad whose family came from Nigeria. I would hire poor people and working-class people, and people who don't have the sort of, you know, disconnect from the American public. Because what we've seen from the national media, again, and again, is that the media does not understand America, it doesn't understand voters, and we are trying to control the conversation and doing a terrible job of it. And I think that's true of the Democrats as well. You know, Joe Biden is not an anarchist. He's not a Marxist. He's a moderate, and he's not the person who most of the media wanted to be in office, like the main like liberal, elitist, mainstream media were for Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, right? The people chose Joe Biden. But conservative media was able to portray Biden as some sort of anti-cop, Marxist in a lot of cases, which isn't true. But it's effective, because you turn on the news, and you see rioting and looting across American cities. That's not Joe Biden's fault. It's not Joe Biden fault. And most of these people doing it are not Democrats, they're like dumb kids, or they're like anarchist, who don't want to vote in the first place. Their allegiance does not lie with the Democratic Party, it lies with tearing down the whole system. The Democratic Party is really pretty centrist and moderate. It's conservative in a lot of ways. So if I were, you know, running a media company, or if I were a Democratic strategist, I would get out of the culture war business, and get back into like bread-and-butter issues. Andrew Yang was talking about this on CNN. He said the Dems need to get out of these sort of elitist issues, culture war about people's pronouns, or whatever, and just get back to the things that actually affect people's lives. And the response to that among many of like, the blue checkmarks on Twitter, was to call him a racist. But he has tapped into something here. Make this about the economy. Make it about taxes. Make it about jobs, and infrastructure and health care and things that actually impact us on a daily basis, and not the things that we fight about on Twitter every day.