Brat summer isn’t a policy. Young people deserve better election coverage.

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This summer, stories about the presidential election — especially Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris — were dotted with allusions to Charli XCX’s album ‘Brat’. From the Brat summer of Harris purportedly leading to an uptick in young voter support to the phenomenon also being covered in The Atlantic and Mother Jones, writers and reporters’ headlines, leads, and jokes coasted on memes and edits combining Harris interviews with ‘Brat’ songs. 

The candidate’s Bratification — and its echoes in journalism — are a rhetorical appeal to young people who have driven the trend of Brat summer past TikTok and X into semi-popular vernacular. But recent polling that shows young people are most concerned about the economy, namely housing, and the continued U.S. support of Israel despite widespread disapproval. This type of coverage serves as a paltry shortcut to gain clicks without providing substantive critique or accountability coverage. It allows those politicians to get away with using rhetoric, not substantive policy, to connect with young people.

Politicians aren’t celebrities. They’re hired to serve the public, not to entertain, unless that extends to the political theater of unfulfilled promises. We need to trust and respect young people enough to give them headlines that reflect how politicians’ choices bear out on their lives and the issues they care about — not to regurgitate memes. What makes elections reporting useful isn’t covering politicians as celebrities, no matter how they get remixed into digital memes later co-opted by communications teams. It’s highlighting how proposed platforms align — or don’t — with the priorities of different communities. 

Journalists aren’t paparazzi. Our job is to rigorously fact-check and hold up to the light said promises, especially how they impact the most marginalized. Accelerating climate change, decreasing access to reproductive rights, transphobic legislation, a dismal job market, and consistently rising rents hang over young people — not to mention the Biden administration’s refusal to stop sending funds to Israel while it scraps the program providing free COVID-19 vaccines to uninsured people — and coverage should reflect that.

So what can be done instead? Movement journalism might be part of the answer. The term, popularized by a Project South report in 2017, (though in action for much longer), alludes to the practicing journalism with an eye toward “people coming together to build the power of all people to collectively control the conditions of our lives and our communities,” report author and journalist Anna Simonton writes. This kind of journalism can provide a political reporting frame that underscores young people’s agency and offers the kind of political education, answers, and resources that can’t be found through generative AI tools meant to stand in as fact-checkers. 

Last week, fourteen grassroots-aligned organizations — spanning movement journalism newsrooms including Prism, Scalawag, and In These Times — announced their formation of the Movement Media Alliance, “committed to accurate, transparent, accountable, principled, and just media.” 

Not every publication may be receptive to the idea of movement media — especially those still married to the myth of objectivity and the idea that detachment from community is possible — but every journalist can commit to asking questions aligned with those principles, and turn to the Movement Media Alliance as an affirmation that other kinds of political reporting premised on rigor, respect, and trust in young people can and do exist.

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James Salanga is the co-director of The Objective and the podcast producer for The Sick Times.