I don’t usually dunk on NPR, because they are a real journalistic outfit that typically produces quality reporting. This is not one of those times. In an effort to be more dumb than one of The New York Times’ many pieces asking Donald Trump supporters at a rural diner on what Biden needs to do, Tamara Keith decided to base her article around just one person who is undecided this election.
I encourage you to read the article. But I had to check to see that it wasn’t satire. The title of the article was such a parody that the infamous New York Times pitchbot X account posted it—but it was all too real.
Snopes even had to address the NPR piece!
The story centers a 52-year old executive consultant and former nurse named Karen Seagraves. She claims the most important issues to her are her retirement, her son’s safety in the military, and reproductive freedom.
Yet she still can’t decide between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
Again, this is not a joke.
“Saturday Night Live” literally did a skit on this ahead of the 2000 presidential election. Nora Dunn’s undecided voter asked Will Ferrell’s George W. Bush where he stood on global warming, a woman’s right to choose, and fighting the big oil companies. Even after Bush told her that she should vote for Gore if those were her issues, she proclaimed, “I still can’t decide!”
I don’t need to get into why Biden would be a better choice for reproductive freedom. As for financial security in retirement, Trump promised he would gut Social Security and Medicare in his second term. Trump’s FY18, FY19, FY20, and FY21 budgets each asked for billions of dollars in cuts to Social Security programs. Trump also promised to permanently eliminate the taxes that fund both Social Security and Medicare. Finally, as for the military, Trump has no respect for those who serve, calling them “suckers and losers.” He told a soldier’s widow that “he knew what he was getting into;” and his bungling got soldiers killed in Niger and almost started a war with Iran. This really is a no-brainer.
Yet Seagraves remained undecided even after the State of the Union speech. She agreed with everything Biden said, but then said he was just too “vanilla” for her. That was her complaint. Sure, Trump literally said he wants to terminate the Constitution and would be a dictator on day one, but at least fascism isn’t … boring?
Seagraves said that she wished she could combine bits and pieces of Biden and Trump to form the “perfect president.” Tamara Keith never once asked Seagraves what she found so appealing about Trump. Nowhere in the story does Seagraves share what she thinks Trump would do for her that Biden wouldn’t. Never once is she asked why she’s still undecided.
Even more maddening is Keith’s framing of Seagraves as holding some sort of a principled stance. The story’s sub-headline reads “She votes based on issues, not the party or the candidate.” Keith writes as if Biden supporters are only supporting him because of partisan reasons---not because the entire foundation of our democracy is at stake.
Yet that’s not even the worst of it. You see, Seagraves’ indecisiveness, according to Keith, is all Biden’s fault.
While Seagraves is just one voter — not a representative sample of the electorate — her experience shows that Biden's campaign has a lot of work to do.
Seriously, what the hell is Biden’s campaign supposed to do with someone like her? I’d love for Keith to explain this to me. Of course, Keith never follows up on this. All she had to do is ask what Biden, or even Trump for that matter, would have to do to win Seagraves’ vote. That simple question might have at least jolted Seagraves’ cognitive dissonance. But the story ends just as stupidly as it began.
She wanted more depth, instead of a speech that just hit all the bases.
"Like sometimes you say to yourself, 'I'm never going to get that hour of my life back,' you know? I just have that feeling," she said.
There you have it. An entire article drawing conclusions from one extremely vapid voter. I’ll never get that time back, either.
This kind of self-satirizing would be rejected at any decent high school school newspaper, yet it was published by NPR and written by the president of the White House Correspondents Association.
Stories like these epitomize the media’s broken approach to a critical election.
As does this SNL skit from 2012.