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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32054 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.

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.

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