The age of consultancy journalism

In a presidential campaign notable for its lack of substantive debate, a serious citizen needs to look far and wide to pierce Donald Trump’s blather and Kamala Harris’s bromides — or to find anything that might resemble real political information. So I quickly reached for my wallet last week when I happened upon the New Yorker’s newsstand edition. The first cover line and subhead caught my eye: “The Democrats’ Left Flank: in the swing state of Michigan, antiwar voters want a commitment from Kamala Harris on Gaza. Are their tactics a gift to Trump?”

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has been top of mind in the campaign press corps all year. Before the Democratic National Convention, Harris picked a gentile as her running mate — Tim Walz, who had no associations with Israel — over the possibly too-pro-Israel Jewish governor of Pennsylvania, Josh Shapiro. But Democratic leaders refused to allow a Palestinian to address the delegates in Chicago, even after journalists discovered that many Arabs live in and around Detroit. I wanted to know what the New Yorker had discovered in the Wolverine State: was Harris’s careful avoidance of straight talk about the Biden administration’s Gaza policy (supporting Israel’s massive onslaught while calling incessantly for a ceasefire) going to cost her the election because of one constituency in one state where pollsters are calling the race a dead heat?

As it turns out, all I really needed to read was the cover copy and the piece’s last paragraph. Andrew Marantz’s story was just another example of a new and proliferating genre of reportage that I call consultancy journalism. In such articles, the reporter does a certain amount of actual reporting, but mainly in the service of a client, not the readers; in this case the client was the Democratic Party. Instead of “we report, you decide” (to borrow from Fox News), I got “we do a quick survey, render a few illustrative, sometimes pleasing scenes, and make a vague strategic recommendation that carefully hedges so as not to endanger our consultant’s contract by being too opinionated — or worse, wrong.”

To be fair, Marantz’s article wasn’t a bad read — some consultants are lively writers. For a peg on which to hang the story, he describes what appears to be a mild disagreement on Gaza policy between the retired Michigan congressman Sandy Levin, a Jewish Democrat forgiving of Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Biden, and his son Andy, briefly his father’s successor in Congress, who supported an “uncommitted” slate of delegates in the Michigan Democratic primary election as a protest against the administration’s Gaza policy. Andy lost his House seat in 2022 after he introduced legislation supporting the two-state solution and criticizing illegal Israeli settlements, which set the powerful pro-Israel lobby into motion: AIPAC responded to Andy’s heresy by supporting a non-Jewish, “more hawkish” primary opponent who defeated him.

There’s no bitterness expressed in the piece; we even see Sandy and Andy hugging each other toward the end of it. Sandy directs a “patient smile” at his son and says, “I’ve been fighting radicalism my whole career, on the right and the left.” He claims to prefer “consensus.” Andy, himself no radical, concludes the piece with this reflection: “I accuse [Dad] of being too cautious, and he says I’m too impetuous. And maybe he’s right. He spent thirty-six years in Congress, and I only lasted four.” Good career advice for a future officeholder, but more importantly, reassuring news for Democratic Party professionals and the Harris campaign. Even a left-leaning, meanly targeted congressman sympathetic to Palestinians judges success by longevity in office — the party’s own measure — not by winning or losing elections on a moral issue. For Marantz, it’s win-win. If Harris wins, the reporter-consultant gets credit for frightening off peaceniks and encouraging respect for party protocol and hierarchy. If she loses to the monster Trump, it’s the fault of party “radicals” blindly wedded to a single issue. Meanwhile, in Marantz’s strangely understated summary, “the war in Gaza — grisly, relentless, and surprisingly persistent in the news” drags on.

Mainstream Republicans also like consultancy journalism. The queen of the genre is the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan, a former speechwriter who worked for Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush, though lately she prefers to advise Kamala Harris on marketing tactics. Her language is pure consultese: “Were I a Harris supporter I would be concerned about these things… she still hasn’t given voters a satisfying sense of what she is about, what the purpose of her political career is. She hasn’t fleshed out her political intent — what she stands for, what she won’t abide, what she means to establish, what she won’t let happen. What is her essential mission? Is it national ‘repair,’ is it to ‘stabilize’ an uncertain country, is it ‘relaunch’?”

I’ve read and heard many pitches for branding and rebranding products and companies, and this one shouts loudly: hire me, Peggy Noonan, for the Harris campaign, or at least bring me into your inner circle to answer the questions posed in my consultants’ white-paper. Not that Noonan would rule out consulting for Trump, though he’s the sort of businessman who dismisses consultants as money and time-wasters. “If I were a Trump supporter,” she writes, “I would be worried about what Trump supporters have worried about since he came down the escalator, that he is squandering it away every day… He’s selling $100,000 watches and having Truth Social meltdowns, free-associating about movies and dribbling away arguments.” Call in Peggy — sometimes even a very stable genius needs new talking points.

At the New York Times, consultancy journalism has been honed to a science — so much so that the paper’s political reporters seem to spend most of their time interviewing other political consultants, as well as the odd computer scientist, since professional consultants like to use computer-generated statistics. In a recent front-page story about Trump’s “rambling speeches,” the Times revealed that its own computer analysis had found that the Republican candidate’s speeches were running an average of eighty-two minutes, compared with forty-five minutes in 2016. “Proportionately,” wrote a pair of reporters, “he uses 13 percent more all-or-nothing terms like ‘always’ and ‘never’ than he did eight years ago, which some experts consider a sign of advancing age.”

The day before, the paper’s lead story on the front page discussed “a toss-up election” that had Harris and Trump “digging in for ‘trench warfare.’” A team of three reporters queried “a national Republican consultant and ad buyer” named Nick Everhart, who responded in the fluently obvious verbiage of consultant non-speak: “Advertising and ground game operations are inundating all these states to find the thousands of voters who will determine the winners. Every week, every day, every minute, every second matters when a campaign is this close with a clear inflection point on the horizon.”

What has happened to American journalism? Why would a reporter or columnist on a self-respecting newspaper or magazine want to sound like a consultant? The answer lies in the collapse of the journalism business, ravaged by Google and Facebook’s theft of the advertising market. Career advancement for most contemporary journalists is a mirage, so the only way up is out. They can’t hope to emulate Seymour Hersh, Maureen Dowd or Bob Woodward — well-paid stars from earlier generations — so they emulate David Axelrod, once a star political reporter on the Chicago Tribune, who switched to political consulting when he was only thirty. This was a far-sighted move that took him all the way to the Obama White House, with many lucrative consulting contracts before and after. Learning the tricks of the trade in what’s left of the news business is the best path forward to hanging out your shingle with a sign: “We consult, you pay.”