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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32043 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.

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.

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.

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

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