President Donald Trump speaks during a news conference in the White House press briefing room on Aug

There’s this video clip, that, to me, has become a kind of shorthand for the way Donald Trump walloped American media, catching so many people blithely unaware. It’s from a 2015 episode of This Week With George Stephanopoulos.
In the clip, then-Rep. Keith Ellison warns a roundtable of guests, including Maggie Haberman from the New York Times, to take Donald Trump seriously as a Republican candidate. Six years later, this clip continues to fascinate me. First, there are the visuals. Ellison is a Black man, the only Black person in the room, just calmly predicting the future. And then, after everyone laughs, Ellison stands his ground.

I think a lot about whether this could happen again. I wonder how much blame journalists share for the past four years. And I wonder what we’re missing again, now. So, for Monday’s episode of What Next, I called up Farai Chideya to talk about all this. Chideya was a political reporter for FiveThirtyEight back in 2015 and now hosts the radio show Our Body Politic. But mostly, she’s one of the sharpest observers of media I know. Chideya has been trying to understand why voters make the choices they do for a long time. She’s reported from 49 states, covered white supremacy and white nationalism since the 1990s.

So while Trump’s rise surprised many people, Chideya’s not one of them. But she says, even though individuals like her saw Trump coming, the news organizations they worked for had more trouble. I spoke with Chideya about how much the media is to blame for Trump and how journalists can do better in the future. Our conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: When you look back at the past four years, how much blame do you put on the media versus the Republican Party? Because I look back and at least I see the press struggling with its role—trying to figure it out and getting it wrong a lot of the time. But I see the Republican Party just outright enabling bad behavior.

Farai Chideya: I love journalism or I wouldn’t still be doing it, but I think that there’s a question of who should have known better. When I look at someone like Kellyanne Conway, she should have known better, and I think she did know better than to unleash the beast of weaponized racial and class resentment that would come back to bite us all. And she made a choice. And she’s inside the GOP. But Les Moonves also made that choice.

It took a lot of people making a lot of choices.

As I like to say, a lot of hands on the knife.

Someone talked about how in many ways the coverage of the past four years was a failure of access journalism. Trying to constantly talk to the Spicers and the Conways taught us a lot less than if we’d actually gone out and talked to Trump voters more consistently and Clinton voters and nonvoters. Again, this idea of only assuming that power lies in the hands of the traditionally powerful has been the kryptonite of American journalism.

There’s been so much criticism of diner safaris—folks who went out into “real America” and sat down at diners with people with Make America Great Again hats and painted a picture of what was happening there. Do you think there is too little of that or that that wasn’t done critically enough?

First of all, a lot of journalists, like a lot of Americans, don’t actually know American history or political science or behavioral economics, all of which I think are critical to understanding the electorate. So there has to be a process of self-education in newsrooms to make sure people have the right context to report on this country. But when I went, for example, to eastern Ohio, I spent three days there. I could have gotten all the interviews I needed for the piece, theoretically, in about 45 minutes, but I wanted to actually sit down with people. I went to their places of work. I talked to people who would never make the article. I sat in Republican Party meetings.

What did that teach you?

It taught me to understand the framework with which people were approaching politics. I had a great respect for the operations of the Trumbull County Republican Party. They were ace organizers. They understood their audience. They mobilized young people. They mobilized older people. The people I interviewed when I was there ranged from 19 to 82 or something. So I think that the idea of a diner safari is not so appealing, but the idea of rooting down when I interview people—I just let them talk for like an hour and then I start asking questions
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