PERRY BACON JR. COVERS A CHANGING NATION, MEDIA LANDSCAPE
It’s 1997, and John Yarmuth isn’t a congressman yet. By the mid-1990s, he has established himself in Kentucky as the founder, publisher and columnist of the LEO, a progressive Louisville weekly. But when he’s not running his paper, he helps his alma mater Yale by interviewing applicants. One such applicant is about to graduate from Male High School and has aspirations of becoming a journalist.
There’s just one problem for the applicant Perry Bacon, Jr.: he has too much going on. As a senior, he’s working at three papers simultaneously. He serves as an editor at Male’s student paper, covers football and basketball games for the University of Louisville student paper and interns at The Courier Journal. Because of his extraordinarily busy schedule researching, writing and reporting on different stories locally on top of his already stringent school schedule, Bacon struggles to find time to hold the interview.
Ultimately, John Yarmuth has to go out of his way to meet with him during a school day between Bacon’s classes. All of the scheduling conflicts would prove worth the headache in the end. According to Yarmuth’s account, “After about two minutes I realized I was in the presence of an extraordinary young person.”
Congressman John Yarmuth and Perry Bacon, Jr. from 2017
As the coronavirus continues to surge through the nation and as demonstrations against racial injustice continue, people across the country understandably have questions. And as the integrity of news has been litigated and questioned over the course of the last four years, many don’t know where to turn.
This sentiment is supported by research. While the political landscape has grown increasingly polarized, people belonging to different political parties have developed different expectations -- and prejudices -- about the ways journalists record news. According to a recent Pew Research Center study, “Americans are divided in their trust of the news media” based on their “political party identification.”
Perry Bacon, Jr., a Kentucky native and resident, has worked to combat this growing distrust of the news media. Relying on a suite of refined tools “including data analysis, original reporting, history, political science, and other social science,” according to his blog Bluegrass Beat, Bacon has illustrated a commitment to the truth in his meteoric rise as a nationally recognized and respected journalist.
Who Is Perry Bacon, Jr.?
Perry Bacon, Jr. grew up in Louisville’s Shively neighborhood. A talented student, Bacon excelled academically. Near the end of his high school career, he experienced a chance encounter that would change the trajectory of his professional and academic life. While he was researching a story at a Louisville Public Library branch, he ran into Tomago Collins, then a copy editor at the Courier Journal. After making small talk and then revealing his SAT scores, Collins suggested he apply to his alma mater Yale.
From his successful interview with future congressman John Yarmuth, Bacon would go on to attend and eventually graduate from Yale.
Working in Traditional Media Spaces
After completing his undergrad at Yale, Bacon landed a job at TIME. After he’d gained experience in the news magazine world there, he moved to The Washington Post, where he had the chance to cover the 2008 presidential race. As one of the Post’s top reporters on the campaign trail, Bacon covered candidates across the political spectrum, including Hillary Clinton, Mike Huckabee, and eventual winner Barack Obama.
Perry Bacon, Jr. on the Daily Show with Trevor Noah, courtesy of Comedy Central
After the 2008 election, Bacon continued to write about Obama’s administration, traveling with him to Brazil and Chile for foreign policy coverage as a White House Reporter. After moving on from the Post to MSNBC and then NBC News, Bacon now utilizes his political science prowess as a senior writer to analyze and draw conclusions from polling data at FiveThirtyEight.
Covering a Changing Landscape
As a journalist, he has witnessed a dramatic change in the way media is consumed by Americans. From his beginnings in news magazines to cable and network news, he has had to stay ahead of the curve. In his conversation with John Yarmuth in a 2017 Kentucky to the World program, Bacon talked about how Americans have continued to get their news less from traditional TV and print sources and more from digital spaces. As a result, Bacon has had, to borrow from the phrase common in tech circles, to “evolve or die,” as he told Congressman Yarmuth.
Perry Bacon, Jr. has noticed the media changing in other ways, too. In addition to the way people consume their news through new sources, Bacon finds social media has helped to level the playing field in who reports breaking developments. “I do think the democratization of the media world, if not the rest of the world, has sort of flattened,” Bacon commented on the rise of social media.
On the flip side, in this moment where so many different media sources offer different editorial positions and approaches, Bacon has discovered that the legitimacy of the news has been threatened. “We really need to tell people what’s going on and be detailed, but not try to predict,” he told Congressman Yarmuth. “Because we’re at a trust deficit, and the last thing you need to do when you’re in a trust deficit is do things to make people trust you even less.”
Bacon is quick to remind that he made several predictions in the 2016 election, starting with both party’s primary races. He’s learned from the mistakes he and major media companies made in that time, and now he approaches political developments with a stronger connection to data analysis.
Watch how he and John Yarmuth dissect the importance of celebrity, party polarization, and technology in politics from our program “Perry Bacon, Jr.: Inside Political Reporting in the Era of Tribalism, Trump, and Twitter” through KET.
