Emily Jashinsky joins this week’s podcast to talk about the red and blue divide in America. With polarization at an all-time high, we discuss the media’s role as well as what we can expect in a Joe Biden presidency. Is he really here to unify?  

Emily Jashinsky is a culture editor at The Federalist. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining the Examiner, Emily was the spokeswoman for Young America’s Foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs, including “Fox News Sunday,” “Media Buzz,” and “The McLaughlin Group.” Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Emily also serves as director of the National Journalism Center. Originally from Wisconsin, she is a graduate of George Washington University.

Transcript

Beverly:

And welcome to She Think Podcast, where you’re allowed to think for yourself. I’m your host, Beverly Hallberg and on today’s episode, Emily Jashinsky joins us to talk about the red and blue divide in America. With polarization at an all-time high, we’ll delve into the media’s role in causing division in this country, as well as what we can expect during a Joe Biden presidency. Is he really here to unify? But before we bring her on, a little bit more about Emily.

Emily Jashinsky is a culture editor at The Federalist. She previously covered politics as a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner. Prior to joining The Examiner, Emily was a spokeswoman for Young America’s foundation. She’s interviewed leading politicians and entertainers and appeared regularly as a guest on major television news programs including Fox News Sunday and Media Buzz. Her work has been featured in the Wall Street Journal, The New York Post, Real Clear Politics, and more. Finally, Emily serves as director of the National Journalism Center. Emily, a pleasure to have you on She Thinks today.

Emily:

Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be here truly.

Beverly:

And there’s so much I want to dive into with you. You cover culture, you cover pop culture as well. You have been covering the Donald Trump presidency for the past four years. Before we get into what we can expect in the next four years with President Biden, what was it like for you just generally and broadly to cover the former president, President Trump, especially since he came from pop culture. He is a pop culture icon and here he became president. What was that like for you?

Emily:

It was overwhelming because every single day something happened or at least it felt like something happened, and many days, it felt like 10 things happened that sort of directly related to my beat, which is understanding our political happenings in the context of our culture and specifically our pop culture. And so it really was overwhelming because it felt like every single day it was like an explosion of elements of this larger conversation. So it was like everything was happening every single day. It wasn’t the type of thing where you would spend a month probing one particular issue or particular issues as they cropped up. Every day it was a race to digest and understand what’s happening in this context.

And that’s unusual in politics because politics and particularly political media is so often focused on the horse race on who’s going to win New Hampshire and why? Or what’s going to with this bill in Congress and why? And Trump’s presidency was just jammed packed with cultural fodder and cultural change and even pop cultural change. So it was overwhelming because you have to digest these things on a daily basis or on an hourly basis while also remaining grounded and anchored and not tripping over yourself to have the hot take or the best opinion, but also doing your readers a service, which is bringing informed perspectives and reasonable arguments. that’s a long way of saying it was very overwhelming.

Beverly:

I think we’re all exhausted. It was just a four years between Donald Trump making so much news himself, but also those who wanted to take him down and going through impeachment and just the Russian hoax and all of this, it was a lot. And one of the elements that I found so fascinating about his presidency is that prior to him becoming president, he was thought of so well by Hollywood. Here he had, of course, his famous TV show. He had been in movies. I just saw Home Alone over the Christmas again, of course, he’s in Home Alone. And so there was this major shift of him being somebody who was thought of well, maybe you mock him because of his hair, but he was somebody who was in the Hollywood circles to somebody who became this very hated man by the left, by Hollywood. What was that like to see the shift? And what do you think the main cause of that shift was?

Emily:

It was odd. And I don’t mean to have naturally fact-check you, of course. But Donald Trump was in Home Alone 2, very key decision.

Beverly:

The second one. Yes. Got to get that straight.

Emily:

He has a great little appearance in there, which was actually organized in exchange for them filming at the Plaza, which at the time he owned. And that goes to how close he was and how closely knit he was into these Hollywood circles. The Apprentice was a Mark Burnett show and he had great relationships. One of the best windows into how really ingrained in Hollywood Donald Trump was is that he had a Comedy Central roast. That’s really something they only give to A-listers, it’s definitely something they give to polarizing A-listers. Roseanne, Joan Rivers, Rob Lowe, I guess Rob Lowe is not all that polarizing, not anymore at least. But he had this big celebrity roast him. And they usually say, we only roast the ones we love and that is really true.

That’s been true over the course of Comedy Central’s roast series. And so that tells you what you needed to know is that a lot of people wanted to be really close to Donald Trump because I think really a large part of Celebrity Apprentice was a huge vehicle for people like Lisa Rinna, for instance, to revive their careers. So some of these A-listers who are washed up, B-listers who want to promote a product, so they want to get their name back into the media and have the paparazzi getting them into magazines and blogs and all that good stuff. The Celebrity Apprentice really was a vehicle for a career revival and so people wanted to be close to Donald Trump and the Trumps for that reason.

The show was super successful and it did a lot of people a lot of favors. So you can see where the transactional nature of the relationship was. He’s supremely entertaining. It was hard for Saturday Night Live and everyone to even mock him because he was just so funny. But from the moment he came down the golden escalator in June of 2015, Hollywood’s relationship with him, most of Hollywood… He’s had more celebrity support than pretty much any republican politician ever in recent memory, but most of Hollywood split from him right away because of his comments on illegal immigration.

So, it was really right from the get-go. They realized the media was putting him through this filter of a far-right politician, even though he had been behind things like the birther rumor or whatever for a matter of years, but it wasn’t really until he got the political media spotlight, and the political media cast him as a far-right fringe figure that Hollywood immediately divorced because it’s bad for publicity, it’s bad for their images, and there’s now the most important trend in this country is how our newsrooms and boardrooms and writers’ rooms have been overtaken by the fringe, progressive ideology that percolated for years in academia. And so after that arrived in those newsrooms and writers’ rooms and boardrooms, as a celebrity, it would just be too toxic to touch Donald Trump.

Beverly:

Someone who I think is probably happy he’s not going to have a second term, I’ve wondered about this, is his wife, Melania Trump. I just have this feeling that she’s glad to go back to whatever normal is after this. She was ridiculed up and down the entire four years. We’ve talked about it on the show, but when you take a look at how she was covered versus Michelle Obama, what’s your overwhelming take on just how she was treated during her time?

Emily:

It’s outrageous, and it’s a really crystal-clear illustration of media bias. It’s just kind of perfect. Melania Trump is an immigrant who has an interesting backstory. Made her way and achieved personal success and is stunningly beautiful to the extent that that’s relevant to media coverage, it certainly was under Michelle Obama. I hope somebody writes a good book about this because there’s an easy way to write a really bad book about this, and we’ll get a lot of hot takes on this.

There’s so much very thinly source gossip that circulates about Melania Trump, and we know that that was obviously, especially in the early days of this White House, former President Trump’s White House that was a daily occurrence. We had to deal with this barely substantiated gossip that was making its way into the pages of the New York Times with other major corporate media outlets, but Melania Trump was really a target of that, and some of it has to do with the infighting in the White House, but mostly what it has to do with is that she’s married to Donald Trump.

So, all of her other positive attributes, her beauty or her fashion sense, her background, are all irrelevant to the corporate media and to critics of Donald Trump and to the left more broadly, because she is supportive of Donald Trump. And so that doesn’t just apply to Melania Trump, that applies to just about every Trump supporter who is especially now, but for the past four or five years has been dismissed immediately reflexively as a deplorable, or as a racist, or a bigot simply because they support Donald Trump and they could have many reasons for doing that, that has absolutely nothing to do with bigotry. And so I think as you said, it’s exhausting.

I imagine it’s been especially exhausting for Melania. I don’t have many good sources in Melania world, to be honest with you, but my read of the situation is that she’s really supportive of her husband’s politics and the leaked audio that CNN got that was captured by her former friend, which it was such a-

Beverly:

I hated it.

Emily:

The fact that it’s way into the media. She’s someone who probably knew, she’s not stupid. She knew people were taping her. She knew that there were possibilities with leaks, et cetera, et cetera. So I think probably she’s personally exhausted by all of it, but I don’t think her politics have been changed or worn down at all.

Beverly:

I want to get back to just coverage of Trump before we move on to Trump voters because I do think that’s where the media attacks are going now. And I know you were even at the rally that the president held a couple of weeks ago now, when tragically after that rally rioters broke into the Capitol. So I want to talk about your experience. But curious of the media landscape right now as Joe Biden has taken office.

So, with a Donald Trump, you used the word, he’s entertaining. Whether you loved him or hated him, he was great on TV. He knows how to play to an audience. I would even say the best thing that happened to Jim Acosta was Donald Trump because Jim Acosta was able to become the celebrity journalist trying to take on Donald Trump. So even though many in the media hated Donald Trump, it did give them an avenue to boost their own profile, to get lots of ratings. Their coverage, whatever their narrative may be, at least he gave them something to cover.

We already know that probably the coverage of Joe Biden is going to be different. We’ve seen that in the election, seen that during the transition time and the questions they don’t ask him. How they hide stories related to Hunter Biden, for example. What do you think the media are going to do in a Joe Biden presidency when frankly, Joe Biden is not the most entertaining person in front of the camera. It’s not a character flaw, but it’s just the reality. Very few people have an entertaining quality like Donald Trump. What do you think is going to happen to ratings and what are they going to do to try to generate more ratings for their networks?

Emily:

This is an absolutely crucial point. I have the misfortune, but also the privilege of covering this stuff every day and following it very closely as you do. And I have to say, the most crucial point for people… the most crucial lens to see this next era of media coverage through is that they have really definitively decided to reject objectivity. Now, some of them do that explicitly, some of them do that under the guise of objective journalism, which is worse in my opinion. So somebody like Jim Acosta, doesn’t make the argument that it’s necessary to drop his objectivity to cover Trump, he pretends he’s still objective and CNN ran those famous apple or banana commercials over the course of the Trump administration in which they bragged about being able to distinguish between fact and opinion, and then spent the entire Trump presidency disguising opinion as fact.

But a lot of the media has actually arrived at this intellectual argument that it is impossible to be objective when it comes to matters of bigotry and when it comes to racism and sexism. The problem is that they define racism and sexism in a way that implicates all Republicans and even moderate Democrats in racism and bigotry and sexism. So what we have is a large continuance of the media that believes that they must be… This is actually the dominant view and there are still some old school journalists who wish that their publications would stick to the facts and believe that the country would be better for it, and the country would be a more harmonious place and the red versus blue wouldn’t be so painful right now.

But this is a really important thing to understand. It’s that the dominant opinion in journalism going forward is that there is no objectivity when it comes to basically cover the Republican Party because they’ve accepted this lie and this very false argument that the Republican Party is dominated by bigots. And so going forward, that’s going to show up in all of the coverage. Some of it is going to be explicit,, some of it is going to say, I can’t see a fair journalist when it comes to republicans because they are necessarily racist.

Some of it is going to be the opposite. Some of it’s going to say, “Hey, we’re just calling balls and strikes here while that journalist or network believes that republicans are all necessarily racist.” So this creates a really, really complicated situation for the public going forward. It’s going to sow further distrust in the media as an institution. It’s going to continue dividing us because people are going to see every day the glaring hypocrisy of the way the press treats Biden and treats his administration in comparison to the Trump administration.

Trump’s ongoing presence in the Republican Party is going to continue to highlight the hypocrisy, it’s going to continue to see these high-profile wealthy, insulated, beltway journalists insulting a wide swath of the country. So I think we’re headed into an increasingly dark period, and I don’t mean to sound pessimistic, but it is true that that belief has been adopted, and it’s the dominant opinion in the media. And so there’s really no positive place to go from there.

Beverly:

A common question that I get from friends who say, where do I go to just get straight news? And that seems to be a question a lot of people want to know, it’s where do I go? And I think one of the things we have seen, and there are positive to this, but there is this ability to choose where we get our news. How do I want to consume it? Where do I want to go? But what that tends to do is then people just getting news from what they like to hear. So if I have this perspective, I’m going to go here and it’s fascinating to me to talk to people who have a completely different perspective of an issue that’s going on because it’s covered in completely different ways. So when you talk about this divide and how polarization is going to increase with the media, does it get to a point where people just tune it out because they realize that’s there, or are most Americans consuming news and thinking whatever outlets they get is giving them the full picture?

Emily:

I think part of the problem is that people are in both camps and I don’t regret to the people who are turning out the news at all, I fully understand that. And I also don’t like that the people who have no idea who to trust, so they put their faith in Donald Trump, and that’s something that we’ve seen a lot of Trump supporters say, and I talked to a lot of Trump’s supporters on January 6th when that rally turned into a riot, and a lot of the peaceful people who were there on their way down from the president’s speech at the Ellipse to the Capitol, they all told me they really don’t even know who to trust anymore and so they believe what Donald Trump says.

And again, I don’t blame anybody for thinking that way at all, because you would have to put an enormous amount of time and effort into figuring out how to read the news anymore. And even as somebody who does this professionally, I’ve struggled with that sometimes because outlets that you can trust aren’t right 100% or even 80% of the time. So it’s an enormously difficult undertaking, and I think that’s at least part of the problem is… I have a friend [Soga Injeti 00:17:51] who’s the host of Rising on and he points out that this fetishization of objectivity in the media did not always exist in American politics, that we used to, as many people know, have very part as an outlet just bickering back and forth, and the public, which is smart and should be trusted to understand the news would just decide based on knowing the biases of the different publications and writers, what to believe pass through the media and figure out where the fact was in the center of it.

And so as mass media came about with technological advances, including the rise of television and radio and magazines and all of that good stuff, we started to fetishize objectivity because those channels had to appeal to a wide audience. They couldn’t just appeal to partisans for the most part. So it’s not impossible that if we push the press to be open about their biases, that we get to actually a better place. If you have a left and a right media, folks who want to be informed can take the effort to figure out what’s right and what’s wrong. I think the ongoing problem is we have a media where a chunk of it still pretends that they are objective and in some cases believes that they are objective, but they aren’t. And to me, that’s the huge problem going forward.

Beverly:

And as you just said, you were in Washington, D.C. with Trump supporters on that day when the riots did break out on Capitol Hill, first of all, what was it like being on the ground? And second, how do you think many in the media did in covering that story fairly, especially in comparison to the other rights that you had covered earlier that year, the Black Lives Matter riots?

Emily:

It was really upsetting. I was on the West side of the Capitol where the scaffolding was set up for the inauguration of Joe Biden, which a lot of people probably saw videos and pictures of people haven’t climbed up to the top of, and it was a windy day, so it was shaking, even outside the building seemed dangerous enough, but I was watching people shove their way up the staircase to get into the building. Hundreds of people just shoving onto that staircase into the building. I saw people climbing the outside wall of the Capitol. It was really, really chaotic. It was really just nasty and negative, and it was very different from the crowd that was gathered at the speech just about 45 minutes earlier. It took them about 45 minutes to make their way down Constitution Avenue.

I talked to a lot of people who were there because they were just sick of being called deplorable and they trusted Donald Trump, and they genuinely believed the election was stolen, and they wanted to come to Washington to be a part of the movement to solve that problem. And so it was infuriating to see Americans infiltrate the Capitol building violently, and it was really, really hard to watch actually.

And so, I think the media coverage, there are a lot of journalists who I might not agree with and might think do a really terrible job on a daily basis who did a great job inside the Capitol building and in the crowd. It’s a hard thing to do, but they were in a dangerous situation and I think they did a good job. I was watching ABC News’s 24 hours special on the situation and they filtered it all really through the social justice lens of how the police treated rioters at the White House or what they refer to as peaceful protestors at the White House and in D.C. and Beverly, you still lived in D.C. when a lot of this was going on, as you’ve written about.

I was there covering it, and ABC didn’t even when they were sort of flashing back between the Capitol riot and the White House demonstrations, they didn’t even mention that Antifa was trying to pull down a statue of Andrew Jackson and that’s why the police had to come in and use chemical irritants to push the line back. That literally was not even mentioned in this ABC special and they said that they were rioting in downtown D.C., which shattered… It caused so much money worth of damage, shattered windows, shattered buildings, stole tons of dollars worth of merchandise. They literally said that it was sporadic and they totally downplayed that, it was only mentioned once.

And so I think what we’re going to see going forward is the media will treat the events of January 6th rightfully as a watershed moment and a really historically painful and historically tragic day in American history, but they’re going to filter it through the social justice lens and I think the ABC news special is a really early indication of how it’s going to be treated by the corporate press going forward.

Beverly:

And something you do cover when you talk about social justice, you do cover the issue of just woke ideology and silencing speech, and we’re seeing a lot of that in social media. Big tech has been a big focus with them taking actions against Parler, for example, the conservative or the free speech competitor to Twitter. Where do you see things going with a democratically led house and Senate and presidency when it comes to big tech, especially since many of them are donors of or were donors of Joe Biden?

Emily:

Absolutely. The tech industry is reviled by a lot of democrats in the same way that it’s reviled by a lot of republicans. They don’t have a lot of bipartisan goodwill on Capitol Hill anymore, but democrats want them to be more censorious. They want Facebook and Twitter to be more censorious whereas republicans think it’s outrageous that they’re censorious basically at all, with the exception of some really obvious cases. And they do that with such imbalance, it’s constantly… Every single day, there are multiple examples of tech treating conservatives differently than leftists. And so I think that’s a huge element of all of this is that when I talk about how woke ideology has moved from the classroom into boardrooms, newsrooms, and writer’s rooms, boardrooms is really the key element of that because these tech CEOs and executives have amassed an incredible, a truly incredible amount of power over our lives. And it’s an amount of power that we couldn’t have fathomed when Mark Zuckerberg was talking about just a decade ago, how his Facebook was going to make the world a happier, more connected harmonious place.

And so when you have an industry that has so much power over the American people and daily power, by the way, too. This isn’t just some power that’s exercised every Tuesday when we go to ex-business, this is something that happens on a minute by minute, second by second basis is tech is exerting power over all of our lives and in an enormous way and you have an industry like that with that level of power and influence that basically holds the perspective that anybody slightly to the right of Alexandria Ocasio Cortez is bigoted. Well, that’s a huge problem. And again, in the same way, that perspective infiltration and grip on the corporate media is going to sow further, deeper, more painful divisions, I think the tech industry’s adoption of that idea is going to do the very same and working in concert, that’s where things start to feel truly hopeless and I’m not trying to be… Nothing is ever hopeless, but it does feel that way.

Beverly:

I get you. There’s a big fight ahead, that’s for sure. And so since we’re ending on a dark note, I thought it would ask one final question to leave on a brighter note. There aren’t many people I can ask this question to, but you were a fellow lover of reality TV, and we both watch The Real Housewives. I’m not sure all the series that you watch, but I watch a decent amount. I am not enjoying the most recent episodes of The Real Housewives because they’re so focused on learning about COVID. So we’re going like 10 months back. I don’t want to relive COVID, I don’t want to relive that. And are you finding the same thing? I wanted the escape, I don’t want to see you deal with COVID. Am I the only one?

Emily:

No, you’re not the only one at all. And I’m so glad you’ve asked this question. I knew where this was going. I was so grateful. So that’s a huge thing and it gets to. The central reason a lot of people watch The Real Housewives is really for luxury and to have the juxtaposition of luxury with their misbehavior and their personal tragedies because it’s a super interesting tension. But yes, when you have The Real Housewives of Orange County locked in their houses and filming on their iPhones and they’re in their sweats and unhappy and miserable, and not even together, and they’re isolated, it’s just such an unpleasant reminder of the uncertainty. It’s hard to laugh at because they’re consumed by the same uncertainty and anxiety that all of us were consumed with. And that’s just not what anybody who watches The Real Housewives experience. I don’t know if you’re watching Southern Charm, but it’s really the same thing on Southern Charm.

Beverly:

I am. Same thing.

Emily:

It’s just like, I don’t need this.

Beverly:

I’m like, it’s already a hard time. We get it, we get it. We’re trying to escape from it.

Emily:

I totally agree with you. I totally agree with you.

Beverly:

Well, I so appreciate you coming on. And I think this is an important part too. I appreciate your writing that focuses not just on politics, but also the pop culture aspect, because so many young people, many people much younger than me, even people younger than you, they’re consuming news in a completely different way, and I know you’re always up on those trends as well and what they’re watching and how they’re using social media. So thank you so much for your objectivity as you report and bringing us the news. We appreciate it, and we appreciate you joining us today.

Emily:

Absolutely. I appreciate you and all that you do, and this is a great podcast.

Beverly:

And thank you for joining us. Before you go, Independent Women’s Forum does want you to know that we rely on the generosity of supporters like you, and investment in IWF fuels our efforts to enhance freedom, opportunity, and wellbeing for all Americans. please consider making a small donation to IWF by visiting iwf.org\donate. That is iwf.org\donate. And last, if you enjoyed this episode of She Thinks, do leave us a rating or review on iTunes, it does help. Also, we’d love it if you shared this episode and let your friends know where they can find more She Thinks episodes. From all of us here at Independent Women’s Forum thanks for listening.