Dear Colleagues,

It’s officially spring! We hope that you’ve enjoyed the slow and steady transition into a warmer season.

As we’re preparing for the next part of our year, we wanted to give you a rundown of what our team has been working on during an eventful start to 2024.

Covering the Election

We are in the midst of what is arguably the most important election of our lifetimes. Yet, it is also clear – through polling, audience trends, and experience – that audiences and voters are fatigued and avoidant. Here at The Daily we have taken on that challenge enthusiastically. We are working hard to remain responsive to major news events – but also to focus our energies on big ideas, deeper understanding, and journalism that leans away from the horse race of the Trump Biden rematch, and towards the stakes of the election, and forces and concepts that will help the public understand and navigate 2024.

For example, after Super Tuesday, rather than focus on the unsurprising results – our episode The Unhappy Voters Who Could Swing the Election with NYT polling expert Nate Cohn, dissected the trends of voter disaffection we are seeing this year. Cohn drew historic comparisons to other cycles when voters have been significantly unhappy with their options, and broke down how those election cycles are often defined by volatility and unpredictability. We hope that might provide a helpful framework for listeners in the coming months.

An issue on the ballot for many voters is the war in Gaza, which became abundantly clear in the Michigan democratic primary. “The Daily” dedicated an episode to understanding voters who are willing to abandon Biden over his support for Israel in the hopes of enacting change to U.S foreign policy. Jennifer Medina, a political reporter for NYT, shares her interview with a longtime Democrat and Palestinian-American activist who struggles to reconcile her political-party loyalties with Biden’s handling of the crisis. Her story is emblematic of a group not only deserting Biden in the primaries, but the general election as well.

After the recent saga between NBC News and former RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, NYT writer-at-large Jim Rutenberg came on the show to discuss the episode and break it down. Rutenberg ascended above the headline drama of the situation, and laid out the on-going editorial crisis another Trump campaign presents for television news networks. Again, our feeling was that this would once again hand listeners a frame through which to process what they see and hear in the coming months, and deepen their understanding of how Trump’s politics and rhetoric continue to present a threat for traditional journalism.

In another episode, Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent for NYT, joins to cover an issue back in the spotlight: the president’s age and memory. Baker leverages his years of covering Washington and the White House to go beyond the superficial references and soundbites about President Biden’s age – to give both a deep account of how the conversation around it is playing out in the higher circles of Democratic politics, and how he expects the political predicament presented by the concerns may play out during the rest of the year.

Recent and Notable

“The Daily” continues to explore the realities of life after the overturning of Roe v. Wade. A recent episode discussed the Alabama Supreme Court ruling that declared frozen embryos are children, which haltered fertility treatments across the state. To understand the history behind this ruling and how potential parents are forced to navigate changes in the world of reproductive health, “The Daily” has a conversation with Azeen Ghorayshi, who covers sex, gender and science for NYT. Later in the episode, host Michael Barbaro interviews Meghan Cole, a 31-year-old lawyer in the final stages of IVF treatment. Cole shares her story of how the controversial ruling happened just days before her scheduled embryo transfer to her surrogate, putting her life in an uncomfortable limbo.

Until next time,-The Daily Team