B4 N THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, NOVEMBER 9, 2020
MEDIA
Soon after the major television
networks called the White House
for Joseph R. Biden Jr. and de-
voted some time to discussing the
coming end of the Trump presi-
dency, they began taking note of a
milestone: the ascendancy of the
first female, first Black and first
South Asian vice president-elect,
Senator Kamala Harris of Califor-
nia.
MSNBC’s Mika Brzezinski de-
scribed Ms. Harris’s success as “a
crack in the ceiling.”
“As we give this context and
talk about Joe Biden’s incredible
path to victory, it would be amiss
not to mention right now we’re
also in another moment of transi-
tion and history, where we are go-
ing to be witnessing the first wom-
en vice president of the United
States,” Ms. Brzezinski said.
Ms. Harris’s rise to the second
highest role in American govern-
ment came four years after Hilla-
ry Clinton’s White House run fell
short and 36 years after Geraldine
Ferraro lost her bid for the vice
presidency.
On CNN, Abby Phillip said that
Ms. Harris, 56, would help Mr. Bi-
den, 77, bridge the gap between
the Democratic Party’s old guard
and its newer members.
“Kamala Harris represents so
much for millions of people in this
country,” Ms. Phillip said.
Her CNN colleague Dana Bash
noted that Ms. Harris was a key
part of a winning national ticket
100 years after women had won
the right to vote and 55 years after
the Voting Rights Act sought to
protect against Black disenfran-
chisement.
Ms. Harris was born in 1964, a
year before the act was put in
place.
“The magnitude of this moment
certainly is not lost on Black wom-
en and likely many women in gen-
eral,” said the ABC News anchor
Linsey Davis. “I’m especially
thinking about the little girls of all
colors, but in particular, Black and
brown girls, because there’s so
much power in seeing someone
who looks like you.”
On Saturday, major networks
focused primarily on Mr. Biden’s
victory and President Trump’s re-
fusal to concede. The story of Ms.
Harris’s triumph was secondary,
and the discussion of her rise was
led mostly by female anchors and
commentators.
On Fox News, after the Biden
news had settled, the host Dana
Perino said, “I want to take a mo-
ment, obviously, for Kamala Har-
ris. This is a significant, historic
moment for America, for women
in America, and for Black Ameri-
cans and Indian Americans. It’s abig deal, and I think we should ac-
knowledge that.”
Donna Brazile, a Fox News con-
tributor who was formerly the in-
terim head of the Democratic Na-
tional Committee, wiped away
tears as she reflected on the sig-
nificance of Ms. Harris’s victory.
She said that, on Saturday morn-
ing, she had thought about her
mother and grandmother, who didnot have the right to vote.
“Been a long time coming, to be
the last to get voting rights, to be
those who waited and waited for
our turn,” Ms. Brazile said. “This
is not about asking anyone to
leave the room. Just scoot over
and let women also share in the
leadership of this country.”
Kathleen Hall Jamieson, a com-
munications professor at the Uni-versity of Pennsylvania, said that
President Trump, an unusually
dominant figure in the news for
the last four years, complicated
the coverage on Saturday.
“Trump is making it more diffi-
cult in the moment to celebrate
her accomplishment, because he
is draining part of the attention
available in the news narrative,”
Ms. Jamieson said. “But it’s notbeing ignored.”
Nancy Cordes, the congres-
sional correspondent at CBS, pro-
vided a history lesson, noting that
Ms. Ferraro, as Walter Mondale’s
running mate in 1984, was asked
whether she was “tough enough”
for the job of vice president and if
“the Soviets might try to take ad-
vantage of the White House” be-
cause of her gender, Ms. Cordes
said.
“If you think about the ques-
tions Kamala Harris got this time
around, she got tough questions,
but certainly nothing about her fit-
ness to be in office because she is a
woman,” Ms. Cordes said. “So that
in itself is progress.”
The history-making rise of a
daughter of Indian and Jamaican
immigrants was also the focus of
articles published online on Satur-
day by The New York Times, TheWall Street Journal, The Washing-
ton Post and The Los Angeles
Times.
A news alert from The Journal
noted that Ms. Harris would be
“the highest-ranking woman ever
in the line of presidential succes-
sion.” The Atlantic ran a story
with a simple headline: “She Did
It.” The feminist website Jezebel
led its home page with “Good
Morning to Vice President-Elect
Kamala Harris, and Kamala Har-
ris Only,” placing its article on Mr.
Biden second. On The 19th, a non-
profit gender and politics news
site, Ms. Harris was center stage.
Others weighed in on social me-
dia. The writer Roxane Gay said:
“I did not think I would be this
moved to see a black woman/
south Asian woman/woman as
Vice President. But I am.”
Reacting to the news on Twitter,
in a post that was retweeted by
Lydia Polgreen of Gimlet Media
and Robin Roberts of “Good
Morning America,” Ms. Harris
shared a video of herself on the
phone with Mr. Biden celebrating
the victory.
“We did it, Joe,” she said.Michael M. Grynbaum contributed
reporting.‘It’s a Big Deal’: TV Coverage Notes Import of Harris Victory
Kamala Harris, the vice president-elect, speaking last month. She “represents so much for millions of people in this country,” said one CNN reporter.SCOTT MCINTYRE FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESBy TIFFANY HSU
and KATIE ROBERTSONA woman brings three
firsts to the office of
vice president.
than a story a day, on average,
and stories with her byline have
accounted for hundreds of mil-
lions of page views this year
alone. That’s more than anyone
else at The Times.
She has consistently painted a
portrait of a man who is both
smarter and less competent than
his enemies believe, a portrait
vindicated again this past week
as the president impotently
poisoned politics with lies about
election results. She was
shocked, but not surprised, when
he attacked the election results
in a dark Thursday night brief-
ing. But as we sat outside her
house waiting for the final call on
Saturday morning, she told me
she believes he “will continue to
say the things he’s saying as he
walks out the door.”
Politics used to be covered as a
kind of a sport, but it doesn’t feel
like that anymore. (John King of
CNN was jeered for calling vote
counting “fun” on election night.)
And despite the television glam-
our and lucrative book contracts
that flooded in for reporters in
the Trump era, the real work of
reporting is painstaking and
exhausting: getting people, one
by one, to tell you things they
should not, and then telling your
readers about them.
Ms. Haberman was particu-
larly well-suited for this journal-
istic moment because of her
sheer relentlessness and hunger,
and her lack of smug self-satis-
faction. She seems to need to
prove herself every day. She
texts while she drives, talks
while she eats, parents while she
reports, tweets and regrets it,
doomscrolls. She hates Twitter so
much she stepped back from the
platform in 2018 and wrote an
Op-Ed about it, and then started
tweeting again. (Relatable!)
For the last four years, she has
been the human incarnation of a
nation riveted, like it or not, by
Mr. Trump, a reporter driven by
a kind of curiosity that feels
more like compulsion to find out
what is going on — and has
dragged us all along for the
harrowing ride.
“She has been the dominant
reporter on the Trump White
House beat for four years, and
it’s not really close,” said Jona-
than Swan of Axios, one of her
fiercest competitors for breaking
news. He described her as “the
bane of my existence for the past
four years,” adding, “I get high
anxiety most days wondering
what she will break that I should
have had.”
I know the feeling. I learned to
report from Maggie — and to
fear her — in City Hall in New
York, where she was a reporter
for The New York Post, and
where she first covered Mr.
Trump. When I arrived in 2001,
Ms. Haberman cut a striking
figure there: She wore a leather
jacket and smoked cigarettes on
the building’s front steps, chat-
ting with the cops.
But she did her real work in
Room 4a, in the basement, where
the junior reporters for the tab-
loids and assorted other misfits
like me were relegated, down-
stairs from the legendary main
press room, Room 9. Room 4a
was a cluttered office with mis-
matched desks and, once, a
squirrel. I sat facing her and
every morning watched her
routine, which was terrifying.
First, she picked up the compet-
ing newspaper, The Daily News,
and leafed through for stories
she wished she’d broken, deduc-
ing who had been the source of
each one. Then, she called the
sources — she already knew
them well, of course — and chat-
ted in a friendly way, before
telling them she felt genuinely
betrayed that they hadn’t gone to
her, that she was worried she’d
be in trouble with her boss for
getting beaten and, honestly, that
she was incredibly angry at
them.
These weren’t the blithe trans-
actions of a slick journalist. This
was how you report when you
take your sources and your work
dead seriously, and make no real
distinction between your report-
ing and the rest of your life. I
learned from her never to treat it
as a game.
Ms. Haberman and I finally
got to work together at Politico,
where she threw me a byline on
a 2011 story about Mr. Trump, in
which she got at what would
become a familiar theme: “The
widespread assumption that
Trump’s flirtation with the presi-
dency is a publicity stunt is no
doubt at least partly true. But
that’s merely the point of depar-
ture for a man for whom almost
every public move over the past
30 years has been a publicity
stunt.” (We remain friends, aswell as colleagues. This is an-
other one of these columns
where you have every reason to
doubt my neutrality.)
She arrived at The Times in
February 2015, the sort of midse-
nior hire who can easily get lost
at a big institution, with the
nominal mandate of writing a
newsletter. She had a scoopy
aggression that made her feel alittle “scruffy” at the broadsheet.
Then, she just started breaking
news — of a meeting between
Elizabeth Warren and Hillary
Clinton, of a big endorsement for
Jeb Bush. Everyone wanted to
cover the likely Republican nomi-
nee, Mr. Bush, and journalists at
the time had “this impulse to just
not cover” Mr. Trump, she re-
called, which she thought was a
mistake. So she became the
Trump reporter more or less by
default, and covered both the
campaign’s rolling leadership
crisis and the candidate’s divi-
sive words.
When Mr. Trump stunned thecountry by winning, The Times’s
Washington bureau chief, Elisa-
beth Bumiller, invited Ms. Ha-
berman and another reporter on
the Trump beat, Ashley Parker,
to brief the Washington bureau
on what was to come. In a meet-
ing that has become Times lore,
they told a room full of seasoned
journalists what to expect. “Al-
ways assume you’re being re-
corded, assume anything you put
in an email is going to be tweeted
about by him or read aloud, that
his aides lie to each other,” she
recalled saying.
Ms. Bumiller and much of her
team were skeptical. “I remem-
ber thinking that the president-
elect she was describing — im-
pulsive, unaware of the workings
of government, with no real
ideology — was exaggerated,
and that the office would change
him,” Ms. Bumiller said. “I was
completely wrong and Maggie
was completely right.”
Ms. Parker, now a White
House reporter for The Washing-
ton Post, recalled that “Maggie
and I were like aliens from an-
other planet describing this
Martian king to the people of The
New York Times in a way they
could not fathom.”
They didn’t have to wait long
for Mr. Trump to test the limits of
the presidency. In his first
month, Mr. Trump carried
through on his promise to ban
immigration from seven Muslim
countries, leading to mass pro-tests in the streets and at air-
ports. The Trump era had begun
in earnest, though many journal-
ists had to learn and relearn the
lessons about covering his presi-
dency.
Ms. Haberman topped out at
599 bylines in 2016 — that’s both
solo bylines and shared ones —
and she also leads The Times
this year. She’s often the only one
able to reliably confirm facts in
Mr. Trump’s chaotic and dishon-
est orbit. She was also under his
skin: He attacked her personally
on Twitter and sparred with her
in person, but kept giving her
interviews until last year. This
Oct. 19 he tweeted directly to her
about his confidence in winning
the election and his “BOFFO”
rallies.
As Ms. Haberman produced
scoop after scoop, she became
the center of intense attention.
Much of that has played out on
Twitter — which she sees as an
“appalling website” that she can’t
quit. She feels she’s never quite
found her footing there, she said,
and “regrets” tweets that she
fears cast a shadow on her re-
porting.
Women in journalism, and
high-profile women at The
Times, in particular, receive
unending abuse on the platform.
The worst of it has come cour-
tesy of Mr. Trump. “I don’t think
that people fully understand
what it’s like when the president
of the United States is personallyattacking you,” she said, noting
that while it’s simply the way Mr.
Trump works, among his sup-
porters “there are enough people
who think that’s real and who
don’t get that.”
But other days, the abuse has
come from Mr. Trump’s critics,
who are sometimes simply shoot-
ing the messenger. And there
have been times, Ms. Haberman
said, that she just sends an off-
key tweet to her 1.5 million fol-
lowers and tortures herself for it.
“I have never adjusted to the
fact that I have so many follow-
ers. So I think I continue to treat
it as if it’s like a small group of
people who I know. And then
when I get attacked by people
who don’t know me, I have not
quite understood why they’re
attacking me,” she said. “And I
think the biggest mistake I have
made on Twitter is fighting with
people.”
Her most recent Bad Tweet
came on Oct. 14, when she pasted
in a quote from a New York Post
article about the laptop purport-
edly belonging to Hunter Biden.
She’d intended to raise an eye-
brow at the mention of F.B.I.
involvement — suggesting they
hadn’t found the information
serious and, perhaps, a hint as to
where Mr. Trump’s personal
lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani got
the information. Democrats
interpreted her tweet as simply
promoting a story whose origins
were shadowy. “MAGA Ha-
berman” trended. She sent a
round of frantic texts to friends
asking if she’d screwed up, and
ultimately deleted the tweet.
Mr. Trump’s own Twitter ac-
count is mostly hidden behind
warnings these days. The presi-
dent, though, will go. And Ms.
Haberman anticipates covering
some blend of the new adminis-
tration and the enduring Trump
orbit from New York. She hopes
that she’ll break more news, and
worries that she’ll lose her touch.
“I’m dispensable,” she said, an
assertion that Times editors
would take issue with.
After the election was called
Saturday morning, she drove her
children to IT’SUGAR and
bought some pockys and the
game BeanBoozled, then drove
through Grand Army Plaza so
they could look out the window
at the celebrations of the Biden
victory. Then, she drove home,
where she taped a “Daily” pod-
cast episode and filed yet an-
other article.
“Nothing about any of this is
normal, including, like, how
much attention is on me,” she
told me. “I will not miss that.”Maggie Haberman has consistently painted a portrait of a man who is both smarter and less competent than his
enemies believe. He “will continue to say the things he’s saying as he walks out the door,” she said on Saturday.BENJAMIN NORMAN FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESEnd of Trump’s Term
Caps a Journalist’s Run
‘I get high anxiety
most days wondering
what she will break
that I should have
had.’
Jonathan Swan of Axios.FROM FIRST BUSINESS PAGE