i saw news on this too. particular article is paywalled, but i saw stuff on this elsewhere.
so anyways. been thinking a bit about it. so some shower thoughts on what happened here.
whether this would truly upset the progressives, i don't think so. i think progressives cared more about abortion/"hardline" immigration policy/cheneys/gaza than harris being featured on any particular outlet. nobody blinks at her appearing on fox news. for her base, the fact that she's willing to go into the lion's den is probably a good thing. (rogan is not fox no, but a lion's den he is, irt who his listeners are)
i think it's still dems stuck in the 90s. lots of the campaign staff and strategy is still too clintonian, just has a progressive tint with piecemeal policy that progressives like.
i wonder who the staffers are, and what their data has shown them here (and what it says irt bias). so i'm trying to wrap my head around this discrepancy; fox is fine, rogan is not. then it's a question of legitimacy of the outlet in question. fox is fine to appear on, since while they're arguably more insane than rogan, they're "real" news, they're powerful, should be respected, and should be appeared on if it can be arranged. rogan is not legitimate, he's not on "real" TV, and then i guess the staffers' idea is that you help legitimizing an illegitimate media outlet that's been helping the right recently? and that would make people mad?
this is all a bunch of leaps of analysis, if my musings is what's going on. but i do think it's a huge issue. dems are just concretely worse at being flexible and using newer forms of mass media. walz is good at it (walz was a massive boon for the campaign, i will die on that hill, and he had a clear line between concrete results, memeability and being the midwesternest of dads; that he wasn't aggressive enough at the debate was the only real flaw i could identify; anyways point is that he used social media in a kindhearted dad-like way, which i thought was excellent); bernie is good at it, aoc is good at it. incidentally, bernie did show up on rogan, but what i remember most about it was people panicking about optics in the same way they do about harris here. the real issue is that bluntly irt swing voters and garnering engagement, fox is just not relevant anymore. rogan is. the media share he has is massive, and his base is specifically the kind of people the dems have a hard time getting airtime with anyways.
basically, my assumptions are -
- rogan is seen by them as illegitimate by the staff in some way
- they understand that progressives (often) understand that legitimizing a bad illegitimate outlet is poor optics
- therefore appearing on rogan would alienate the vote (even if outrage is not the same as keeping people from the polls)
(and again these are guesswork and i'm free to being corrected)
and if that's actually the case -
- rogan, whether i and others like it or not, is de facto a real outlet now. you can't on a practical level pretend it isn't.
- the idea was to sidestep the issue on this particular outlet and do fox instead because i guess they thought everyone understands fox is Big and Necessary to speak on? i'm not sure that's as true anymore, is the issue.
so: the clintonian path doesn't work anymore. and this extends to some of the strategy. the idea that appearing on fox is enough is not true anymore. podcasts are actually great. noone - or noone relevant to the turnout - watches tv news anymore. stop appearing on fox (or, like, do, for optics). appear on rogan. appear on
stuff like this - maybe not as a presidential candidate i guess, but people should understand my general point here. i don't want to go full millenial on this and claim it's because they don't know how to internet per se, because they did try and go quite active there; but there's doing your own youtube channel stuff, and then there's appearing on joe rogan.
of course they may also just be correct that appearing on joe rogan would lose progressive votes. i just don't really see it though. if they didn't have those because of optics, the optics were lost after cheney stuff.