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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32063 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Another minor sign that the New York Times is hewing more to the center?

An Ethics Watchdog Criticized Stacey Abrams. His Boss Retracted It.

https://web.archive.org/web/20221103111651/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/03/us/stacey-abrams-ethics-voting-rights.html

Last week, Politico reported that in 2019 and 2020, Fair Fight Action spent more than $22 million on a largely unsuccessful voting rights lawsuit, in which it charged that Georgia’s elections process had “serious and unconstitutional flaws.” The largest fees — $9.4 million — went to a law firm run by the campaign chairwoman for Ms. Abrams, Allegra Lawrence-Hardy.

...

But Politico asked Mr. Holman, who works for Public Citizen, an advocacy group founded by Ralph Nader, about this arrangement.

“It is a very clear conflict of interest,” Mr. Holman said, because it “provides an opportunity where the friend gets particularly enriched from this litigation.”

“The outcome of that litigation,” he added, “can directly affect her campaign itself.”

The day the article appeared, an official with Fair Fight Action complained to Public Citizen, according to both groups. The next day Public Citizen retracted the statement. Our organizational position, the group wrote, is “that the contractual arrangement described in the story is normal and non-objectionable. It raises no legal or ethical concerns.”

Public Citizen then congratulated Fair Fight Action for “heroic work” in protecting the vote and stated it was “proud to partner with them.” This partnership, Public Citizen officials said, was unofficial and not financial.

Juicy bonus at the end:

Xakota Espinoza, a Fair Fight Action spokeswoman, also sent a statement to The New York Times: “It was deeply disturbing to see an attempt to diminish the qualifications of a nationally esteemed Black, woman attorney.”

No one in the Politico article criticized the legal qualifications of Ms. Lawrence-Hardy.

I think it's possible to criticize the article for potentially harboring a barely detectable prejudice in favor of Abrams; it's easy to visualize how much more inflammatory the critical language might be if the subject were a Republican, for instance by replacing the highly neutral "No one in the Politico article criticized" sentence with a less neutral "[GOP spokeswoman] falsely claimed that". And the article conveniently does not have reader comments enabled, and one wonders if that would be the case if Abbott or DeSantis were found channeling tens of millions of putative litigation money to law firms run by their campaign chiefs in fight for, say, election integrity.

But all in all, I still found the article to be solid journalism worthy of a paper of record. Combined with the current headline at The Atlantic, "Democrats Keep Falling for ‘Superstar Losers’", which has a big photo of Beto and Abrams attached, one may almost say the center left establishment has already written off the Georgia governorship a week before the midterms.

if that would be the case if Abbott and Desantis were found channeling tens of millions of putative litigation money to law firms run by their campaign chiefs

Coverage of the Ken Paxton scandal seems relatively evenhanded, and he filed the lawsuit over the 2020 election.

junior associates bill at 300/hr, 2-4 years experience at 500-700, partners at 900+

I think it's possible to criticize the article for potentially harboring a barely detectable prejudice in favor of Abrams

This would seem barely detectable a few years back, but it's absolutely glaring at this point. A similar article about a Republican candidate would absolutely spam phrases like "falsely claimed", "conspiracy theory", and "election denier" to describe Abrams and her refusal to admit that she lost in 2018. I guess I'm glad the NYT is at least giving a neutral-tone report on Abrams funneling millions of dollars to her buddy to do nothing much, but the difference in valence is unmistakable.

I feel like election denialism for the GOP is a bit like hazing or burning your boats.

People on the right are tired of being bullied online and in politics as racists white supremacists……

So they want someone they know will fight with them and play for their team. By getting politicians to agree to something that’s completely false it’s a sign that they’ve burnt their boats and can’t back down. They are now on your team. Gangs do this by having beat downs. Or in the mafia a murder requirement. Or frats had ritualistic hazing. Or Caeser crossed the Rubicon. It’s like a loyalty oath now and by defending a fraudulent election you prove that you will fight for your voters interests.

I think some ideology has similar oaths now that serve a purpose of confirming membership in the group.

I’ve long since decided I like election denialism. I think there’s a similar argument that the 2020 election was rigged but I don’t think votes were manipulated.

And of course religion has examples - Catholics calling a piece of bread God. And they turned the world upside down like no movement in the history of the world.

Makes sense to me. I realized recently that my judgement of people has simplified right down to "how likely is this person to stab me in the back or watch a mob burn my house down the second it becomes socially encouraged." And it's something you can pick up from social cues before you even see their "in this house, we believe" yard signs.

If someone believing in lizardmen running pizza-based midichlorian-harvesting conspiracies makes them less likely to do that, I'm not going to discourage them, weird and unreasonable as I find it.

"Does this person have rational methods for forming their beliefs" is the third or fourth most important quality I look for in an associate, tops. It's often correlated with trustworthiness, but not always, as following various people's takes on Reddit proved.

It's still trying to reverse an election after the fact, which feels like the relevant category IMO. The time to protest voting procedures is before the vote is cast.

The time to protest voting procedures is before the vote is cast.

No the issue isn't ripe then.

It's necessarily ripe then, because it isn't justiciable afterward.

Nope, it's not ripe before and not justiciable afterwards. No injury has been suffered until the election takes place, and no remedy is possible afterwards.

So any example of a court intervening in election rules would disprove your hypothesis?

No. A slightly different method was used for the ballot dating rules last time; the appeals continued until a favorable one was received for the side which wanted to count, the counting happened, and when the higher court took up the case it was too late.

More comments

I agree but it seems like a lot of courts don't.

Since I don't really read articles from news websites anymore, could you please give some examples of similar NYT articles using such phrases for Republican candidates?

To try to capture the spirit properly, I arbitrarily picked Don Bolduc and archived the first hit for him from searching "New York Times Don Bolduc". I get this article:

He continued to falsely claim there had been fraud in the election but acknowledged that the outcome was not in question.

...

Ms. Hassan’s campaign responded quickly to Mr. Bolduc’s reversal, sharing a series of videos and quotes of the many times Mr. Bolduc had promoted the lie that the 2020 election was stolen.

Almost every time I see NYT refer to claims regarding the 2020 election, they seem to be preceded by something like "falsely" or "promoted the lie". The second one is particularly striking - it can't even be that Bolduc is incorrect, it has to be that he's promoting the lie. These could easily be written identically by just saying "the claim" without respect to whether it is true or false, which makes me think that it's an editorial decision.

thank you!

would absolutely spam phrases like "falsely claimed"

I thought the phrase is "falsely claimed without evidence"

I actually like "asserted, without providing evidence" most of the bunch because of the implication that no evidence exists, while actually only stating the individual didn't provide evidence at that moment. This is a fun rhetorical trick that can be used any time someone says something that's generally accepted in their circle, but not believed by all parties that might read the quote later.

I felt similarly when I read this fivethirtyeight piece:

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/what-happened-to-stacey-abrams/

Wow, apparently the only reason Abrams might be struggling in Georgia is incumbent advantages, sexism, and racism. Maybe a side of voter suppression.

Not even gonna mention her refusal to accept the 2018 loss, her horrible reputation on Covid-19 mask mandates for kids (think this infamous photo), her frankly embarrassing attempt to lobby to become Biden's VP.

Fine, I guess.

This is what passes for even-handed these days.

They're still handling her with kid gloves, but one gets the sense her star is fading due to complete inability to actually advance politically.

I'm not sure how to make this observation tactfully, but any inventory of Abrams' electoral weaknesses seems lacking without at least acknowledging that she is also extremely fat and ugly. Whether we might wish it so or not, politics is at least in part a contest of personal popularity.

I don't see being fat or ugly as true impediments to electoral success. At least, not on the state-level.

But when you put it that way it is funny they didn't add fatphobia to the list of explanations.

Xakota Espinoza, a Fair Fight Action spokeswoman, also sent a statement to The New York Times: “It was deeply disturbing to see an attempt to diminish the qualifications of a nationally esteemed Black, woman attorney.”

No one in the Politico article criticized the legal qualifications of Ms. Lawrence-Hardy.

This sort of editorializing is so slimy, and transparently so. It's obvious that the last paragraph is meant as a follow-up to the sentence before that, in a way appears to counter it to a typical inattentive reader. But it doesn't counter it at all, since there was nothing in the quotation from Espinoza that implied that her accusation was that the attempt was to criticize the legal qualifications; she specifically used the term "diminish" and didn't imply any sort of "legal" conditional on the qualifications of the attorney. There are a million and one ways the Politico article could diminish her qualifications without criticizing her legal qualifications in any way. And the NY Times presenting the latter statement as if it's in any conflict or even any discord between the 2 reduces their credibility in my eyes. Either they're purposefully misleading, or the writer and editors lack the capacity to understand that it's misleading.

I really do not see what is wrong with their wording. Are you saying Politico made some specific diminishing statement that the NYT is trying to weasel their way around with their wording?

EDIT: wrong person. These are talking about Abrams the politician, not Lawrence-Bundy the lawyer.

Let's check:

with the largest amount going to the self-described boutique law firm of the candidate’s campaign chairwoman.

But some outside the group questioned both the level of expenditures devoted to a single, largely unsuccessful legal action and the fact that such a large payout went to the firm of Abrams’ close friend and campaign chair.

“Beyond $10 million would be very shocking, I would say.”

some ethics watchdogs say the closeness of their relationship, combined with Lawrence-Hardy’s leading roles in Abrams’ campaigns, raises questions about a possible conflict of interest.

“It is a very clear conflict of interest because with that kind of close link to the litigation and her friend that provides an opportunity where the friend gets particularly enriched from this litigation,”

Through her campaign, Abrams declined to be interviewed.

Abrams didn’t congratulate Kemp after his narrow victory. Instead, she complained that the electoral system was flawed.

...and I stopped halfway through. I'd say that all of those statements in the Politico article are diminishing her qualifications in some way or another, to varying degrees.

Conflicts of interest are a different issue from qualifications, I think.

EDIT: wrong person

I'd say that "ability to avoid conflicts of interest" is a qualification for political office, and she did not demonstrate that skill there.

Maybe we're talking past each other? The qualifications that may or may not have been diminished, I thought, referred to those of the lawyer Abrams hired, not of Abrams herself.

Oops, my mistake. I'm used to politicians coming from a legal background, and I didn't read the names closely enough.

No. I'm saying that it's entirely possible for Politico to have diminished Lawrence-Hardy's qualifications without criticizing her legal qualifications, and it's misleading to state as if them not criticizing her legal qualifications has any implication on the spokeswoman's claim that Politico diminished Lawrence-Hardy's qualifications. I'm ignorant of the specific statements Politico made, but presuming accuracy from NYTimes, my conclusion is that no one at Politico called out Lawrence-Hardy for not having the qualifications to be a lawyer. If I want to figure out if the spokeswoman's claim about Politico was true, then this NYTimes article doesn't help me other than pointing me in the direction of the primary source. Which would be all fine and good, if the NYTimes article didn't also strongly hint that the spokeswoman's claim about Politico were false while still avoiding explicitly saying it.

Mmm, this seems to be splitting hairs to me. The legal nuance seems fine considering the original statement referred explicitly to an "attorney." If we were litigating over a physician, it would seem fair for the follow on sentence to editorialize with medical qualifications.

As for diminish vs. criticize, they're perhaps not identical if we're dealing with contract or constitutional law, but I find them roughly on par in context. In fact, you could even turn the tables and criticize the spokeswoman for pulling a slimy statement--pretty much everything that's not-complimentary can be interpreted to be diminishing, so the criticism is almost unfalsifiable. NYT chose to make a more falsifiable statement using the word criticize, and I think the inclusion advanced rather than diminished the average reader's comprehension.

Mmm, this seems to be splitting hairs to me. The legal nuance seems fine considering the original statement referred explicitly to an "attorney." If we were litigating over a physician, it would seem fair for the follow on sentence to editorialize with medical qualifications.

No. Claiming that one is "diminishing the qualifications of an attorney" implies something very different from claiming that one is "criticizing her legal qualifications." The former brings to mind her quality as an attorney; the latter brings to mind actual legal qualifications.

Of course, there's barely enough plausible deniability there that someone who is sufficiently motivated could believe that the 2 phrases are similar enough that it's just an innocuous rephrasing. And that's what makes it so slimy, because (intentionally or not) they're relying on that plausible deniability.

NYT chose to make a more falsifiable statement using the word criticize, and I think the inclusion advanced rather than diminished the average reader's comprehension.

No. NYT's sentence here was in response to what the spokeswoman Espinoza said. Espinoza claimed something about what Politico wrote - it might be true, it might be false, it might be misleading, but what she claimed is what she claimed - and NYT commented on a different but related thing that Politico could have done (an didn't do). This muddles things - either they're misleading the reader by changing the topic without notifying them or they're misleading themselves by believing that they can read minds and figure out that when Espinoza claimed that Politico "diminish[ed her] qualifications" what she really meant was that Politico "criticized her legal qualifications." Either way, it's bad journalism and slimy.

If the writer wanted to contradict Espinoza in an open and honest way, he could have asked her for clarification and/or examples and then analyzed Politico's statements on those grounds. Or just stuck to the original meaning of what Espinoza claimed.

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