Episode description:

Welcome to In Reality, the podcast about truth, disinformation, and the media with Eric Schurenberg, long-time business journalist and executive, now the founder of the Alliance for Trust in Media.

What has it meant to be a professional news journalist during the past 10 years? In an era of gleeful hostility to the press, how do reporters cope? How do they avoid becoming the story? How do they handle unprecedented fear for their own safety, and the challenges of covering an administration that sometimes demands followers refuse to believe their own eyes?

Our guest today is Steve Peoples, senior political writer for the Associated Press and a 14-year veteran of presidential campaigns. Few reporters have a clearer view of how the relationship between presidents and the press has transformed in these hyper-partisan years.

We recorded this live at a session of my virtual University of Chicago course, Presidents vs. the Press.

Our focus in this class was on the coverage of President Biden, which we are still processing 10 months after he left office, in particular how the press missed the signs of his cognitive decline. Steve is candid about the cause of that failure and about the job ahead for journalists in the age of Biden’s successor, Donald Trump: We cover the dangers of groupthink in the newsroom, the pressure journalists face to skew coverage to maintain access, and why fact-checking in real time is now a core responsibility of the press.

We hope you enjoy the episode…

 

Transcript

 

Eric (00:06.082)
And here’s Steve Peoples. Tell us a little bit, just a little background about you. So, you’ve been covering a number of campaigns, a number of administrations. And just kind of in a general sense, how has the role of the AP in particular and the media in general changed over the course of your long career?

Steve (02:12.79)
My goodness, that is a big question. Well, just a little background about myself. And again, thank you for having me. It’s great to be with you all. I feel like we have an obligation to share our experience with the public when given the opportunity. It’s a huge part of our job. it’s nice to be able to pull the curtain back a little bit and just talk about journalism. I feel like the press is part of the story now in a way that it just never has been before for my entire career. I’ve been a reporter since college, worked my way up and I won’t go too deep here, in regional newspapers, so I’ve covered state houses and city councils and worked my way up. The AP hired me in 2011 to be the Northeastern political correspondent. They moved me up to New Hampshire to cover the New Hampshire presidential primary that year. There was a competition, there was a primary on the Republican side, primarily President Obama was running for a second term. I don’t know if any of you guys have been to those early states, but the access is incredible to candidates. You can walk right up to folks in living rooms and backyard barbecues and things like that. And so that’s kind of…

…how I got into presidential politics, started covering the Romney campaign, hopped on his plane in 2012. Different kind of Republican, different Republican party, but still there was a lot, know, it’s always been in vogue, especially on the Republican side to hate on the press or certainly dislike the press, you know? And so I’ve been kind of the focus of… politicians ire and disdain for a long time. It’s really part of the job. And after that moved to DC, back to DC, where I covered some of the Obama campaign or the Obama presidency, a second term. I was on the Hill for a bit in Congress, covering that stuff. But really, I’ve always been focused on presidential politics.

(04:21.728)
It’s always just been the most interesting to me. It’s also, think, mattered the most. Right. So I was just, I think one thing that a lot of journalists have in common is we’re just drawn to the biggest stories, big, you know, big stories. And certainly presidential politics is one of the biggest stories in the world. Right. So, did some of the, Hillary, Hillary stuff then, and then the Trump era began. Right. And, and so much changed. We can talk for a long, long time about, you know, about that, but

My biggest takeaway too are one, again, we really became part of the story that the enemy of the people stuff started then, right? We had never had a presidential candidate, a presidential nominee, certainly in this country, openly using language like that in almost every rally. know, Trump before he was the president would call us the enemy of the people. And we saw, you know, some spates of violence start to pop up. My organization and others started to talk a lot more seriously about security. You know, we can get into this more, but we’ve had very serious conversations and more and more. This is the second time around, but about whether or not to wear bulletproof vests covering events that the kind of thing that would never even cross my mind, right? Became a real part of the job, you know, and being in environments where we were instructed to not identify ourselves as journalists, to hide credentials, know, try not to carry. The camera folks had a real tough time, right? But for me being a print reporter, was relatively easy to, you know, hide what I was doing at times. So we could talk a whole lot about that, and hopefully we will.

Eric:
I think that that is kind of a fundamental change, feeling like you could do your job and everyone understood that your job was part of American democracy to feeling like doing your job was actually dangerous and that you were in danger from fellow Americans just for doing your job. That’s pretty foundational. Let’s switch to Biden now. some of the reading we did suggested that his administration, at least at first, was greeted with a huge sigh of relief that after the open hostility, the enemy, the people stuff that Biden was seen as a real breath of fresh air. that was that true? And if it was, how long did it last?

Steve:
Great question. I think it’s absolutely true that just the temperature in Washington was turned down dramatically, at least for you know, in terms of the relationship of the press and the administration. We, I mean, part of what they ran against what he ran against was this chaos, this this division, right, things like that. So I think he and his team did come in wanting to have a good relationship or at least not a violent relationship with with the press. And so yes, I think I think we did welcome that things went back to normal something I didn’t talk about this but something I love about the AP is that we’ve always had a well respected position in the White House press corps right so we have up until now we we’ve had the front middle seat and press briefings reserved for us. We would always we would always get the first question at press conferences.

We would actually get the last question at press conferences when the press secretary would be going on for a while. It would be up to one of my colleagues or me at times to say, thank you. You know, says whoever the press secretary was and that would end it. So there was just like a real kind of respect for the press in general, but especially AP.

Speaker 1 (08:24.438)
It kind of represented a whole coalition of all the newsrooms that are here.

Exactly right. It’s exactly right. Yeah, we are a nonprofit. Folks might not know that. And it can be a little confusing these days, even explaining what we are, but we are a cooperative. So we have news organizations around the world subscribe, you know, pay different, you know, packet, you know, for different packages and access our content. Right. So in theory, you know, we have pools, pool situations where reporters will go on events and share their material.

We are by nature a large pool. Everything that I write or do or say is meant to be shared with a very, very large broad audience in America and across the world, right? So yeah, going back to Biden. So yes, I mean, absolutely. It was a welcome change. the temperature was down. There was a mutual respect, I think, that we hadn’t had. And of course, it never lasts long.

Right. Of course, it never, by nature, our job is to ask very difficult questions and be adversarial, right? With regardless of the administration, right? Like I’m, I’m a big part of my job is to write things that people don’t want me to write. Right. And so no matter what the beat is, the white house or city councils, that, that doesn’t change. And so, and of course, the, the, the most dramatic shift was just access to, to the principle.

I mean, nothing’s more important in my line of work than having access to the person in charge and being able to ask the person questions. Trump got a lot of criticism, but one thing he was not was shy, right? So he was constantly in front of us taking questions, no matter where he was. And people might not like what he said, or certainly there was a lot of fact checking about the veracity of his statements, but he was there and we had access to him.

Speaker 2 (10:17.814)
And very early on, it became clear. And we saw this during the campaign as well, you know, on the campaign trail. President Biden was just not made available very often, you know. And so I think it took a while for us to realize or to be bothered by that. As time went on and then other media jumped on that narrative, of Fox had a countdown, right, of how long he had not done a press conference and things. so it became more and more of an issue for

the White House and became something we paid more and more attention to, right?

Before we get into the issues of, of course we know the reason that access was limited and we’ll get into that in a second, but I’d like to talk about kind of one of the points that other coverage not about his acuity made was that he did arguably a terrible job at selling the accomplishments of his administration. Why do you think that kind of just did not get traction with…

Eric (11:19.618)
people’s perception or the amount of newspaper column inches devoted to it.

Yeah. Again, I think it’s such a big question. says it speaks a lot to our media environment, right? In the way that we are segmented as never before, where people go off to their own bubbles and can choose their news. And I mean, I’ve written a million stories about message, you know, parties messaging problems. It’s been this theme for, you know, a long time. Democrats just can’t message. I’m not convinced that that’s even the case on this.

But honestly, mean, President Biden clearly was not the best salesman, right? He wasn’t a bad salesman. know, he was likable. would do, you know, to some, would, you know, make these carefully scripted appearances. His team was pretty good at getting him, especially on local TV and whatnot. I think it just might be a little old fashioned thinking that you can show up and talk about all the good things you’re doing and have it breakthrough. mean, almost it’s the bar that the bar had shifted after President Trump’s presidency. Right. And so up until 2016, infrastructure week historically had been kind of a big deal because it meant billions of dollars to your communities and things like. But like after four years of Trump, infrastructure week is just like the punch line of a joke. Right. And so President Biden is out across the country talking about all this…

…like real meaningful legislation. And I just I’m just not sure that folks wanted to hear it, you know. And so it it I’m not a political strategist. Right. So there’s other people who get paid to do that. But we certainly covered those events. We were there. He was on TV. We put him on TV. We asked him questions to the extent he was out. And, you know, endless fact sheets from the White House about, you know, everything that they had done. And it just and it just I think both because of the media environment.

Speaker 2 (13:24.794)
And just this this bar had shifted. It was incredibly difficult. And this this, of course, is also something people blame us for. Right. And some of it’s probably justified. You know, but if I had a dollar for every time, you know, I need it done in the White House or someone like that would say, like, like, why aren’t you writing about this? And the answer is we are, you know, just once you’re reading it, people, you know, it’s was very, very…

…Especially at AP, we really do write all of it. It all goes out on the wire. So anyway.

Eric:
Let me, let me shift to another kind of fulcrum point or inflection point rather in Biden’s administration, which was the withdrawal from Afghanistan. So this withdrawal and the plan and the date and everything were set by a treaty conducted under Trump’s rule. But the execution was seen as a disaster and it resulted among other things with the death of 13 American servicemen his approval rating never recovered from that. It’s plunged. It had been high. Do you think press coverage of how bad that was, was overwrought or did it not go far enough? And, I wonder if you could speculate about why the decline in the approval ratings seemed permanent after that.

Steve:
I think part of it, just like the context here is this tribalism, right? And then the divisions in our country. So there’s going to be 40 % once he gets office, 40 % of America was not going to like the guy no matter what they much and probably higher than right. So we’re talking about people in his own party and, and the slice of independence. And if you talk to pollsters, they’ll tell you like, there’s, there’s some debate about whether independence even exists, right? mean, because a lot of people have leadings if you dig down into it. So I think that conditions were ripe for…

…for him to be viewed unpopularly or certainly to have a tough challenge to maintain his high numbers. There was that relief once he came in that the chaos had calmed down, right? And so I think the country took a big breath. And so there was some relatively high approval numbers. Afghanistan really, I think was the beginning of the end for him, like polling or not.

I’ve personally experienced, you know, there was a guy up in New Hampshire who I got to know really well, Steve Shurtleff. was the Democratic Speaker of the House in New Hampshire. He was Joe Biden’s longest supporter. Joe Biden’s run for president, you know, three times, right? So he’s been around for a while. This guy had been with Joe Biden from the beginning, you know, and it was right around this time that I would, part of my job is to call people in these early voting states and check in with them, see what they’re thinking he was one of the first people to say publicly, like, I just I cannot support Joe Biden anymore because of this is long before even the acuity stuff started to emerge that he was a veteran, you know, older guy. And and so I think on multiple levels, the numbers never recovered nationally. But there was a real tangible harm that he caused among his closest supporters, right? Which surprised me, honestly. I didn’t expect to hear that. So,

Speaker 1 (17:03.502)
Yeah, I can, I can, can imagine, especially if the, if the idea was that the chaos has now ended and we now have competent people back in the administration. And then we have this great example of chaos re-emerging and it’s seemingly incompetent operation unfolding with tragic results. Let me switch back to the campaign trail, which during COVID and given the way Biden chose to campaign wasn’t…

…of a trail actually. But one of the things that the Chapper book claims is that Biden had good days and bad days. And there were moments when, you know, you could easily convince yourself that the guy was sharp enough to, you know, run the country again. And I wonder if you ever noticed that, if you felt like, if for you it was kind of an up and down sign curve of decline or was it kind of a sled ride down?

The one thing people might not realize is that Joe Biden is not, he was never a good campaigner, right? I mean, he can connect, he can smile, he knows his stuff, right? It’s been a while since he could walk into a room and kind of command the room and be the center of attention. I mean, I’ve literally seen him, this was in his last campaign before everything shut down, speaking to a group in Iowa.

50 people in a room intimate setting. And I’ve seen people fall asleep while he was speaking. I mean, it’s like, he’s just he was never I done a dynamic, exciting person to be around. so we didn’t didn’t expect that. From him, I will share one anecdote. So this is in May of 2024. So right before, about a month and a half before

Speaker 2 (19:02.178)
the big debate that we all saw and talk about. And so I’m there at Andrew’s outside of Air Force One when Marine, he’s in the helicopter landing there, it’s called Marine One. He gets out and by this time the White House had started a policy where they never had the president walking by himself. There was always some sort of escort with him and we knew why, right? It’s just physically.

It wasn’t looking good. You know, he was getting stiffer and stiffer. And so I remember watching him walk from Marine one to Air Force one, maybe a hundred yards, not a long walk. I probably have video of it on my phone right now. He, the president reached out. He has some sort of military official next to him reached out and it was debatable if he was just tapping him on the shoulder or leaning on him for support.

But I remember remarking to my colleagues and I wasn’t on White House duty full time. I was more of the campaign reporter. But afterwards, remarking to them like, I don’t think he can make that walk for very much longer. he just did not look physically well. And of course he has to walk up the stairs. And so I remember asking them like, has there been a discussion about how to get them on the plane? But then we fly to North Carolina.

Right. This is a key swing state that the he was still a candidate at that point running for reelection. A key state for him. And he was on stage with the governor and nailed it. I mean, was, again, not super dynamic, but was like high energy, which showed no signs of of mental decline or, you know, exhaustion or anything. I mean, he was he was on just like he would have been anywhere else. Right. So part of it is like

Am I to believe my eye? Like just under just trying to figure out how big of a deal is it if he can’t walk up the stairs to Air Force One, right? He still can give a good speech and God knows what he’s doing behind the scenes in the White House. But we just kind of assumed because we’d never had this situation before that. Sure, there might be some physical issues, but when it matters most, he he was sharp enough to do the job, right? And so.

Speaker 2 (21:18.774)
it was this constant tension and of course group think becomes a major problem. So it was easier for me to see that because I wasn’t on the White House duty full time. I kind of would rotate in every month or two. But my colleagues just were very uninterested in any comments I was making about the physical limitations, right? Because they see him every day, they’re concerned about peace deals in the Middle East and just like consequential policy and whether or not the president has stiff knees just didn’t even rise to the level of interest for them, right? So, go ahead.

Eric:
Interesting. I remember examples of people pushing back when Fox or other right-wing media would give examples of his behavior being or his or his physical activity being kind of compromised. And the reaction was that, you can’t believe those people, that video is context, the analysis is, you know, biased and untrustworthy. I think that might have made it kind of, it might’ve excused people from believing a lot of things that were being pointed out factually by people on the other side of the political spectrum. When did AP start writing about this story before it became kind of the only story? Do you remember?

Steve:
There was, well, I remember the groundbreaking story that now I’m blanking on which publication wrote it was at the journal. Yeah, so it might have been my friend, Andy Linsky at the journal, but there was, you know, the first story came out where it was a mainstream media outlet, not Fox, right? That was that was questioning his mental acuity, regardless of the tense backlash that I don’t know if you all are aware of or have been reading about, but.

Speaker 1 (22:52.929)
It was the journal.

Speaker 2 (23:14.19)
my goodness, the White House and all of, you know, official Democratic, just the establishment just came after that publication hard. Again, that’s part of our job. We’re used to being attacked, you know, but it was, we hadn’t seen that kind of reaction before. And I think you’re right. There was a tendency to, because it had been such a talking point for Fox and conservative media, was a thinking that,

This is all just part of kind of, you know, right wing spin. And so to see a mainstream media outlet that we knew and respected go there, it opened the door. And so we started to pursue our own related story. I was part of that reaching out to folks who had known him. By that time, everybody close to the Biden White House was been given, you know, strict instructions not to speak, you know, not to address it or if to address it, you know, just stick to very safe talking points. But that it started that discussion. But I don’t think any of us took it or it really broke through in the way that it ultimately did until the debate, right? So it was not that long after all of that happened, what, like two, three months? I should have Googled it before I came on here. It wasn’t until the entire world could see it for themselves and it was undeniable that something was wrong. That it just became the dominant narrative. I was at that debate. I was there. yeah, yeah.

And did you personally process it being in the room and watching it unfold in real time, probably having, you know, some inkling from that experience, for example, when he was walking across the tarmac and needed to lean on, you know, the military guy’s shoulder.

Speaker 2 (25:03.406)
I mean, like you, don’t, well, first of all, I wasn’t in the room so that there’s no press in the room. There used to be a protective pool at least that I’ve been in that protective pool in the room for those debates. We were in a big arena and so we were kind of set back a little bit along the spin room, which is, you know, 100 yards from the actual debate hall. I mean, part of the issue for, remember watching that is that,

I don’t know if this is a Trump era thing or not, but initially I just wasn’t sure if I could trust my own eyes. Like it didn’t look good, right? But so what people like I do in those situations is I start to text my closest sources in both parties and know, campaign manager types and just be like, what do you think? Like how bad is this? know, and it sure seemed bad. so it is. So it there over the course of the first 10, 15 minutes, it very quickly became clear that like this is very, very bad, you know. And even then I had my colleagues, my editors in the newsroom in D.C. not thinking that right. So we’re so used to just doing the job one way. Right. We’ve just been doing this. We are in a debate night at AP. I have 25 literally versions of the story written.

by the time the debate’s over, right? So it’s intense deadline pressure, get the news out. What was that first answer on healthcare? What did he, you it’s like, very focused on what we’ve always been focused on is trying to, you know, report the policy implications of this debate. And it’s just like policy didn’t matter, right? And so it took just, again, it just took a little while. And even looking around at my colleagues, like we’re like, is it like, is this really happening? You know, it’s so it didn’t mean it wasn’t until.

The spin room. So I’ve been to a million of these spin rooms and you’ve probably seen them on TV, but I was down, you know, walk down the stairs and the, it was like, it was a basketball arena or something. These spin rooms are full of political operatives, right? Campaign manager types, strategists on both sides. You know, there’s, there’s Chris Lassavita is there from the Trump campaign and, Corey Lewandowski and people like that.

Speaker 2 (27:21.07)
And so we walked down after it was over. And by the way, I think spin rooms are useless, useless. You don’t actually get any real information from them. I always view them as a sourcing exercise. I just want to get cell phone numbers from people. This was the first time ever that a spin room was not useless. And so I walked down and there were 50 Republican operatives and not a Democrat in sight. They were gone.

I’ve never seen that before. And so it was just, it became a game. How long is it going to take for like someone to come out? And it took a good 20 minutes maybe, you know, or it was Gavin Newsom and a few folks like that come out in a pack. They, they stood behind a fenced off area in the room delivered. I couldn’t even get to them because you know, there’s 200 reporters running over delivered. I don’t know how long… three minute statement and left, right? And so it was just very obvious on multiple levels that something very, very, very bad had happened.

Wow, what a tell that was. Tapper’s book, if it identifies any villains outside of the Biden family, it’s the circle of advisors around him, the legend of the politics, the Politburo. And did you observe them, those people in particular, circling the wagons?

It was incredible. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:48.6)
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (28:57.378)
Yeah, like Jen O’Malley, Dylan, campaign manager. Yeah, those are all people. It’s funny because I talk about how the most valuable thing that we have is access to principles. But but really, because we deal in information, right? And so the most valuable people oftentimes are those folks like I want to get Anita done and Jen O’Malley, Dylan on the phone to, you know, talking on background to figure out what’s really happening here. And and so

This is, this is, it’s, it’s hard stuff because this is where I think in general, of course we deserve some blame here. Of course we deserve some blame here. Right. For one thing, we, we care about access. Right. And so it’s not, it’s not a conscious thought that like, I’m not going to write this critical story or ask when a, Joe Biden’s wandering around the stage looking lost because I don’t want to lose access to the campaign manager.

Right. But like somewhere in there, that’s that that’s part that’s part of the thinking or it’s in the awareness. Right. And again, we’re not not writing stories because of this stuff, but it shapes it shapes the interactions a bit. And so am I going to them upset that, you haven’t put your boss out in front of us in a while? You know, it’s like, no, I want to I want to know about, you know, your messaging strategy for this this North Carolina swing or

Where you running ads in this where what’s the what’s your battleground map? You know, things things like that. So I think I think it is important and the books could be and probably have been written about this just to to acknowledge that people like me didn’t push as hard as we could have, you know, and for and on certain levels, right? Like we should have been with Fox saying, where is he? And we were at times for sure. Like we, know, Tapper was great about wanting them on a show and, but it wasn’t, it wasn’t like a top five issue for us during the campaign at all, at all. Right. And I think it really should have been.

Speaker 1 (31:07.838)
One of the questions that is a perennial one in the Trump and Biden era is that you’re often asked to not trust your own eyes. I think you said that yourself earlier on. Yes. In the Trump administration, famously, you have to basically claim that you believe that the 2020 election was stolen. If you want to get a job there, you want to be part of it. I assume that there was a comparable loyalty test in the Biden

circle after the debate that he did fine or that he is fine or that he had a cold or whatever the spin was. When sort of one party’s position is something that you as a journalist don’t believe, how do you strike a balance? If you call one side out for promoting falsehoods, particularly in an organization like AP, which strives to be nonpartisan, how do you do that without being, you know,

opening yourself up to claims of partisanship.

It’s so hard. mean, this is one of the key questions of our time for journalism, right? This is this. I’m sure you all have thoughts about like, and you hear it’s become a term that both sides ism, right? Yes. That and and truly I was brought up in journalism school and worked for decades believing that right. I need I need to I need to reflect both sides of an issue. Right. And so that’s hard to break.

It is, it is hard to break, especially at AP, right? Because again, we don’t want to be part of, we don’t want to be part of the news. We would just want to report the news. And so that’s been an evolution really during the Trump era. And we’ve done it in other times as well, but to have to start fact checking in real time, right. And in the headlines, you know, saying Trump or Biden says falsely X like we’d never done.

Speaker 2 (33:08.844)
really before and in this and this. Partisan environment, there’s real consequences, financial consequences for organizations that do that. That doesn’t stop us from doing it. We did it and we continue to do it right. We every story that we I would write that we would write about stolen election claims. We had boilerplate language that we would put in there up high saying that, you know, there’s been X.

Republican officials who have looked into this, this number of judges have ruled and there’s nothing to it. And so it’s an evolution. It’s still not something that, that’s just how I’m wired. It’s how a lot of us are wired. And there’s been a shift, stronger willingness, I think, to call out obvious untruths, you know? But it’s uncomfortable. It really is uncomfortable.

Would you say that the feeling that a lot of people in the press have that you just admitted to a feeling like we could have done a better job on Biden’s health? Has there been a shift to thinking, all right, this is something that we as a profession need to pay attention to for every president? And has there been heightened attention on Trump’s health? He’s, you know, he’s 79. He’s not in the pain comes health. Has there been kind of more coverage at AP around that?

Well, it’s funny to talk about both sides-ism. mean, I remember when we were working on our first Biden’s age stories, we were also doing Trump age stories, right? And it’s just, it’s just, it’s just kind of this, this environment that we live in. think that like the 30,000 foot takeaway really from, from being a journalist in the Trump era in general, it’s just, we don’t know. Like we don’t know. the, the, and the assumptions we make.

Steve (35:08.532)
And the way that we’ve always done things, journalism or otherwise, really shouldn’t apply anymore. We need to think differently. We need to question our assumptions. We need to listen to different sources who we might think are biased or not. Right. And and so, yes, I think I think there’s some real this this issue of covering Biden and missing that story hurt journalism, like Big J journalism, right? It hurt America’s trust in what we do. And I believe in the power of journalism, the role that we play. think it’s incredibly important. The same thing with Hunter’s laptop, right? It’s one of those things that was like a Fox News talking point and nobody really believed it, you know, and we were wrong, right? And so I don’t think any of us can responsibly look at those just two examples and not think that we have to, we don’t have to question.

the way that we do things moving forward. So sure, a part of that is covering Trump’s health and paying attention, but just generally, we don’t know. And the polls, like the polls are wrong a lot, you know? And it doesn’t matter that Trump was behind in all the polls. So it’s just, and if you talk to our polling team, they’re very defensive about this, but as somebody who writes about all that, I don’t really trust the polls anymore.

Like our internal, our internals did not have in the last, last week’s election, our internals did not have the margin of victory, especially in New Jersey, as large as it was. That was surprising. And the governor’s races. Yes. Yes. The governor’s race. So, so I think that that’s just an important takeaway because it’s easy to fall back and say, Hey, we’ve always been here. We’ve always asked the questions this way. And we’ve always recovered debates that way. And

In the governor’s race, the recent governor.

Steve (37:01.804)
You know, and we’ve always accepted the doctor’s notes, you know, is like, it’s just all these things that, you know, tradition just doesn’t apply here. Right. And so I don’t think any of us have a have the playbook moving forward. If anything, it’s a lot harder now because we are divided. Our media is so segmented. So a lot of these politicians now would rather go on podcasts, you know, than sit down and talk to me, which I get, you know.

But it’s really, it’s an evolving challenge that I’d like to say we’re meeting well, but I’m sure on a lot of days, a lot of days we’re not. Like there’s room for improvement, I think, across the board.

Eric:
I was going to ask you is a last question, what the what the key takeaway from the Biden era was, but I think you’ve you’ve answered that. Yeah. Let me ask you an even bigger, more fundamental and kind of big Q theoretical question. With. Shift, perhaps, or the center of gravity moving away from institutional journalism towards these podcasters that have huge audiences or influencers who swarm around to who may not by themselves have few audiences, but swarm around an issue. What is the role of an institution like the AP where journalists are trained, they are veterans, they have a code of behavior. Are people recognized in and what will the role be in the future of covering presidents?

Steve:
My goodness, it’s such a big question. It’s a little frightening to think about because the answer is who knows, right? I mean, I think all we can do is continue to show up, to ask tough questions, to challenge our own assumptions in the way that we’re telling the story, but to tell the story without fear of reprisal or backlash or you know, political fallout. It’s it’s I think we just need to keep, you know, practicing journalism. And and we’ve had I don’t know if you all are aware, but we’ve had some real consequences at AP where one thing that we do is we write a style book that most journalistic institutions, really a lot of institutions follow style being, you know, do you spell for write the numeral or, you know,

What is the official name of geographic areas? And so it was the Gulf of Mexico debate that, um, we have a whole team of people whose, whose job it is, is, is only to focus on our style book. It’s a big deal. Probably 10 people full time who do this constantly updating it. So it’s kind of a living document and our team reviewed it and decided not to recognize, you know, that golf as the Gulf of America, And based, there’s a detailed long explanation for why that is, which we published, we shared with the world. And as a result of that, we were, you know, I talk about AP kind of having a front row seat to all this stuff, we were barred from Air Force One, you know, we’ve had a permanent seat on Air Force One since I’ve been around, well, one before we lost that seat, we were barred from any protective pool.

Speaker 2 (40:33.546)
environment so we weren’t allowed in the Oval Office, for example. There’s a lot of events if there’s meetings with foreign leaders that we just weren’t allowed into anymore. And that that hurts us financially, right? It’s not just I honestly thought it wasn’t necessarily a bad thing to not be in a press conference, right? Because either there’s that group thing thing that can happen. And so being forced to cover a White House slightly differently might not be a bad thing. But it hurt our organization.

Right. It’s like our customers around the world count on us just being there if nothing else. Right. And so we ended up having to sue the Trump administration. Right. And we it’s something that we did not take lightly at all. We had a huge all all staff conference call with Julie Pace, our executive editor, about it. It was a real kind of scary moment because who knows what what what was going to happen. Right. There was this frightening on multiple levels. We ended up winning that lawsuit.

Which we basically the argument was we cannot be denied access for for practicing free speech, right? Discriminate against for practicing free speech. So it’s come back around a little bit, but all to say. This is all uncharted territory now, right? And we have a lot of really good smart people who believe in the power of journalism, you know.

Fighting this fight every day with an awareness that it’s not just the Trump administration, right? It is our elected leaders in both parties, know, independents, third parties, right, who are doing things differently. And we need to adapt and be willing to acknowledge that we often don’t know. We don’t know. so, yeah, it’s humbling. It really is humbling.

But I think it’s important as an institution to acknowledge that A, we could do a lot of things better. And the scary thing is B, we’re not always sure what those are, but in cases where it is clear, right, we need to try harder.

Eric (42:46.092)
All right. That’s a great place to end this interview, Steve. Thank you. And thank you for those thoughts and the candor to talk about the job. It’s very reassuring. Can you stick around for some questions from the…

And that’s a wrap. Deep thanks to Steve Peoples, senior political writer for the Associated Press. What stayed with me after this conversation was Steve’s candor about journalism’s blind spots and its challenges. In an era when presidents challenged the legitimacy of the press and when safety and truth itself are contested terrain, journalism is a hell of a job. Some predict that the kind of unbiased journalism that he strives to practice is headed for extinction. I sure hope not, because democracy is going to miss it if it’s gone. In reality is a production of the Alliance for Trust in Media. Thanks to our producer, Tom Platts of Sound Sapien and my Alliance colleague, Sophia Campbell. And thank you for listening. If you enjoy the show, please subscribe, leave a review and share it with someone who cares about.

Democracy based on a shared reality.
Thank you

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Created & produced by: Podcast Partners / Published: Nov 21 2025

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