The Curious Case of Elizabeth Warren and the "Charter School Lobbyist" Who Wasn't

[BeckyDem]

How internet insinuation can quickly become campaign fact
by
Rebecca Solnit

June 7, 2019

The Internet is a costume party in which everyone comes dressed in an opinion, or rather dozens of them or an endless array, one right after another. An opinion is, traditionally or at least ideally, a conclusion reached after weighing the evidence, but that takes time and so people are dashing about in sloppy, ill-formed opinions or rather snap judgments which are to well-formed opinions what trash bags are to evening gowns. If opinions were like clothes, this would just be awkward, but opinions are also like votes. They shape the discourse and eventually the reality of the world we live in. Journalists used to say that everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts, but opinions are supposed to be based on facts and when the facts are wrong or distorted or weaponized, trouble sets in.

There was actually a nice victory over distortion and insinuation a couple of weeks ago. The Washington Post put out a story on May 23 that was titled “While teaching, Elizabeth Warren worked on more than 50 legal matters, charging as much as $675 an hour.” (If you look it up now, the title has been changed to not shout about the money any more.) It was kind of a nonstory: one of the nation’s leading bankruptcy lawyers, while teaching at one of the nation’s most distinguished law schools, did some work on the side, as law professors apparently often do.

If you didn’t know anything about legal experts’ compensation rates, $675 an hour might seem high, and the whole thing seemed to be trying to suggest that there was something shady about the whole thing. Perhaps women are not supposed to earn a lot of money, though we knew from the sideswipes about Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s waitress work that we are not supposed to work in low wage jobs either. Perhaps women are always either too much or not enough. For the record, I am wildly enthused about Warren as a presidential candidate, but I was enthused about accuracy a long time before she came along, and this is a story mostly about accuracy and its opposites. The stories I’m relating could be told about any number of other candidates who’ve been misrepresented in ways that have stuck as smears.

One of the two journalists, Annie Linskey, had penned an earlier Post story whose headline suggested a desperate reaching for controversy: “Elizabeth Warren reshaped our view of the middle class. But some see an angle.” The story declared there had been, “a bitter dispute over the integrity of Warren’s work that shadowed her for years as she climbed the academic ladder,” which turned out to be one angry competitor whose claims about her integrity didn’t hold up, according to others in the field. One of the peculiarities of journalism is that “evenhandedness” can degenerate into pretending that everyone is equivalent, that the fossil fuel industry and the scientists have equally valid positions on climate change, that everyone has to have a scandal and all scandals are approximately the same size.

Response to the Washington Post’s story about her $675 an hour was a best case scenario. A barrage of legal experts, lawyers, and law school professors (and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez) hit social media, while readers hit the Washington Post with 2,700 comments; those that I read were all scathing. By the end of the day, Slate had a story headlined “Washington Post Discovers That Elizabeth Warren Was Paid a Reasonable Fee for Providing Legal Services to Unobjectionable Clients” and Esquire and New York Magazine had also mocked the Post’s insinuations.

Eight days later, things didn’t go as well, perhaps because the misinformation didn’t start out in a high-profile outlet. Warren spoke at a big outdoor gathering—the crowd was estimated at 6,500—in Oakland, California, and a young woman introduced her. The introduction was full of praise for public education, for Warren’s plan to make preschool affordable by taxing billionaires, for her college debt plan, for “full funding of cradle to college funding as a cornerstone of her presidency.” The speaker, Sonya Mehta, had taught kindergarten for five years at an Oakland school that became a nonprofit charter school the year she started, at age 24, and then gone on to work for a ballot campaign to increase public school funding in the county, then for an Oakland educational nonprofit focused on teacher sustainabilty called The Teaching Well.

But an education blogger in Pennsylvania called her a “charter school lobbyist,” and then education policy figure Diane Ravitch said on her blog that Warren “was introduced by a representative of Great Oakland Public Schools, a billionaire-funded anti-teacher, pro-charter, pro-‘reform’ operation.” By the end of the week, The Progressive had stated, with a link to the education blogger’s piece, that “her introduction at an Oakland rally by a former charter school teacher associated with a charter lobbying organization was seen by some as a calculated signal that she is more supportive of charter schools than her progressive rival, Bernie Sanders.”

Seen by some as a calculated signal is both vague and incriminating: we never find out who the some are, but the implication of “calculated signal” is that Mehta was chosen to make a political statement and that that statement is pro-charter school. The calculated signal: would it matter unless Warren was the one making it? So is that an assertion Warren was involved in the decision, or is the vague language a way to have it both ways? The carelessness with which they represented this young woman of color—who had not previously been in the public eye—was also disconcerting.

For the record, Warren has been an ardent public school supporter, a critic of for-profit charter schools, and a fierce opponent of education secretary Betsy DeVos. She’s promised she would put a public school teacher in DeVos’s job; if elected, she’d also put a former public school special education teacher, herself, in the White House.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2019/06/07/curious-case-elizabeth-warren-and-charter-school-lobbyist-who-wasnt

[mopinko]

1. way more general than just warrren.

a cautionary tale of how it works today.
this is what scares me the most. truth is just not a thing any more.

[BeckyDem]

5. Scares me too. Convenient how "truth" gets spread around through mainstream sources.

[JDC]

12. Yes. Several "journalism" tactics succinctly boiled down to their essence.

[yardwork]

2. I'm changing my DU preference back to Warren.

This is an excellent column and I hope lots of people read it. We all have an obligation to speak out against misinformation, false insinuations, and old fashioned swift boating.

One sentence really stood out: "Perhaps women are not supposed to earn a lot of money."

This same smear was used against Hillary Clinton. Sadly, it's often women who are doing the attacking, often on behalf of a specific male alpha they admire, and sometimes just to uphold the patriarchal order, where they feel comfortably ensconced in their role as "helpers."

[BeckyDem]

4. +1

Some of the smears are subtle bias against women, others can still be full blown. We must be vigilant no matter what, because more of the same will be coming down the pike.

[lark]

3. RW'ers hate and fear powerful women.

With Liz rising in the polls, it's sad but not surprising that hit pieces are starting to come out. Nevertheless, she will persist!!!

Liz is my #2 pick at this point in time and I'd be happy to work my tail off for her if she ends up being the Dem nominee.

[BeckyDem]

6. True.

Remember Fiorina? She kind of got it but then doesn't follow through. She probably came closer than most GOP women.

Carly Fiorina slams Trump: 'He views women as something to be used'

By Rachel Frazin - 05/14/19

Former Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina slammed President Trump's treatment of women in an interview aired Tuesday.

Fiorina said she believes the president is "dismissive of women," but noted that he has placed many women in important roles.

“He's so routinely dismissive of women, the way he talks about women,” she said on the Yahoo News show “Through Her Eyes.” “And on the other hand, he's put a lot of women in really important jobs.”

https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/443569-carly-fiorina-slams-trump-he-views-women-as-something-to-be

[Farmer-Rick]

7. Very interesting

Sometimes it pays to Not form opinions until the truth has a chance to catch up. And if you don't have a chance to make an opinion before you have to vote, don't accept the supposed evidence as fact. (Like when Comey helped Trump with that Hillary letter in October before the election. Turns out that letter was mostly BS.)

So many liberals came out and said, "See there's no Russian collusion or even crimes by Trump." after Barr put out his first lying letter about the Mueller investigation. If they had waited two weeks, they would have realized Barr was spewing propaganda and lies. Even Noam Chomsky fell for the Barr lies letter. Of course Greenwald was going to fall for it but he certainly made use of his liberal media connections to repeat Barr's and Trump's lies. So, you can't always trust your usual sources.

Knowing that every new bit of information maybe a lie is a form of defense against propaganda.

I like how this article follows the lie from the beginning to the truth coming out.

[BeckyDem]

8. Yea, it seems to take seconds to form a smear and that smear could last a long time.

Long enough to possibly ruin a career.

[Farmer-Rick]

9. Yeah, and most lies are more interesting than the truth

So they tend to spread quickly.

[dalton99a]

10. A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its boots on

And the bigger the lie, the more it will be believed

[groundloop]

11. The Swift Boating of John Kerry certainly showed us the effect of despicable lies

Right wingers seem to be extremely talented at "dirty tricks", I've concluded that it's simply in their DNA. It's what they are. They're the ones (like tRump) that lie, cheat, and steal to succeed at business (if you can call going bankrupt 6 times succeeding).

It's extremely difficult to tiptoe through the minefield of lies which are laid out in the course of a campaign, as the saying goes a lie can travel around the world before the truth has time to put its' trousers on.

[Lonestarblue]

13. I read the Washington Post every day, and some of their writers love slanting the news.

I don’t even bother clicking on many opinion pieces because I know all I’ll read is partisan drivel. Why WaPo continues to publish Hugh Hewitt is beyond me. Even MSNBC finally got rid of him on most shows.

I find the Post better than the NYT these days, but their efforts to appear even handed result in too much equivocation and too much attention given to attacking progressive ideas with no serious criticism of how conservative ideas have lead us to where we are today. The headline writers can be especially egregious, often going for sensationalism instead of accuracy, as in the case of the Warren piece.

[BeckyDem]

16. +10 Excellent post.

You covered the problems very well.

[Roy Rolling]

14. Very Thoughtful Article

Unless one is focused on Warren, this went unnoticed. But it reminds us, if nothing else, of how super-qualified she is to be president and how she is targeted by the opposition who consider her a genuine threat to their way they do business.

[BeckyDem]

15. Yep. She speaks through her policies and that is where her commitment to the American dream

is founded. Highly threatening to the looters, otherwise known as Republicans.

[SunSeeker]

17. K & R

[Tactical Peek]

18. Calculated political smears don't spread themselves, despite appearances.

In many cases they neither create nor spread themselves. For that, there are the Lie Factories.



The Lie Factory

How politics became a business.

By Jill Lepore

September 17, 2012

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/09/24/the-lie-factory



Lepore details the rise of the political consultant/political PR business. I found the article quite revelatory.

[deurbano]

19. Here's the same "education blogger," Steven Singer, writing about Clinton in 2016:

"Five Ways Hillary Clinton is Running a Dirty, Underhanded, & Disingenuous Campaign"

https://gadflyonthewallblog.com/2016/04/23/five-ways-hillary-clinton-is-running-a-dirty-underhanded-disingenuous-campaign/

Only the last two allegations (even if true) could legitimately be blamed on Clinton:

1) Voter Suppression in New York

2) The DNC is Taking Sides

3) Voter Suppression in Arizona
In this case Clinton's campaign was "dirty" because voter suppression by Arizona REPUBLICANS benefitted her (according to Singer, anyway) at the expense of Sanders.

4) Hiring Social Media Trolls
“On the Internet, Clinton supporters have been silencing dissent and lowering the conversation…”

5) Misappropriating Sexism
Singer alleged Clinton played the sexism card when it wasn't relevant, thus hurting women "everywhere":
"...this misappropriation hurts women everywhere. It devalues the concept of sexism. It cheapens it."


Singer's inevitable conclusion:

"Scaremongers say it may come down to deciding between Clinton or Trump. That’s not much of a choice: one candidate is a member of the 1% and the other is bought and paid for by the 1%.

What’s the difference?

If the Clinton campaign continues to disenfranchise voters, receive an unfair advantage from party leaders, silence dissent and misappropriate sexism, I may end up casting a write-in for Sanders or voting for the Green candidate Dr. Jill Stein.


ETA: This blogger/influencer who wrote about possibly writing in Sanders or Stein in the 2016 general is from western PA!