Fails

 On the coldest Christmas Eve in Washington DC history, several buses of migrants, not clothed for the weather because they started out from Texas, were deposited on the street.  All signs point to Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas as the person who sent them.  He notified no one that they were coming.  He did not order the buses to stop at an agency equipped to shelter some 150 destitute strangers.  Instead he ordered the buses to throw these people off on an empty street in the dead of night, near the official residence of the Vice President.

It was, as White House spokesperson Abdullah Hasan said, "a cruel, dangerous, and shameful stunt." And the media by and large fell for it.  Stories about this incident appeared, often including the response of churches and volunteers who were tipped off by someone in an NGO in Texas.  But the story needed a photo or image, and what did many media outlets select?  Photos and images of Vice President Kamala Harris.

What did Harris have to do with sending these helpless people onto the cold streets of Washington?  Absolutely nothing.  Is she even responsible for federal policy on migrants?  No.  It's not even clear she was at the residence.  But lazy editors did what Abbott baited them to do anyway, and linked the story to her with a photo.  

Maybe not running a photo of Abbott instead was justifiable if journalists couldn't get confirmation or a quote that he'd sent them.  But a photo of someone who had nothing to do with it, except that Abbott wanted her photo associated with the story--that's just a total lazy fail.

And where were the questions?  The journey took two days, and they did not know their destination.  Were they even fed along the way?  The dehumanization of these people that began in their own countries was compounded in this country, abetted by at least some of the media.

Another recent journalistic fail is more complicated.   George Santos, newly elected Republican member of Congress in a New York district that includes parts of Long Island and the Bronx, was recently accused of lying during the campaign about several important items in his personal story, including his education and job history, but also about his parents and perhaps even his sexual identity.  A furor erupted, with calls to deny him from being seated as a Member of Congress.  On Monday, he admitted some of the lies, but made it clear he intended to claim his seat.

The lies he admitted to were exposed in a story by the New York Times, for which the reporters deserve credit.  But the whole matter raises the question: why wasn't the story published before the election?  Then something could have been done--by the voters--to keep Santos out of Congress, instead of the very likely futile efforts to deny him now.  

The information as to whether he got a degree from a college when he said he did, or had the jobs he said he did, is not hard to find.  The failures to find it are multiple.  The Democratic party and its candidate failed in this relatively simple background check.  But so did the media, and it's beyond embarrassing.  There are lots of places in the country now where there is no local newspaper, and no real political reporters to speak of in any news medium.  Candidates there can get away with anything. New York and Long Island are not those places.  They have more journalists per square foot than anywhere else in the country. This is a big journalistic failure.

It may be that the kind of stretching the truth that candidates normally do did not prepare journalists for candidates lying about easily checkable facts about themselves.  But this is becoming a trend, and part of the reason is that people are getting away with it.  They are getting away with it on job resumes and in creating their public story and persona.  If people aren't routinely checked and called out for these lies, they will continue, and the concept of a fact will take yet another hit.