All posts by Gary C. Woodward

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When We Are the Problem

Problem Practices, , , , ,

The old adage that ‘we get the politicians that we deserve’ may be more accurate than we think.

The final chapter of his political career is now being written for former New York Representative George Santos, who has pleaded guilty to a host of financial and legal infractions, and for deceiving constituents and election officials in New York’s Third Congressional District. Last May a U.S. District Court indicted Santos for money laundering and wire fraud, soon adding 23 counts, including charging $44,000 on credit cards funded by campaign contributors. His guilty plea will require financial restitution involving hundreds of thousands of dollars. And he could spend up to eight years in prison.

As is now well known, Santos fabricated most of his biography while courting friends within the Republican Party on Long Island, winning their endorsement and defeating Representative Rob Zimmerman in November of 2022. He won that election in a virtual news blackout that kept his checkered past away from the public: this, in the media capital of the nation with multiple newspapers. Only after his malfeasance became known was he expelled from the House in December of 2023.

My interest here is less about Santos and more about the troubling fact that the 4th wealthiest congressional district in the United States could elect a bad imitation of Zelig as their representative. Where was the due diligence of journalists, party leaders and the public who should have quickly flagged Santos as a not-very-sophisticated phony? The New York Times began to examine the false claims of wealth and a suspicious resume in December, after he was elected. They were well behind the tiny North Shore Leader in the district that correctly reported before the election that Santos “boasts like an insecure child, but he’s most likely just a fabulist, a fake.”

The paper usually endorsed Republicans, but opted for Zimmerman that year. Why had the media center of the nation with many news outlets not bothered to examine the fraudulent Trump acolyte right under their noses? It was not because he was engaged in a sophisticated ruse. Among many other lies, Santos claimed that he was a summa cum laude graduate of Baruch College, received an MBA from New York University, and worked for Citigroup and Goldman Sachs: all not true and easily checked. Santos’ hostility to LGBQ rights also rang false when someone discovered that he once performed in Brazilian drag performances: not itself disqualifying, but out-of-sync with the image he projected to voters. A district with an average household income in six digits surely had the resources to raise questions about his credibility. Upper crust heirs of the Van Cortlands, Roosevelts, and Clintons were complicit.

It would be foolish to assume that Santos was the rare solitary candidate to have skated on the thin ice of lies and deceptions. His case is just one of many “Strange but True” stories about American politicians that keep much of the rest of the world alternately entertained and alarmed. Even while there have been wonderful members in both bodies of the Congress, the case is a reminder that Americans with all the advantages of life may still be too bored or distracted to apply even elemental standards of character to determine a candidate’s veracity. If most of the folks in the 3rd District of New York were blind to who their representatives are, what hope is there for smaller districts with practically no news-gathering resources? For that matter, should we worry about whether enough Americans are discerning enough to see red flags in a current crop of presidential candidates, including one who inexplicably left the carcass of a bear cub in Central Park, and another who is facing jail time for a number of felonies?

 

 

 

Making Sense of it All

Problem Practices, Reviews, , , , , , ,

Too often political reporters are reluctant to use the kind of everyday language we might apply to people who have lost touch with reality.

American journalists covering this political campaign are facing the challenge of reporting on one of the candidates who repeats fictions that are sometimes so ludicrous that they probably should be reported as the ravings of a man who has lost touch. The problem is that strait journalism in the legacy press—sources ranging from CNN to the Associated Press—tends to grant rough equivalency between candidates running for office.  Does it violate journalistic rules to call out the one who no longer lives in the reality-based world?

Too often these days candidate Donald Trump does not feel tethered to even an approximation of the truth in the observations and accusations that show up in a typical stump speech. For example, he recently noted that his crowd size was up to 30 times larger than his competitor’s rallies. That implies numbers larger than would fit in a stadium for the Superbowl. In addition, he has asserted that the Harris campaign is using A.I. to make her crowds look bigger. As we all know, the former reality show star puts a lot of stock in audience sizes. Other recent fictions include the statement that thousands outside a half-empty hall were still trying to get in (not so, according to the Associated Press), or that he has spoken to the biggest audiences in American history, including those that crowded the national mall to hear Martin Luther King in 1963.

Trump is a fantasist. The lies stack up like so much cord wood at a lumber mill. But except for a few set pieces with the latest lists of “bizarre claims” most of his muddled thinking gets lost in routine synoptic coverage.

A Bias Toward Coherence

The problem here is an old one for those assigned to describe various sides of a dispute. As The Atlantic’s editor Jeffrey Goldberg has described it, journalism has a “bias toward coherence,” where reported events are cleaned up in the retelling. He recently noted that we get “careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines” that might better account for all the fantasies that get passed on as fact.

Trump escapes the full effects of fully revealing journalism by being protected by two norms of journalism: a bias for equivalency, and a second and natural norm to frame most events as stories, which curbs the impulse to let the actual incoherence of an event remain. This is partly Goldberg’s point.

The first norm of equivalency assumes two matched sides to a campaign or—for that matter—almost any event. Each side is presented in a seemingly neutral form to preserve the appearance of objectivity and neutrality. If one driver goes over the speed limit by 10 miles per hour, and a second has exceeded it by 70, both can be described as scofflaws. Recently a Vice Presidential candidate misspoke by describing carrying a gun in combat, which he later noted was not accurate. He carried guns in his military service that spanned more than two decades. But he did not see combat. So maybe it seems to even out the coverage at any point in time if the GOP campaign fudges the numbers on actual audience sizes. This is norm keeps audiences placated, but it is intellectually dishonest.

The second norm is to reorganize events into a story format with a framework of actors, action, purpose, and scenes. Campaigns are normalized by filling in the blanks to make each story a complete account of another day. Never mind that the contradictions represent incoherent acts. Few editors want to pass that incoherence on to their readers or viewers. You have maybe experienced the sensation of attending an ordinary event like a city council meeting– a meeting that was bewildering and aimless–that has since been transformed by the local press that into a more conventional narrative discussions followed by action.  Our instinct is almost always to make sense of it all, not to let the nonsense show through.

These are basic themes are played out in more detail in what is sometimes called “media frame analysis.”  But what it often reveals is that a person unfit to run for the highest office in the country is protected—as CNN demonstrably in 2016 —from an uglier and non-sensical process.

This problem of constrained journalistic norms is doubled by the fact that reporters are reluctant to use everyday language we routinely apply to people who seem less grounded in reality. Columnists may talk about the “delusional” and even “pathological” candidate. Goldberg uses the term “bonkers” to describe Trump’s ideas: an everyday term that hits the mark, but still sounds odd coming from a journalist. In fact, most reporters are reluctant to use terms that suggest the abnormal responses of a person barely able to adapt to their world.