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There’s this video clip, that, to me, has become a kind of shorthand for the way Donald Trump walloped American media, catching so many people blithely unaware. It’s from a 2015 episode of This Week With GeorgeStephanopoulos.

In the clip, then-Rep. Keith Ellison warns a roundtable of guests, including Maggie Haberman from the New York Times, to take Donald Trump seriously as a Republican candidate. Six years later, this clip continues to fascinate me. First, there are the visuals. Ellison is a Black man, the only Black person in the room, just calmly predicting the future. And then, after everyone laughs, Ellison stands his ground.

I think a lot about whether this could happen again. I wonder how much blame journalists share for the past four years. And I wonder what we’re missing again, now. So, for Monday’s episode of What Next, I called up Farai Chideya to talk about all this. Chideya was a political reporter for FiveThirtyEight back in 2015 and now hosts the radio show Our Body Politic. But mostly, she’s one of the sharpest observers of media I know. Chideya has been trying to understand why voters make the choices they do for a long time. She’s reported from 49 states, covered white supremacy and white nationalism since the 1990s.

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So while Trump’s rise surprised many people, Chideya’s not one of them. But she says, even though individuals like her saw Trump coming, the news organizations they worked for had more trouble. I spoke with Chideya about how much the media is to blame for Trump and how journalists can do better in the future. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris:When you look back at the past four years, how much blame do you put on the media versus the Republican Party? Because I look back and at least I see the press struggling with its role—trying to figure it out and getting it wrong a lot of the time. But I see the Republican Party just outright enabling bad behavior.

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Farai Chideya: I love journalism or I wouldn’t still be doing it, but I think that there’s a question of who should have known better. When I look at someone like Kellyanne Conway, she should have known better, and I think she did know better than to unleash the beast of weaponized racial and class resentment that would come back to bite us all. And she made a choice. And she’s inside the GOP. But Les Moonves also made that choice.

It took a lot of people making a lot of choices. 

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As I like to say, a lot of hands on the knife.

Someone talked about how in many ways the coverage of the past four years was a failure of access journalism. Trying to constantly talk to the Spicers and the Conways taught us a lot less than if we’d actually gone out and talked to Trump voters more consistently and Clinton voters and nonvoters. Again, this idea of only assuming that power lies in the hands of the traditionally powerful has been the kryptonite of American journalism.

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There’s been so much criticism of diner safaris—folks who went out into “real America”and sat down at diners withpeople with Make America Great Again hats and painted a picture of what was happening there.Do you think there is too little of that or that that wasn’t done critically enough?

First of all, a lot of journalists, like a lot of Americans, don’t actually know American history or political science or behavioral economics, all of which I think are critical to understanding the electorate. So there has to be a process of self-education in newsrooms to make sure people have the right context to report on this country. But when I went, for example, to eastern Ohio, I spent three days there. I could have gotten all the interviews I needed for the piece, theoretically, in about 45 minutes, but I wanted to actually sit down with people. I went to their places of work. I talked to people who would never make the article. I sat in Republican Party meetings.

What did that teach you? 

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It taught me to understand the framework with which people were approaching politics. I had a great respect for the operations of the Trumbull County Republican Party. They were ace organizers. They understood their audience. They mobilized young people. They mobilized older people. The people I interviewed when I was there ranged from 19 to 82 or something. So I think that the idea of a diner safari is not so appealing, but the idea of rooting down when I interview people—I just let them talk for like an hour and then I start asking questions

You’ve written about how you DM’dwith a white nationalist for more than a year. And there’s something I struggle with, which is how to cover real people when they are pumped full of disinformation. How do you authentically present their voices without laundering their perspective?

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I think it’s pretty straightforward. If you look at my articles from FiveThirtyEight from the voters, at one point I have a lead character in an article about Trump voters in eastern Ohio, and I talk about his rhetoric on Mexico. I don’t say that’s wrong or that’s racist. I don’t need to. He speaks for himself. When I interviewed Sheriff Joe Arpaio in 2010, I didn’t say he’s wrong or he’s racist. I let him speak for himself. And the thing is not everyone will be on the truth bus when they read your articles, but I think actually being less judgmental and more exploratory gets people to be more in line with your articles. And I’ve actually—this is pretty funny—gotten praised by a white nationalist, different one than I was DM’ing with, who was like, Well, I started reading this article and I was mad. And then I realized, you actually talk to us. I was like, OK, well, sure.

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Do you worry about that, encouraging these kinds of beliefs in some way?

Absolutely, but I worry less about that than not covering it. I interviewed a woman from the Aryan Nations in the 1990s. I interviewed her by phone, and I said at the end, I’m Black. Would you have granted me an interview if you knew that? And first she said no and then she quickly said, Yes, because for every 10 people who read this, one of them willfollow me. And that was absolutely chilling, but I would rather have a situation where the other nine people know that one of the people will follow her than where we pretend she doesn’t exist, which is effectively what most of journalism has done.

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The place where I think it gets complicated is the place we’re at now,where there are so many conspiracy theories about what happened with the election,stuff that is patently false. For some reason I feel like there’s more risk to exposing that.

When I report on white nationalism, as I did in that piece with the woman from the Aryan Nations, I’m not both sides–ing. I talk about people being killed. I talk about a woman who was forced into a child marriage and had to flee for her life from a white supremacist cult. There’s a difference from listening to people in real time and presenting it as just as, like, tra-la-la a walk in the park. That’s not what I do. And part of it is that you have to synthesize a context around your interviews that makes all of it make sense without being both sides–y.

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You’ve written about your time at FiveThirtyEight as really revelatory for you as a reporter. You talk about interviewing a woman in Las Vegas about Trump during his candidacy. And she was making a comparison through her conversation with you to Trump and the rise of Hitler. And in the end, that was struck from the article. Can you tell that story?

There’s a woman in the Las Vegas area where I’d gone out for the final debate to cover that. And she talked about how, as someone who worked in a corporate position, she had multiple people in both business and personal settings say that the reason to vote for Donald Trump was to preserve, basically, the purity of the white race. That’s not a dog whistle. That’s a frigging club or an ax. And her husband is Black and Latino, so her daughter is multiethnic. And so we got the first part of this in. But then she said her daughter was doing a unit in high school on the rise of Hitler, and she said, I feel like this is happening. How could people believe this again?And it was struck. And I know that it may have sounded incendiary to some people. I didn’t think it was incendiary, but I was like, I’m not going to fight over this. But what it showed that people didn’t realize and some may not realize still is that there is a battle for the soul of whiteness. There is what I call the call to whiteness, which is white nationalist, white supremacist mobilization. And then there’s what I call establishment whiteness, which is the idea that whiteness is neutral, the idea that whiteness is meritocratic and essentially invisible because it is the standard. And what this woman was doing was acknowledging the call to whiteness through her own personal experience. And I don’t think we, including me, paid enough attention.

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It’s interesting the way you’re framing that, because you can see how those two calls to whiteness fed off of each other. There was the one call to one group of people and then the establishment whiteness nicely kept a lid on things until Trump was president.

Essentially what we think of as mainstream media represents an interest of establishment whiteness, which failed to respond to the supremacist nationalist call to whiteness, which is not objective journalism. It is self-interested elite journalism that makes money. It is not objective.

I tend to reject the title of objectivity because I find it so tainted. I don’t disagree with all of what it can be under some circumstances, but fundamentally, the reason that objectivity in journalism is a white construct is because it relies on you shedding the self. It’s this idea that you’re above it all, you’re sitting on some little magical cloud and looking down at the people. Well, you know what? I am one of the people. I’m a Black woman who grew up in Baltimore. I’ve seen race, class, and gender affect my life and my family’s life my whole life. And so when I interview a white supremacist, as I have for the past 25 years, I won’t be like, Oh, I’m objective about white supremacy. It’s like, No, this is a threat. But these are people, these are my fellow Americans, and I’m going to listen to them.And many people have said recently that Black people and Asian people and all other people are adjectives and white people are a noun. White people are just people. We have to unpack that. There is a tragic lack of attention to whiteness as a subject. And if journalism were truly objective, whiteness would be a bigger subject than Blackness or any other race.

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What you’re saying is objectivity doesn’t mean we all have the same perspective. It’s that we know about everyone else’s perspectives, respect them, and consider them all.

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I reject objectivity because I believe it’s impossible. I don’t reject the sentiment that leads people to use the phrase objectivity, but I reject it because being in the newsrooms I’ve been in, white people are not rejecting their whiteness. They just think it doesn’t exist. And I don’t reject my Blackness. And so when I go into a situation where I’m interviewing people who use racial resentment as a tool, I say to myself, How can I debias my own reporting process? I ask myself a critical question so that I can do my job well, which is fairness, not objectivity. I say, How can I do an unbiased interview with my subject?One thing that has to happen in America is better funding of journalists of color starting their own enterprises—and women—because where the money has flowed determines the shape of the media.

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I will say—although it’s self-serving, it’s accurate—that I pretty much called all of this. My piece in 2016 talks about the infiltration and weaponization of white supremacy and nationalism in government and the fact that it was a clear and present danger. This is not because I’m a genius. It’s because I do a lot of pattern recognition based on what I know about race, class, and politics. I had to learn pattern recognition of this type in order to survive as a Black woman in America. It doesn’t mean that other people can’t learn it. But this is survival for me. People I know died for liberation in this country. We can’t trivialize the stakes here. And if journalism wants to be better, it could learn from some of the pattern recognition that people of color and immigrants have to do simply to survive in this country and instead of that being viewed with suspicion in the newsroom, it could be respected.

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• Donald Trump
• Media
• White Supremacy

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