Narrowly factual means factual but inconvenient

This past week, there has been news that presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren has been lying about part of her origin story. Dogs bark, politicians lie. She has lied before. That's not much in terms of news.

It is difficult to strip away the partisan from the reporting but to me, there is an interesting sub-thread in here.

From The Media Bend Over Backward to Protect Elizabeth Warren from the Washington Free Beacon’s Damaging Scoop by Jim Geraghty.

That the mainstream media is very partisan and overwhelmingly Democrat in its orientation is also not new news. It is manifested in the stories they choose to cover and those which they omit. It manifests in their beliefs and opinions.

But Geraghty is pointing out something slightly different it seems to me. The abandonment of professional standards. In my profession (management consulting) and others with which I am familiar (medical, legal, engineering, etc.) there are people who make a point of hanging their politics on their sleeves. Not a lot of people, but certainly some. Expressing their political opinions does not encroach on their professional ethics.

And all of them are professional. They adhere to professional standards.

Geraghty is pointing out that it is hard for a journalist to be both professional and partisan at the same time as is feasible in other professions.

As if to prove Byler’s point, days later the Washington Free Beacon published a damaging scoop about the end of Warren’s early 1970s tenure as a grade-school teacher in Riverdale, N.J., and the mainstream media circled their wagons.

On the campaign trail and social media, Warren has claimed that her employment in Riverdale was effectively ended by her pregnancy, using the anecdote as a way of connecting with female voters:

When I was 22 and finishing my first year of teaching, I had an experience millions of women will recognize. By June I was visibly pregnant—and the principal told me the job I'd already been promised for the next year would go to someone else.

— Elizabeth Warren (@ewarren) October 8, 2019

It’s a neat story — as it turns out, a little too neat. The Free Beacon went back and found the minutes of the Riverdale Board of Education’s 1971 meetings, which make clear that in April of that year, the board unanimously offered her a second-year contract, and that in June, her resignation was “accepted with regret.”

[snip]

The other wrinkle in Warren’s account is that, as the Beacon noted, in 2007 she did an interview at UC Berkeley and described her departure from the school differently:

My first year post-graduation I worked in a public-school system with the children with disabilities. I did that for a year, and then that summer I didn’t have the education courses, so I was on an “emergency certificate,” it was called. I went back to graduate school and took a couple of courses in education and said, “I don’t think this is going to work out for me.” I was pregnant with my first baby, so I had a baby and stayed home for a couple of years.

The Beacon reported that the November 1970 Riverdale school-board minutes “confirm Warren’s account that she was working on an ‘emergency’ teaching certificate, showing unanimous approval ‘that a provisional certificate be requested for Mrs. Elizabeth Warren in speech therapy.’”

This is just standard good journalism. You investigate claims and reveal facts.

Here's where it gets interesting. The Free Beacon shared their research with the Warren campaign and sought comment. The Warren campaign did not respond.

Instead, it talked to CBS News, which published a piece the next day with the headline, “Elizabeth Warren stands by account of being pushed out of her first teaching job because of pregnancy.”

The article began by repeating Warren’s account of being fired for being pregnant, and adds that “recently, several media outlets have questioned the veracity of these claims.” Way down in the eleventh paragraph, it finally elaborates: “The Washington Free Beacon reported on a transcript from contemporaneous local school board meetings, also obtained by CBS News.”

[snip]

In addition to burying the Beacon’s scoop in its own story and dutifully relaying Warren’s vague response, CBS attempted to “add” to the story by talking to a pair of retired teachers who said that maybe it could have happened.

Two retired teachers who worked at Riverdale Elementary for over 30 years, including the year Warren was there, told CBS News that they don’t remember anyone being explicitly fired due to pregnancy during their time at the school. But Trudy Randall and Sharon Ercalano each said that a non-tenured, pregnant employee like Warren would have had little job security at Riverdale in 1971, seven years before the Pregnancy Discrimination Act was passed.

No one, of course, is arguing that it’s impossible a Riverdale teacher could’ve been dismissed for being pregnant in 1971; they’re merely questioning, with good reason, whether that’s what happened in Warren’s case — whether she is inaccurately describing a moment she claims, over and over again, was a turning point in her life. The version of the story Warren told at Berkeley — that she decided that pursuing a career in childhood education just wasn’t for her — isn’t all that dramatic or likely to win voters’ sympathy. The version she’s taken to telling on the campaign trail — that she was a good teacher helping needy children before a sexist school board broke its promise and fired her because she was pregnant — is quite the opposite.

It seems to me, and perhaps this is too thin a hair to split, that there is a distinction between misleading through story omission and opinionating versus actively trying to deliberately misdirect.

In this instance, Free Beacon obtained the facts in the form of the minutes of the meeting. Minutes which directly contradict Warren's account. This goes beyond questioning the veracity of her claims. They questioned, researched and then showed that her claims were untrue. And that her earlier, pre-campaign version was consistent with the records.

This is not omission. CBS is actively trying to suppress or discount revealed facts. On behalf of a favored candidate.

And it is not just CBS. All the mainstream media are in on the game of denying the facts.

To the extent the mainstream media discussed this story, it mostly expressed anger that the Free Beacon dared to question Warren’s version of events. The Washington Post’s Margaret Sullivan called it a “narrowly factual” “unfair” “smear.” Eric Lach of The New Yorker sniffed that “the Free Beacon didn’t have a scoop; it had an innuendo.” Vogue declared, “If you think Elizabeth Warren is lying, you’ve never been a woman in the workplace.” (This will be quite a surprise to Free Beacon editor-in-chief Eliana Johnson.) PolitiFact just couldn’t come up with any conclusion, other than “At the time, it was common for women to be forced out of teaching jobs after they became pregnant.”

Warren made a claim. Facts (the minutes) have been presented which show the claim to be false. The mainstream media, instead of investigating and finding other facts to contradict those of the Free Beacon or to give a context which might lend a different interpretation of what otherwise seems a straight-forward reading of the minutes, instead, simply functions as an extension of the Warren campaign by deriding the facts.

For example, perhaps in that time period, it was a pro forma offer of a second-year contract. Perhaps "her resignation was “accepted with regret”" was a euphemism. I suspect that is unlikely but it is at least a conceivable hypothesis.

But they don't do that work of researching the alternative hypothesis. They don't present new facts. They simply deny the available plain facts.

Which seems an abandonment of the basics of the journalistic profession. At this point they are just opinion and advocacy bloggers with a bigger (but shrinking) distribution from the days when they were real newspapers and news organizations.

As I say, politicians lie. Mainstream media spin. But when spinning transforms into partisan denial of black letter evidence, it seems to me an important line has been crossed.