Before the coronavirus pandemic reshaped media priorities, along with just about everything else, the MSNBC host Chris Hayes was spending most of his time covering the Democratic Presidential nomination and the transformation of the Democratic Party, of which Hayes himself was arguably a harbinger. Born in the Bronx, Hayes graduated from Brown in 2001 and began a career in print journalism. He wrote for In These Times and The Nation—two unapologetically left-wing magazines—and made a name for himself as an affirmatively progressive, antiwar commentator in George W. Bush’s America. I remember meeting him for coffee a dozen or so years ago in Washington, and asking his advice on the business. He was generous with his time, and wonky, even by the standards of the profession. He seemed, in short, about the least likely person to make the jump to television.
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You could certainly hear progressive voices on mainstream television back then, but they almost always took the form of a Phil Donahue or Keith Olbermann, both older white men with a lot of broadcast history. And yet, by 2010, Hayes began guest-hosting for MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow—a young historian and another unlikely cable-news star—before getting his own weekend program. In 2012, Hayes published his first book, “Twilight of the Elites,” which looked at how our cherished meritocracy had gone rotten. The following year, he began hosting the weekday evening program “All In with Chris Hayes,” which mixes breaking news and analysis, offering an ideologically consistent but notably unshouty approach to the day’s events. In 2017, Hayes published his second book, “A Colony in a Nation,” about how our notions of policing and justice are informed by race and American history. He also hosts the podcast “Why Is This Happening?,” a series of interviews on politics and other topics.
Hayes has been in the news recently for reporting on Tara Reade’s accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden, which caused a subsection of MSNBC viewers to demand his firing. On Wednesday, I spoke with him by phone about that controversy and a range of other topics, from how the coronavirus has changed the news environment to why Bernie Sanders lost the Democratic-primary race to Biden to recent upheavals at NBC News. Our conversation, edited for length and clarity, is below.
How has your daily routine changed because of the coronavirus?
The daily routine is profoundly different, as it is for basically everybody in America. We are in a house outside the city, where near us there is a remote location that I can go to for broadcasting. The benefits of that are I see my wife and family a lot more. I get home a few minutes after I finish the show, as opposed to like an hour later.
I’m not doing the normal things that we all do in the working world as parents of young kids: dropping your kids off at school, and then starting your workday, and then coming home at night. Instead, the domestic sphere is constantly present. My wife is just working her ass off doing numerous things, aside from being a law professor and a podcast host, and also home-schooling the kids. I home-school them for a few hours. She is definitely doing more. So that part of it is totally different, and very intense. Again, world’s smallest violin. I am a hundred per cent aware that I am in an incredibly privileged position that I am grateful for basically every second, which has actually been a huge part of the experience of this—just gratitude, constant gratitude, about family and health, and all those things. But, that said, I’m also a parent of young kids the way that a lot of people are, and home-schooling your children, and then working, is hard.
How has your show changed?
I have hosted a show for seven-plus years, and so I’ve been in periods where there’s very low exogenous audience interest, and very high exogenous audience interest. Right now is a period where the interest is there. But the thing that’s both gratifying and animating when you’re in a moment with a hugely important story that people want to hear about is that you’re able to jettison the concerns you have often in this business of “How do we get people to watch? How do we get people’s interest? How do we draw them in?” Which is taxing, and sometimes people are just not that interested.
It’s a business that revolves around audience attention, and so the weirdly liberating thing is that I’m not thinking in those terms now. I’m basically, like, “There is an urgent, world-historical cataclysm that we are tasked with covering and explaining as best we can, with as much clarity and moral urgency and empathy and context and precision and rigor as we can marshal every day, and that’s our job every day,” and I don’t have to worry about a lot of the other stuff.
The really important story is for now the story that people want to read or watch, which is not always the case.
There are fewer cross-pressures. We’re basically going to try to do the best job we can covering this story. I think there’s probably some fatigue setting in. I have some. I think we all do. But I would also say that what really makes this story different than any other story I’ve ever covered is that it encapsulates the full spectrum of human institutions, structures, forms of knowledge, and zones of interest. It’s a medical story; it’s a biological story; it’s an epidemiological story; it’s a public-health story; it’s a sociological story; it’s an education story; it’s an economic story; it’s a government story; it’s a political story. There is no story that is not a COVID-19 story right now.
Well, there are also just fewer other stories, because there are no sports, and there are no movies, and there are no other bills being passed in Washington. I guess Mitch McConnell’s getting a judge through.
Yeah. Exactly. I would say that’s also, in a weird way, liberating, because it means you don’t feel beaten into the ground by repetition. It’s not a missing plane that you’re covering for thirty-five days straight.
Let the record show that you were yawning while you were saying it’s not a boring story, but O.K.
Well, I’m tired, Isaac.
You’re someone who does podcasting, and you do cable, and you’re very active on Twitter. How do you see your role being different in these three mediums, if you do?
They all have their unwritten rules. I think my voice is my voice across all three, but different in terms of how it interacts with the platform. Cable news is a medium where we have, on our best nights, over two million viewers. You have to be cognizant of the spectrum of people you’re talking to, which is a very wide spectrum. Twitter is a medium that is much looser, casual, more profane, and also more recursive, more dialogic. You’re replying more; you’re also constantly referencing things others said, and inside jokes and memes and things like that, which wouldn’t work as well on cable.
We had a moment the other night where I had a tweet about the President taking this new line about how the citizens have to think of themselves as warriors, which I just find unimaginably—just incomprehensibly—perverse, and morally bankrupt. I had a tweet that the President was trotting out the idea of doing a Pickett’s Charge against the virus, with nursing-home residents as the infantry. We were going back and forth about the script, and I was, like, “Should we use the Pickett’s Charge line?” Then we were, like, “You need to explain what Pickett’s Charge is.” A tweet you could look at, and you can be, like, “Oh, I don’t know what Pickett’s Charge is.” You could Google it or not, or you know it or you don’t, and you scroll through. But if you do that on cable, for people that don’t know it, it’s weird and alienating, or confusing. Then why would you be doing that?
I think the podcast, in some ways, is the most natural form for me, in that it doesn’t have time or length constraints in the same way, and you can just be inquisitive, and curious, and you can learn things in real time, and produce fairly compelling content in that form without trying to grab people by the lapels or offer your takes. I really like that one a lot.
Can you expand on that?
I think there are ways that you can import more of that into a TV show, but I would say that podcasting is the medium that most fits the way that I like to process information myself. It’s a good fit for me. It probably comes the most naturally to me, although I would say proper book- and essay-writing probably comes naturally to me, too, more than cable news does.
To turn to the campaign: Why do you think Bernie Sanders isn’t the nominee?
I would say three factors. One, an inability on the part of his folks to build a coalition large enough to win the nomination, partly due to a fundamental strategic error of believing it would be a split-enough field that they could win with thirty per cent. The second reason is that there was a tremendous fear, which I think was actually not that empirically grounded, that he would be a head-to-head-matchup electoral disaster, and people were so concerned with beating Trump that, when he became the front-runner, that fear was called to mind in a very powerful way that ended up benefitting Joe Biden and hurting Sanders. When I looked at the data, I just didn’t think there was some very clear-cut case that he was considerably and obviously a bigger electoral liability than, say, Joe Biden. I still think that’s true, probably.
The last thing was just the weird timing of it. He was the front-runner, and then Joe Biden, whose campaign was moribund, has a very impressive win in South Carolina, and then Super Tuesday was a few days later, and there’s this kind of rush for the exits, somewhat similar to 2004 and John Kerry. Democratic voters felt, understandably, like they didn’t want the primary to go on that long. I think it was causing agita: “Let’s have a nominee and go fight Trump.” Sanders hasn’t done the work to build a coalition, and then Biden has this excellent week and a half, and then the virus comes. It’s, like, “O.K., we’re done.” It was very strange.
Sanders’s miscalculation about being able to win with thirty to thirty-five per cent and not having to broaden the coalition, and then the concerns about electability that set in with the Democratic electorate: Are those two sides of the same coin?
I think they’re related, but I think they’re distinct. I think that the professional pundit class was the signal sender for electability concerns. I think the grassroots in the Party really care about electoral concerns organically, but the signals that are sent about those concerns tend to come from a fairly small number of élites, political professionals, etc.
In terms of building the coalition, some of the choices were rhetorical things, like, for instance, “Do I feel close to this person? Has he spoken to me as a proud Democrat? I’m a proud Democrat, and I kind of like Bernie Sanders, but all he talks about is how the Republican Party and the Democratic Party both can’t stop us.” There were a bunch of rhetorical choices that I think were alienating to wide swaths of the primary electorate that were probably correctable.
Do you have a sense of why those choices were made?
I don’t. I think part of it is he’s kind of stubborn. I think you can get caught up a little bit in the incentive structure of your own base, particularly when you’re running an operation that is entirely dependent on grassroots fund-raising. I don’t know if that’s the case specifically with connection to that rhetorical choice, but I do know the broader truth—that those incentives can sometimes be quite different.
In some ways, it feels like this primary showed that the Party is closer to where it’s always been. It just chose Joe Biden, and it chose a bunch of moderates in 2018 in competitive House seats. But in other ways it feels as if, with smarter political judgment, perhaps Bernie Sanders would be the nominee, and very plausibly the next President.
Yeah, I think it’s hard to sort those things out. I do think the generational divides in the Party were some of the starkest, and were larger even than a lot of other divides, like education level and race and things like that. Young people across all kinds of categories—educational attainment, race, whatever—really liked Bernie Sanders. Senior citizens across all kinds of different geographic backgrounds, educational attainment, race, income, did not like Bernie Sanders. They vote at higher rates, they lived through the Cold War.... In terms of the ideology, I do think that the Party has moved substantively to the left—tangibly, just in terms of policy platforms—but I also think about the Sanders critique a little bit, which is that personnel is policy. You can say whatever you are going to say in your speeches and your platforms, but whether the people around are true believers matters a lot. You can write a platform that says big national investment, infrastructure spending, Green New Deal, and then if you hire, I don’t know, Larry Summers, for instance, you’re going to get a different version of that than if you hire one of the economists in the Sanders camp, right?
I think some Sanders people have a cynicism about the degree to which there’s actually been a substantive ideological movement. To some extent, they think it’s box-checking for a group of people that fundamentally have a different ideological vision. I think the truth is somewhere in between. Also, this is all pre- the enormous world-historical cataclysm, so who knows now?
Do you think that the left critique in this election—that the status quo was unacceptable in various ways and had to change, and that policies needed to be thought out in new ways—was much more compelling than the left’s belief that they could reinvent politics, and that politics had fundamentally changed? This might have something to do with 2016, and the idea that Trump changed everything about politics.
I totally agree with that. I think the critique about the condition of the world, and the breadth of the challenges—many of which have been borne out in this cataclysm, in this national catastrophe we’re undergoing, might have seemed overstated before the coronavirus. Like, “Oh, we have a health-care system that’s deeply broken,” which I believed at the time, but I think people would respond and say, well, “Maybe you’re overstating things, and people like their health care.”
We have “innovation.”
We have innovation, but also, people like their employer-sponsored health insurance. It’s, like, well, now we have twenty million people who don’t have that anymore. [By mid-April, twenty million Americans lost their jobs, and an estimate by the Economic Policy Institute suggests that roughly nine million Americans lost their employer-provided health insurance.] I think all those critiques were compelling to me. There was a certain portion of the Sanders folks who, I think, thought that, if they were able to win a narrow factional battle, they could essentially seize the palace, and that’s not how it works. They just didn’t convince enough people, and sometimes it felt like they were not trying.
Did you have a sense of what the average Chris Hayes viewer thought about the primary?
It’s hard to tell. What I would say is that there was really a sizable, significant, and unmistakable portion of viewers who really did not like Bernie Sanders, really did not like us having him on the show, and let us know that on Twitter. I want to be clear here: I genuinely think there was a real problem in the coverage of the campaign, which is that I think a significant number of people in the media genuinely had no real contact with Sanders supporters other than someone trolling them online, or their niece who goes to Vassar. There was a little bit of a bubble, and this is where the conversation about Bernie bros and online harassment comes in. There are a lot of Sanders supporters out there in the world. They’re not all just like people online or college kids who are swept up in some ideological activism. There was a reason he did well among all those unionized casino workers in Vegas.
Last week, you covered Tara Reade’s accusation of sexual assault against Joe Biden, and after that there was a Twitter campaign to #FireChrisHayes. What did you make of that reaction, and how widespread do you think that feeling is among the Democratic electorate and/or MSNBC viewers?
I thought the reaction was probably partly representative of a real feeling among a lot of the viewers, and partly a little bit of a Twitter frenzy that isn’t necessarily representative. I understand that we’re in the midst of a truly unfathomable national calamity in which we’re losing thousands of our fellow-Americans every day, I think far in excess of what we should be, and we’re going to be at Great Depression levels of unemployment. The stakes feel extremely profound, and the idea of anything that takes us away from that feels like a betrayal. I sort of get that. I also get—and I’m going out of my way here to be fair in my prologue, so, if you just indulge me—
I’ve noticed.
I also think that one of the lessons of 2016, one of the problems, is you only have one campaign to cover. You only really have two candidates, ergo everything is kind of zero sum, and the Hillary Clinton e-mails are a perfect example. It was perfectly fine to cover that story. It was a story. But it was covered at orders of magnitude and excess of what it could have been, and people see this replaying itself now, and are terrified about that.
That may be, but do you also just think that it’s just rank partisanship, and people don’t want to hear it, even if it’s an accusation of sexual assault?
Yes. That’s part of it, too. There is a whole variety of “This person is a Russian plant. There exists, whether through these pieces of evidence I can point to, or just sheer implication, some vast conspiracy.” Or not even a conspiracy, just, basically, “This is the product of an obviously disingenuous political hit job.” I don’t think people actually believe that, but I just think that the desire to believe that is powerful, and it’s probably worth trying to check that. Then, people online are, like, “How dare you lecture me condescendingly about what I should believe and what I should not believe?” It’s, like, you can believe whatever you want. It’s like talking about certain habits of mind that are probably good for us to all try to work on.
I don’t want to put MSNBC in the same category as certain other cable-news networks at all, but do you think that cable news generally and MSNBC included have played some role in fostering a climate where paranoia about the other side, or hyper-partisanship, or conspiracy theorizing, can find a common ground?
I think it’s actually fairly endemic, and part of human-information processing at all times. I don’t know. I think that’s often the way that we make sense of the world. If you go back and you look at COINTELPRO stuff, and essentially the kind of combination of dirty tricks and surveillance that the F.B.I. was using on Black Panthers and others, one of the effects was that it drove them nuts. They all started going a little crazy and getting super paranoid, but that was part of the point of it. So I also don’t want to take the agency away from the actual actor here, which is the Russian government doing these things in 2016 that really had very profound, tangible effects, and have produced some amount of craziness and paranoia. I don’t want to lose sight of their agency in producing that state of affairs. I think that, in some ways, was the seed that has flowered into whatever we’re dealing with now.
But there’s also a certain brand of #ResistanceDemocrat who, from watching MSNBC, or from certain things on Twitter, can get into a more conspiratorial mindset.
There is absolutely a subculture of conspiratorial thinking among Democrats, or the broad anti-Trump coalition. I would a hundred per cent concede that. That is borne of a lot of things. I think, again, I do think—I’m just speaking for myself—and this is... I don’t know. The world’s confusing, and I don’t feel like I know all the answers. What I try to do, to the best of my ability—I know that I fail all the time—is to try to maintain the best habits of mind, if that makes sense.
I’m sure you hear people say things like “Don’t watch cable news,” or “Don’t spend too much time watching cable news.” Why is cable news like this? Is it something with the medium, or not?
No, there’s something there. I think the medium is designed by—well, it’s not designed. It’s because of the incentive structure of attention that the nature of the medium is kind of bombarding your attentional synapses and trying to grab them all the time, which is also true of Twitter, actually. I guess I would say that existing in that place all the time for news consumption is probably not healthy. I don’t know if my bosses would love me saying this, but I’ll say it anyway. I don’t think I would say, “Your best bet to consume news is to watch eight hours of cable news a day.” That would not be my prescription to someone about the best way to get the news. I think you should go to a bunch of different sources. Whatever’s happening neurochemically, with the endorphin release, and these attentional synapses firing—and then there’s a new thing, and the little soft clicking sound of Twitter refreshing, or the breaking-news banner on cable news—all of which are doing this work at an almost chemical level on you.
Are those effects in tension with the best habits of mental hygiene in the prefrontal cortex that we want to cultivate? Probably. Is the challenge to do both—to do something that is having an effect that is compelling people to watch, while also trying to not just leech people at a lizard-brain level? That’s the goal. But, yes, there is some kind of tension. There is a tension between the things that compel us at this brain-stem level and the best forms of mind we want to inhabit as democratic citizens.
What did you make of the recent management changes at NBC News? [On Monday, NBC Universal announced the departure of the NBC News chairman, Andrew Lack, who oversaw the company’s response to sexual-misconduct claims against Matt Lauer.]
I feel so removed from them, I have to say. I was sort of surprised. I didn’t know that they were happening, then I saw that they had happened. We haven’t been in the office in six weeks, which is the place that any kind of gossip, to the extent that there would be gossip—that would be the place that you would hear it physically. Being removed from it, it’s, like, Oh, wow, O.K. I’ve never met Cesar Conde [the head of NBC’s Telemundo and Lack’s replacement], and hope to, I’m sure, soon, at some point.
NBC News had scandals involving Matt Lauer, and allegations of sexual misconduct, and then we also saw similar things at CBS News, with Les Moonves and others. You spoke out at the time when my colleague Ronan Farrow’s book came out, detailing NBC News slow-walking his reporting out of fear that Harvey Weinstein reporting would lead to reporting on Lauer. Do you think there is something endemic in the television-news business, even if we know—
Yeah, I was just going to complete your sentence for you. It is hard to tell. Is the culture of TV news particularly bad in that way, or is it everywhere, and particularly everywhere that has powerful men? The #MeToo stories are almost fractal in that it’s, like, “Oh, a story about an extremely powerful person, the person that ran Hollywood,” and then the same dynamics replaying down to a poetry professor, where, in the world of the poetry professor, the poetry professor’s very powerful, and that same dynamic manifests itself. I genuinely don’t know.
It matters a lot for people to feel that workplaces are safe, and serious about this stuff, and transparent—and, particularly, I think, for the extremely brilliant and talented women that I’m lucky enough to work with, that they feel empowered, and protected, and like equals. No book is closed on all of this, for everyone throughout every institution—newsroom, private corporations, public institutions—to make that right.
But do you feel that if similar things came up at NBC News now they would be handled differently?
I think I do. Or, I think this: I think the accrued social change and understanding of what the procedures need to be, and what the transparency needs to be, are such that there would be more careful effort to make sure that things were handled in a way that did not break faith with the people inside that building.
You had a miniature controversy a long, long time ago, where you questioned the practice of referring to fallen soldiers as “heroes,” and whether that was appropriate or “rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war.” What do you make of the idea of talking about front-line workers as heroes now?
There is a notion that sometimes we socially confer status in lieu of actual substantive things—in lieu of substantive care. “We applaud you, and that’s what you get.” I’ve read numerous critiques along those lines, and I think there’s something to those. The other thing I thought about the hero thing is that, when that happened, the thing that really hit home to me was just about being careful and empathetic about people’s experience of loss and their grief, and how important that is as a public figure and public platform. No matter what point you’re making, in whichever political valence, people’s losses are real. Their grief is real. Their mourning is real. You have to take that seriously and be respectful of it.
It doesn’t mean that that’s the end of the conversation from the policy perspective. It doesn’t mean you can’t oppose the war, you can’t oppose lockdown—whatever your policy preference is. But it does mean we all have a duty, as human beings, as members of civil society in a collective enterprise of democracy, and also anyone with a platform, to just be, like, empathetic and careful with the hearts of others.
Well, this is the most shocking thing about where we are, in the sense of—
Isaac, I literally can’t get over it. I spend huge portions of my day just with this feeling of being hit in the chest by watching the utter blitheness and disregard, and casualness, and sociopathic casualness, about the vast losses. They’re not far from me. Family members of our staff. A neighbor of ours. People I know who’ve gotten very sick. It’s not some abstract thing. It’s a tangible thing, very real, and, to watch this utter disregard for it by some people, from the President on down, it is so shocking to me, and horrifying, and enraging, and almost insanity-inducing.
I keep thinking about if you went around on TV or in New York City after 9/11, and you were showing up at house parties, or on interviews, being, like, “Uh, guys, you know sixty thousand people here die from the flu. I’m not quite sure what the big deal is here.” You would have sounded like a sociopath, and you probably would have gotten punched in the face. You certainly would have gotten fired from TV. It’s not like any of that would have been the correct response, but it would have been sociopathic. What sort of maniac would you be?
I would say there’s been a debate for the last few years between left and center-left, about whether Trump is a symptom or a cause of American decline, American inequality, and American brokenness, with the left viewing him more as a symptom, and the center-left viewing him more as a cause. How does the coronavirus make you think about it differently, if it does?
I think I’m probably more in the symptom camp than in the cause camp, but I also don’t have a lot of tolerance for people who want to elide or gloss over the specific terribleness of how this individual has handled the job. Before the coronavirus, my feeling about Trump was that he was a worse President and a worse person for the job than George W. Bush, who I think was a terrible President and terrible for the job. But because of the historical things that had happened under Bush—chiefly 9/11, the launching of the war on terror, and the Iraq War—Bush had created more misery in the world, had actually done worse things than Donald Trump.
But I thought Donald Trump was worse, and that was shown in a few specific areas, which were in the margins of American society, in terms of who has power. The response to Hurricane Maria, which was a disaster, and never quite the controversy it should have been, showed how he would react to a catastrophe. The mental torture and some of the outright kidnapping visited upon immigrant populations and people seeking asylum was also this clear vision of what it looks like when this sort of sociopathic view, lacking empathy, is visited on people. It was all present. But in terms of the risks that we were being dealt by the spinning roulette wheel of history and fate, we had escaped cataclysm, and it always seemed to me that it was only a matter of time. And now, here we are.
A Guide to the Coronavirus
- Twenty-four hours at the epicenter of the pandemic: nearly fifty New Yorker writers and photographers fanned out to document life in New York City on April 15th.
- Seattle leaders let scientists take the lead in responding to the coronavirus. New York leaders did not.
- Can survivors help cure the disease and rescue the economy?
- What the coronavirus has revealed about American medicine.
- Can we trace the spread of COVID-19 and protect privacy at the same time?
- The coronavirus is likely to spread for more than a year before a vaccine is widely available.
- How to practice social distancing, from responding to a sick housemate to the pros and cons of ordering food.
- The long crusade of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the infectious-disease expert pinned between Donald Trump and the American people.
- What to read, watch, cook, and listen to under quarantine.
