Election Season: Distortion Days
Tim Walz coverage touting football background sheds light on media manipulation
This presidential election cycle, the latest “most important in our lifetime,” is increasingly coming into focus with each passing week.
This may be a cynical take — is there any other kind to make? — but whoever wins the presidency will have done a better job convincing the American people to ignore their flaws. Donald Trump has many, but we know them by now. Kamala Harris is the shiny new object but is she really? She announced a presidential campaign in 2019 (and got just as many primary votes as Cruella de Vil).
But reality is garbled in politics. With healthy scoops of distortion is how campaigns are run these days, with the assistance of the Crock-In-Arms press corps.
Take Tim Walz, Harris’s pick for Vice President.
Walz does have an interesting background. A native Nebraskan who joined the national guard after high school, became a teacher and football coach (more on that later) and appeared to be living an ordinary life in rural Minnesota. But in his 40s, he ran for state congress, then governor, winning in 2018. He continued to serve in the National Guard while in congress. His service time and reasons for leaving the Guard have come under scrutiny in the weeks since Walz became the V.P. candidate.
I don’t believe most Americans care about whether a vice presidential candidate took early retirement to skip a deployment. Comparisons to John Kerry’s swift boat Vietnam controversy from 20 years ago are silly. Nothing more than a round of hopscotch in the midst of a three-month long political Olympic Games, Ancient Rome style. We are used to these types of playground tactics.
Anyone who’s read up on Walz these past few weeks knows he’s far removed from his days as a social studies-teaching everyman rural Minnesotan. This is a guy who endorsed a tattle-tale Covid hotline and let the city’s capital burn to bits in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Power will do that to people, make them put their conscience up for sale.
Yet in the season we are in, a politician’s record is a matter of interpretation.
Earlier this week, two New York-based publications published pieces on Walz’s days as a football coach.
The New Yorker, which wrote piece after piece about the dangers of football during the head injury hysteria of the late 2010’s, used Walz’s newfound fame to reframe their position on the sport. From the article:
Football may be the last great bipartisan issue in the United States—N.F.L. games dominate the list of most-watched programs on television every year. Still, the sport, with its pronounced hierarchies, its emphasis on discipline, and its fairly thoroughgoing machismo, is arguably coded as conservative. The White House occupants most closely associated with it—including Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, and Gerald Ford—have largely been Republicans. It was something, then, to see a bunch of Democrats at a scene reminiscent of a homecoming pep rally, which was clearly not lost on the Harris campaign. During her speech, Harris referred to Walz as “Coach Walz” nine times.
Sections of the article mention Walz’s playbook, his commitment to “stopping the run” but mostly cast the V.P. candidate as a Coach Taylor-like wordsmith maharishi: benign on scheme, heavy on benevolence.
It’s fascinating how The New Yorker has taken a sudden interest in football and its populist values considering the magazine advocated for the sport’s elimination almost a decade ago. But we expect false virtue from them. Bias is their business.
The Athletic, a “sports journalism” website, did a oral history style piece on Walz’s coaching years, also published this week.
The Athletic launched in 2016 with much fan fare. A media company that would replace newspapers, they claimed, with designs to watch them “bleed out” as their founders arrogantly stated, while giving fans what they’d been missing from legacy outlets: deeply reported coverage of their favorite major sports and college teams.
I’ve been a subscriber almost since Day One. They’ve had beat writers for my favorite teams (Cubs, Commanders/Redskins) and do a great job covering college football and its ongoing metamorphosis from amateurism to professionalism. But, predictably, the subscription-only model cratered out. Private equity money went dry. They had to take on advertising, which was fine and not all that intrusive for readers. A couple of years ago The Athletic went shopping for a buyer and found one in the New York Times. Soon after the purchase, coverage emphasis shifted to more sports of the bourgeoisie like tennis and European soccer. Earlier this year, the transition came full circle as they switched over their platform to reflect that of NY Times digital.
The Walz piece verifies Athletic editors are all in on giving subscribers a reading experience that reflects a point of view that paints outside the lines of a stick-to-sports ethos.
An excerpt from the paywalled article:
Before he was elected governor of Minnesota, before he represented the state’s first district in Congress and long before he became a candidate for vice president, Walz was a coach and social studies teacher in the Midwest, first in Nebraska and then in Minnesota. The night he introduced himself on the national stage in Philadelphia, many of his fellow coaches and former players at Mankato West thought back to sticky fall evenings as they listened to their old defensive coach, who used to light them up in the film room and challenge them on the practice field 25 years ago.
“I think if they had given him a helmet,” said Salsbery, “he probably would have played in practice.”
“I still hear the cadence,” said John Considine, an offensive lineman on those West teams at the turn of the century.
The article craftily begins with an anecdote about ex-players being unknowingly contacted by swarms of media outlets, removing any intro that may reflect a reporter’s point of view and thus, justify the piece as nothing more than sharing glory days stories about the old ball coach-turned-vice presidential candidate.
Since this writing, the article has accumulated over 2,000 comments, many objecting to the use of Walz’s sporting coach background as means for pursing a political agenda. Others found the story affirming and insightful as to Walz’s personal values.
(I jumped into the comments, brainlessly, and asked if editors would have written the same type of story if J.D. Vance, Walz’s counterpart on the Republican side, had let’s say, coached baseball at one point in his past. I didn’t receive a response from editors to my rhetorical question but I did get a crapload of ‘likes’ balanced out by an equal number of ‘you suck’ replies. That’s good day!)
The almost 50/50 reaction reflects to some degree, a desired outcome from a piece of content generated by a media company. But to not see the shrewdly political underpinnings of the Walz article, disguised as sports-themed, produced by a New York Times-owned company, is an admission of cognitive dissonance.
Elections used to be about the most popular truths. Not anymore. They are now about something more sinister, with endless drips of misshapes and switch ups.
What side can do the better job of reality distortion. That’s who wins in November.
Have a suggestion for The Kerr Report? Send email to jonjkerr@gmail.com.