The press is failing in its democratic duty by focusing on access and constructing narratives to create controversy rather than informing the public.

“The press is supposed to be serving us, right? And and it gets so lost in access that we forget that the point of what the press is supposed to be doing is looking for patterns and revealing patterns and giving us information, which is not necessarily what they're doing.”

Political actors and elites project their own fears and desires onto public figures, using them as blank slates to represent their concerns about power and change.

“In a way there's something similar here, which is people are projecting who they are and what they want and don't want onto these people. And what they're doing has far more to do with who they are than with who this person is.”