Im-Politic: Latest Charlottesville Polls Suggest a U.S. Race Relations Muddle

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ABC News, CBS News, Charlottesville, Confederate monuments, Harris, Harvard University, Huffington Post, Im-Politic, Marist University, Mark Penn, Morning Consult, NPR, Politic, polls, race relations, The Hill, Trump, Washington Post, white nationalists, white supremacists

Keeping in mind how flawed they are, and keeping in mind that the wording of their questions matters a lot, several polls are now in (out?) on the intertwined issues of what to do about the nation’s various (and variegated!) Confederate monuments, and how Americans viewed President Trump’s response to the recent Charlottesville, Virginia “Unite the Right” rally, the counter-protests it attracted, and the violence that resulted – which of course produced the death of counter-protester Heather Heyer. The findings seem pretty clear, if somewhat challenging to explain: Most Americans don’t want the statues etc, removed from public spaces, but at the same time, most Americans disapproved of Mr. Trump’s response to the controversy – which included a defense of keeping the monuments in place.

Huffington Post, a news outlet I rarely cite, just performed a useful service by compiling the results of seven surveys on the Confederate monuments question conducted this month by six organizations. In five of the seven (including the NPR-Marist poll I wrote about last Friday), majorities backed keeping the monuments exactly where they are. In one of the outliers, this position was backed by a big plurality (49 percent).

The only survey showing a widespread desire for change found that by a wide 58 percent to 26 percent margin, respondents supported “relocating monuments honoring the Confederacy from government property and moving them to museums or other historic sites where they can be viewed in proper historical context.” Unless it’s assumed that “proper historical context” would portray the Confederate cause in an overall less-than-flattering light, even this arguably moderate viewpoint doesn’t exactly demonstrate that most Americans view its links to slavery and treason as especially troubling. Which of course I find especially troubling.

It’s possible to explain how these opinions dovetail with the negative reviews drawn by the president’s Charlottesville-related words and deeds, but it’s anything but easy, as I’ll elaborate on in a moment. But first the actual findings.

The earliest survey on the matter yielded results that could be seen as ambiguous. It was the NPR-Marist poll, and it showed that by 51 percent to 31 percent, the public viewed the Trump “response to the violence in Charlottesville” was “not strong enough” (as opposed to being “strong enough). This poll, remember, came out on August 17, and was only asking respondents about the president’s remarks as of Monday, August 14 and Tuesday, August 15 – before his late Tuesday afternoon press conference, when he made much more controversial comments. So it wasn’t entirely clear of whom Mr. Trump should have spoken more “strongly” – if any group or individual.

Subsequent polls, however, have made clear that most Americans believe that the racial issues as well as that Trump performance lay at the heart of their criticisms. The first clue came in a CBS News poll that was released on Thursday, the 17^th. According to the pollsters, a strong majority disapproved of “Trump’s response to Charlottesville” attack and that “Disapproval of the president’s handling of events rose [in interviews conducted] following the [Tuesday] press conference.” Indeed, those interviewed by CBS Tuesday and Wednesday frowned on Mr. Trump’s remarks by a 58 percent to 33 percent margin. The Monday interviewees disapproved by a 52 percent to 35 percent margin.

On August 21, the Washington Post reported that a poll it conducted with ABC News found that that Mr. Trump’s Charlottesville comments earned a failing grade from Americans by a two-to-one ration (56 percent versus 28 percent). And three days later, a survey conducted by Harvard University and the Harris polling firm found that 57 percent of respondents viewed the Trump remarks as a missed opportunity to bring the country together, and 57 percent believed he should do more to promote racial unity. (And in case you’re wondering, 59 percent agreed that the President should be doing more in this respect.)

Moreover a similar Harris finding – that the Trump comments did more to divide the country than to unite it – was supported by data both from the CBS News poll and a separate Politico/Morning Consult survey released on August 23). 

Nevertheless, these polls all presented results that raise important questions as to exactly how their Charlottesville-related views are or aren’t influencing Americans’ views on race relations above and beyond the Confederate monuments controversy.

For example, despite the stated desire both for better race relations and for a greater presidential effort to bring them about, and even though Mr. Trump’s comments on Charlottesville were broadly unpopular, most of the polling evidence shows agreement with the President’s view that both sides deserve equal blame for the violence in that city. (CBS’ was the only poll I found with contrasting results.) Those two sets of views don’t easily jibe with the great dissatisfaction expressed with Mr. Trump’s comments ostensibly because they weren’t racially sensitive enough.

Moreover, fully nine percent of Americans, according to the Post-ABC poll, said that it is “acceptable” to “hold neo-Nazi or white supremacist views.” Another eight percent were undecided. (The NPR-Marist poll, held before the heated Trump press conference, found support for “white supremacist” and “white nationalist” groups at only half these levels.)

The best explanation I’ve found for these apparent inconsistencies comes from Mark Penn, a well known pollster who helps direct the Harvard-Harris operations. Penn centered on that Trump press conference and contended, “His arguing the point about the violence is a Pyrrhic victory as he still gets the blame for the polarization in the country. The voters are looking for a uniter and he is coming off as a divider.”

I fully agree that Mr. Trump’s big post-Charlottesville problem has been being too argumentative (on top of firing off inconsistent comments seemingly from day to day) and that most Americans want a unifier in the White House. Yet the polls and Penn’s observation leave me less convinced that a critical mass of the country agrees on what it wants this unifying message to be, especially when it comes to race issues.

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Im-Politic: How Trump Could Really Make the News Media Great Again

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CNN, Constitution, First Amendment, Harvard University, Im-Politic, Mainstream Media, press freedom, Sean Spicer, The New York Times, Trump, White House Correspondents Association, White House press corps

The nation’s intertwined media and political elites are in an uproar over President-elect Trump’s performance at his press conference yesterday – the first he’s held since July. Their stated fear: Mr. Trump’s refusal to answer questions from a CNN reporter at the session add to evidence that he and his administration will be willing to “retaliate, bully, and ban journalists whose questions he doesn’t want to answer.”

As a result, the media won’t have “the access and information necessary to accurately and honestly cover the new administration” and the public will lose out “on the perspective those reporters bring, and we as an industry lose out in our efforts to hold power accountable.”

Sounds pretty serious. Except here’s what these supposed watchdogs of democracy either don’t get or won’t admit: More than ever before in recent memory, the Mainstream Media that Mr. Trump has so often attacked are hardly the totality of the U.S. media universe. They’re clearly not the totality of the competent or intellectually honest U.S media universe. And therefore, restricting some of their members’ access to American officials no longer means that the public’s right to know need be endangered.

The nation, and especially those increasingly overlapping political and media classes, have gotten so used to the structure of the journalistic universe as it’s evolved in recent decades that everyone’s forgotten that it has never, and shouldn’t be, set in stone. More specifically, although freedom of the press unmistakably is and should be protected vigorously by the Constitution, the role of today’s leading national news organizations, and in particular, the current White House press corps, has no legal or Constitutional basis. Nor should they enjoy such a privilege.

The White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), for example, exists and itself influences access to White House officials through its membership criteria, solely at the president’s behest. No government officials are required to deal with reporters on its roster, and as the organization itself acknowledges, presidents have treated it with dramatically varying measures of respect and disdain for more than a century.

In fact, the last word on who can interact in the role of journalists with government officials on any level legally belongs with government agencies themselves. In the words of this 2014 Harvard University study on such issues, the First Amendment

“does not cover the full spectrum of newsgathering activity, and, as presently understood, does not confer a right to gather news in particular places or circumstances to which the public is not otherwise admitted. This includes access to private events, as well as access to nonpublic spaces owned by the government (such as government offices and prisons).”

Could American leaders exploit this situation in order to deny the public the information it needs to evaluate their performance, and weaken the vibrancy of truly representative government? Of course. But keep the following three considerations in mind:

First, according to the Harvard report, “Recognizing that effective newsgathering requires greater levels of access than what the First Amendment provides, legislators and regulators at various levels of government have adopted policies granting to a subset of the public identified as the ‘press’ certain privileges to do things that ordinary citizens may not.”

In addition, as this study documents, the courts have demonstrated a clear determination to ensure extensive access by journalists to public officials, and to define “journalist” in ways that have enabled aggressive reporting.

Regarding worries about the presidency in particular, the federal government also contains a legislative branch with plenty of members of opposition political parties. Even disgruntled members of a president’s own party have ample means to disclose information they consider important – either through their authority to compel testimony and reports from the executive, as well as their power of the purse; or by working with the media themselves.  

Second, how democratic would it be to empower the media themselves – which after all consist overwhelmingly of privately owned, profit-seeking businesses – to determine who can attend press conferences and belong to media pools covering traveling leaders? Indeed, how democratic would it be to entrust the establishment media specifically with this responsibility?

These businesses – again at the government’s sufferance – already play a decisive role in these matters. How many Americans – outside Beltway insider circles – are satisfied with the results? And what evidence is available that the White House Correspondents Association has adequately disciplined members who have been exposed as partisans? As little as has been seen from the journalistic employers of these hacks – who don’t seem to have fired any of them.

Third, the better establishment journalists perform at reporting accurately and impartially, the likelier they are to create, maintain or reestablish the kinds of informal relationships with the widest variety of officials that have always been central to the most valuable investigative reporting – as opposed to shouting questions in the White House press room. And don’t forget the importance of filing Freedom of Information Act suits, or even keeping up with information on the public record – which can be astonishingly revealing.  

In the meantime, the incoming administration has indicated that it’s thinking of introducing some badly needed accountability of its own into its dealings with the press – for example, Mr. Trump’s refusal to respond to the CNN reporter in the (not unreasonable) judgment that the organization has too often fallen short of best journalistic practices. Moreover, his press secretary-designate, Sean Spicer, has spoken of changing the authorized White House press pool in various ways in order to reflect better the makeup of contemporary journalism.

So America may be heading towards a world in which presidents (and other senior government officials) don’t feel any particular need to deal with, say, CNN. Or The New York Times. In the short term, the result might be a rocky period for the government, for the media, and possibly for the flow of high quality information a real democracy needs. Yet the status quo ante plainly was not sustainable – both because of new technologies that have been rapidly transforming the media landscape, and because traditional journalism’s recent performance in particular has been so deficient.

But American leaders will still have powerful interests in getting their stories and narratives out through news organizations with large audiences. That’s why I’m confident that, however scornfully they treat individual media companies, they’ll nonetheless wind up dealing with responsible and dedicated journalists. And who knows? Maybe heightened competition will help make the Mainstream Media great again.