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
