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Wes Moore: A Study in Media Bias.
Those who have been following the upcoming election cycle may have noted that Wes Moore (current governor of Maryland) has quietly been dropped from top ten lists and is starting to be listed as someone who might not run.
This raises some questions – he’s popular, charismatic, ethnically preferable, a Clooney favorite. What happened if he was so ascendent?
The answer is… unbiased investigative reporting, that for now is mostly swept under the rug but would certainly pop up in the primary and beyond.
The Washington Free Beacon has done two reports on Moore in recent months that are probably best considered bombshells and exclusionary.
The reporting on this reasoned, clear, pretty close to air tight and with lots of room for fire that was held back (Mark Halperin notes that if he was the editor he would have tossed in a lot more).
Moore’s camp just says that it’s all Republican BS hit pieces, which is about as close to admission of guilt as you can get. Seeing this story, which hasn’t gotten much airtime, concerns me.
Our big media outlets just aren’t investigating (unless of course, it’s the Right). We saw this with Biden’s trivially obvious cognitive decline that now all Washington insiders admit was obvious and clear.
I’m not sure that Western society can function without bilateral media scrutiny, but you see things ignored, swept under the rug until convenient, and just discounted with “well that’s the NY Post” with no engagement of the facts.
What can we do about this, anything?
Bari Weiss taking over CBS was supposed to help, but that tree has yet to bear fruit.
Perhaps more concerningly – what else are we missing. Biden became eventually obvious, Moore got scrutiny in a presidential election. Most politically involved people know about Jay Jones’s comments.
What else is out there, well known, and not addressed because it’s on the right team?
It would be easier for me to take your claim seriously if you hadn't said it like this:
As for the first claim, the story says that he made some statements about his time at Oxford that the Beacon couldn't verify, other than that he completed a Masters program there but never received the actual diploma. And there's something about the dates not lining up with what we know about his life. There's probably some weird administrative explanation for this, but I'm not going to speculate. The article has a lot of weasely statements like
I'd emphasize the "willing" part: They had questions. Moore's people didn't think a story in a right-wing publication was worth wasting the governor's time clearing up, so they took the path of least resistance and sent over written confirmation that he studied at Oxford. Oxford probably told them that they weren't in the business of disclosing student records to anyone who called. I don't know what the truth is here, but calling his academic credentials "heavily fabricated" is quite a stretch based on what we actually know.
The second item can be dismissed even more quickly, as it's the kind of family lore that most people aren't going to perform any serious research to confirm. But even still, the Beacon's reporting didn't actually reveal the story as fictitious, they just couldn't confirm it. And I don't know how they would be able to confirm it. The contents of sermons from black preachers in the South over 100 years ago weren't exactly comprehensively cataloged. Whether or not some random black guy got death threats in 1924 isn't the kind of thing that normally makes the public record. I don't know that political candidates at the state level are in the habit of performing independent research on stories their parents told them, but even if they are, there's nothing here that directly contradicts anything Moore said. The reporting certainly muddies the waters and casts doubt on the story, but again, that's a far cry from "entirely fictitious".
At this point, I know that you're going to argue that the specifics don't matter and that there's enough here to suggest that Moore has a problem of at least not being entirely truthful, and that this is in itself newsworthy. And I agree. The problem I have is that you claim
While this is true with respect to the specific stories you mentioned, this isn't true with regard to the overall theme that Wes Moore may have engaged in some degree of fabulism. CNN ran a story questioning claims that he "grew up in" Baltimore. And if that seems too small potatoes for you, the New York Times ran a story about his incorrectly claiming that he was awarded a Bronze Star, and they had mentioned a number of such controversies in a piece on the 2022 primary. In other words, the mainstream media reported on Wes Moore's questionable relationship with the truth during a time when it actually mattered. Moore is running for reelection this year, but as an incumbent Democrat in a state with a heavy Democratic advantage, it's unlikely that a minor scandal like this is going to spark his downfall. The people with the most to gain here are his primary challengers; if this were that big a deal they'd certainly be trying to make some hay out of it.
But you don't seem to concerned about his reelection, because who actually cares about the Governor of Maryland anyway? No, your framing is in terms of the 2028 presidential election:
We're at least a year out from when the first candidates will start declaring. Who were the top ten Democratic prospects at the beginning of 2018? I've looked, and I can't find anything. The few polls on the subject that were being conducted at the time were asking about far fewer than ten people, and those included Oprah Winfrey and The Rock. The earliest poll in which I can find ten candidates (February 2019) has the 9 and 10 positions occupied by Michael Bloomberg and Sherrod Brown, who both clock in behind Someone Else at 8 (the poll named 20 actual candidates). Only 11 candidates actually made it to the primaries, and that includes people like Tom Steyer and Deval Patrick. My point is that saying someone is in a top ten list doesn't mean much, and them dropping off a top ten list only means that they went from a fringe candidate to a non-candidate.
Finally, even if it turns out that Wes Moore fabricated this stuff, why does the right actually care? They are currently in thrall of one of the biggest pathological liars the office has ever known, and as far as I'm concerned they've forfeited the right to get on their high horse about whether it's really plausible that Wes Moore's great-grandfather got death threats from the Klan. Trump lied about his father being born in Germany and his grandfather being born in Sweden. He keeps insisting that his first inauguration parade was bigger than Obama's when it clearly wasn't, and he doubled down on the whole hurricane hitting Alabama thing. Almost as soon as he entered politics in 2015 he would say something on the campaign trail and when it became an issue he would deny that he said it, even though it was only a day or two before and was recorded on tape. Hell, just a couple weeks ago he had his press secretary denying that he said Iceland when he meant Greenland. I don't get how a publication like the Beacon can support Trump through the endless parade of bullshit, yet when Wes Moore says something it's a huge scandal because he didn't hire a genealogist to dig into 100 year old church records so he can verify something his parents told him.
Because according to the article, the ancestor wasn't a random preacher, he was an ordained Episcopalian so all the church records are there. And the records say great-grandpappy wasn't run out of town by the KKK, he was offered a job back in Jamaica (where he was born and raised) when the minister in a church there unexpectedly died, so he happily went back home:
Now, it could be true that the Klan made threats against him, but it could equally be true that he just left to take up a position back home and Governor Moore has been embellishing his family history. We don't know for sure.
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Out of nothing more than curiosity, since I don't know who Wes Moore is or what all this scandal is about, I looked around a little online.
Wolfson College seems legit, as does the Masters in International Relationships. The Rhodes scholar part may be the sticking point. The MPhil is a two-year course and Wikipedia says Moore was awarded it in 2004. That means he should have been awarded a Rhodes scholarship in 2002 but he doesn't seem to be on the list of those selected that year. He is on the list for 2001, so then maybe he deferred for a year, meaning he didn't start until 2002.
Anyway, if he completed the MPhil in 2004 then he could have gone on to do the DPhil and here is where the Washington Free Beacon seems to be raising doubts. The DPhil is 3-4 year course at Wolfson, the Beacon says Moore claims he gained his doctorate in 2006 which would be only two years. The plausible answer to reconcile the two contradictory stories is that Moore did his Masters, started a doctorate, but dropped out early/washed out without submitting a thesis.
The Beacon also claims that Moore fudged dates on his White House fellowship application where he said he finished his Master's degree in 2003 which might be correct if he started in 2001 (the year of his Rhodes award) and not 2002. So that's a grey area where there may be legitimate mistakes not deliberate deception. There's conflict between the Wikipedia article, which gives 2004 date for the completed degree, and the Beacon, which claims he only finished it in 2005:
Again, that could be reconciled if he started the Masters in 2001, finished it in 2003, then went on to the doctorate in 2004 (and dropped out in 2005 with a partial award of some kind).
The part about his great-grandfather seems to be on more solid ground, if he was an Episcopalian minister. That would be much more formally registered with plenty of records and links between the churches in Jamaica and the USA. So if great-grandpa left in an orderly fashion to take up a new ministry rather than being chased out by the KKK, that is, er, gilding the family history lily on Moore's part.
There is also a website to check degrees granted to people claiming they hold qualifications from UK universities, but that requires consent forms signed by the person being checked etc. so that might be harder to check as a random enquirer. Seems like Moore is not giving any consent to anyone to poke around in his academic past.
I thought about speculating about what may have happened but I didn't because it would be just that, speculation. I don't know what happened, and the Beacon doesn't either, and can only point to lack of evidence, but the Oxford thing isn't something that's a matter of public record. The ministry thing is, but the article admits that the records only note the transfer and not the reason for it, and it could be that all the church knew was that he requested a transfer and was granted one. If the family was indeed receiving death threats it's certainly plausible that they didn't tell anybody and quietly requested a transfer. But I don't know, and unless one can find contemporaneous accounts that directly contradict the story, or find a relative who insists that Wes was never told that, it's not the kind of thing we can know. Even if it's false and the story was embellished through the generations, "Guy repeats family story without doing intensive historical research" isn't the kind of scandal that's going to sink a campaign.
Moore himself is one of young moderates who is seen as a rising star in the party. He's a YIMBY who is concerned about budget deficits and has a distinguished military record. He's somewhat pro Israel. George Clooney thinks he should run for president and he often gets named in the conversation, but he hasn't done anything to indicate he'd even be interested. Progressives don't like him because they live in a bubble where they think every Democrat is super far left, even though his views are more or less representative of the party as a whole. He's more or less the anti-Harris in the sense that he's a good speaker and has been pretty consistent throughout his career and doesn't sound like his positions are based on what some advisor told him played well in a focus group. As a Democrat I'd have no issue voting for him if he were the nominee, but I honestly don't know enough about him to say that I'd prefer him in a primary to a guy like Shapiro, though I'm biased in that regard.
But the grandfather doesn't seem to have requested a transfer. Since he was Episcopalian, there's a lot more centralised church government and record-keeping than if grandpa was a random Baptist or non-denominational minister of an independent church. Had he been threatened by the KKK, there would have been some record of that, even as a reason to ask his bishop to switch him to another diocese. And Moore seemingly has already blamed his mother for telling him fake family history, when caught out. So there may well be some kind of family legend that is not based on actual fact, about why Great-grandpa went back to Jamaica (he was born and raised there and when he got the chance to return, he did, is the real truth but that's too simple).
Moore does seem to have gone for the more emotive story of "my entire family was run out of the USA by the KKK" and one reason I'm dubious is because of the tendency of activist African-Americans (or Foundational Americans or Descendant of Slavery Americans, whatever the new woke term is) to exaggerate and flat-out invent 'just-so' stories to make their history of suffering and abuse even more awful. See the fake etymology around picnic, for example. And now that African-Americans have to share the racial spoils with other, newer, minorities coming to the USA, they're marking out their territory as "no, we suffered the most, we deserve the most DEI etc.!"
I think it's handy for Moore to spin up family history into the same kind of "descended from Cherokee princess" as another person we've all heard of, when competing for "pick me for the slot for the candidacy" when you're trying to rack up the Oppression Olympic points. A bit like AOC and her "I'm just Sandy from the block who had to work as a waitress unlike the rich kids at college", when in fact she had some plum internships and after-college gigs herself. Also her magpie ancestry, where she kept discovering that as well as being Puerto Rican, she was also part-Taino and Jewish heritage and I don't know what else. Ditto with Harris and her story of the Oakland childhood, when she's the daughter of two academics and partly grew up in Canada and was not the same background as someone from the ghetto. Not to single those out in particular, every politician wants to be seen as a man/woman of the people who understand you little folks because I, too, grew up hardscrabble (see Gavin Newsom, for God's sake, retreading his tough childhood. A lot of us were brought up in struggling circumstances, Gavin, but we didn't have connections to the Gettys which paid off when we started working lives). As the NYT article points out:
I have no idea what is the real truth in all this, but the Beacon makes a list of accusations:
And again, no idea if Moore has presidential ambitions, but see the NYT about how it's beneficial for Democratic candidates (for any office, I guess) to make the most of "now, I may look privileged, but let me tell you about my hard, tough, deprived family background".
“My father was a tool—“
“Yes, we know, Mr. Starmer. And so are you.”
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Media is hard since humans are self-interested monkeys that want to lie and exaggerate to dunk on their outgroup all the time. From that baseline, the mainstream media is quite good, as long as you ignore its coverage on identity-related issues.
There are certainly valid criticisms of the media, but what's telling is MAGA's utter failure to offer up a credible alternative after an entire decade. There's no law that prevents them from doing this, it would just require consistent work on par with what the NYT produces, and enough impartiality not to be written off as blatant right wing propaganda. This would benefit not only the Right, but the Republic as a whole for having a credible alternative. Instead... we get stuff like Nick Shirley -- a kernel of a real problem reported in regards to Somali fraud, but wrapped up in layers of partisan nonsense.
This doesn't exist. During the height of the Daily Show's popularity, Fox News' news programming was purportedly actually quite good. And that counted for absolutely nothing with the wider media environment because Glenn Beck had an opinion show, and thus FAUX NEWS.
There is no degree of impartiality that will cause a zealous, mind-killed left-partisan to not write a neutral media source off as "blatant right wing propaganda", because calling everything to the right of AOC "blatant right wing propaganda" is an important tool for maintaining the power of their blatant left wing propaganda.
It doesn't need to be impartial enough to win over deranged leftists, just enough of the center that people like myself or Scott or Bryan Caplan or Richard Hanania or Nate Silver could look at it and see a relatively competitive alternative. The easiest niche would be on identity topics since the MSM is quite bad on those, but right-leaning news is also terrible so we're in a "pick your poison" environment on that issue. On most other topics the NYT is good enough that it can generally be trusted within terms of bounded distrust that reading it will be a lot better than the average right wing news source, which at this point isn't so much Fox News as it is Tucker, Candace, and Rogan.
The entire point of my post was that we literally had exactly that and it was meme'd into a mass perception as "blatant right-wing propaganda". It's honestly still not that bad, compared to, say ABC News. I see articles on their website that seem low-key hostile to Trump and relatively few that look like water carrying.
Silver does seem to have positive things to say about Fox, but then he asks LLMs to rate them by consensus and gets VERY CONSERVATIVE, compared to ABC as "somewhat liberal". As someone who uses those two for "hard" news sources, I think that's exactly reversed. But then, I actually consume their content. Silver is trusting a self-serving "consensus".
We never had this. The conservative ecosystem has never had something that was as consistently high-quality and as consistently central to the conversation (even only among conservatives) as the NYT.
Your point of comparison is literally the biggest name in news in America, which never actually deserved it (Walter Duranty, etc).
Your argument here is essentially "You don't deserve to be taken seriously because you're not at the cool kids table, and you're not at the cool kids table because you don't deserve to be taken seriously. The rest of us do deserve to be here because we just don't admit our biases, lies, and open support for genocidal tyrants."
As I said, it's not about total popularity. Popularity within the movement is sufficient. If the NYT was ignored by every centrist but still did the same quality of work and was widely read by leftists, that would qualify since it would be generally truth-seeking news with enough pull to be a major part of the conversation. You could sort of see the outlines of this with stuff like the National Review back in the 90s and 2000s, but it was ostracized by conservatives themselves. Now, nothing even remotely looks close in the age of MAGA.
Not sure what this is in reference to.
Walter Duranty, mostly.
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The correct comparison to the NYT would not be Fox news, though- Fox is in a different medium, just to start with. The WSJ isn't terribly pro-Trump, but it's still an overall right leaning paper, and the National Review is somewhat more pro-Trump and also a high quality source. Fox is the equivalent of, like CNN.
I'd agree National Review is fairly decent. The problem is its place in the Republican ecosystem. The fact its been willing to criticize Trump has made it a persona non grata to a lot of the MAGA-dominated modern Right. By contrast the NYT remains firmly centered in the left-leaning info sphere.
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Did you read that one Scott article on ‘The Right vs. The Centre’ or some such? The issue is that the left-tinged media is just about good enough for most people most of the time, plus a big chunk of the MAGA partisans really does want some level of monkey-brained dunking (equivalent energy on the left too of course). What’s left when you exclude those two groups is a theoretical maximum customer base of maybe 20% of population across all platforms and that’s not enough to create and sustain a full on serious investigative media equivalent to the BBC or CNN. In England, GB News just about pulled it off but it’s clinging on for dear life.
Right-tinged blogging is cheaper so Substacks does well as does this place.
In general, I think Musk's takeover of Twitter really lends massive credibility to the idea that it works for better for both sides to take over large institutions rather than to recreate them.
I agree with you on all points. The reason the Right can't produce a quality competitor is that it has a demand issue rather than a supply issue. The parties have increasingly sorted by educational attainment which correlates with intelligence, but it's not like everyone on the Right is a moron. You only need like a dozen or so good journalists to start an institution. But the Right lacks an ecosystem that punishes partisan slop, so you have a few genuinely good writers blogging in the wilderness (like Arctotherium, who I'm a fan of) while the Right mainstream gets clowns like Shirley and podcasting fools like Tucker, Candace, and Rogan dominating the conversation.
Capturing institutions is particularly valuable when there are large network effects like Twitter, and I agree that Musk's takeover was a huge coup for the Right. I don't think it's quite as hard to build a competitor to the NYT by comparison.
What I'm saying is that it's not about Left and Right, it's about the Ins and the Outs. At present, the Left is broadly In and the Right is broadly Out. (Yes, I know, Trump, trifecta, etc. The valence may change, but we're talking long marches and it mostly hasn't changed yet. Journalism schools are taking in centrist-left-educated students and producing centrist-left-aligned journalists).
The Ins are broadly in charge of the historic institutions, that's what makes them In. They pull them as far towards their own position as they can without actually destroying them. (That can be touch and go, look at the decline of Disney/video games). They have monkey-brained In stuff as well, because that's what they really like, but most of them recognise the value of being able to propagandise the middle and have their opinions/prejudices/interpretations laundered through the mainstream press, so they have to preserve them. It's the same dynamic when the Right is mostly In and the left are limited to silly student magazines.
Rather than 'the Right lacks an ecosystem that punishes partisan slop' I would say, 'the Outs by definition lack a significant ballast of centrists'.
An interesting consequence of this is that you can get good semi-mainstream right-wing media if you find a community where the Right is broadly In and include a signficant number of centrists. Religious magazines like
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Lying about graduating from Oxford? Well, at least it's not quite as bad as buying a degree from a Floridian faith-based diploma mill. Not great, but it could be worse.
How is lying about a degree not worse than buying one?
Well, since Oxford has standards for admittance, getting accepted there at all is a higher bar to clear than finishing somewhere like Higher Place Christian University. Buying letters does not an education make.
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All else equal, buying feels worse to me because the results are the same--falsified credentials--but buying involves a conspiracy whereas lying doesn't. Of course, all else is not equal when the lying involves one of the most prestigious universities in the world and the buying involves a known "diploma mill".
In this particular case, the lying allegedly involves at least some conspiracy with Oxford, particularly its "deputy communications chief".
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The media is probably the most significant institution that hasn't been taken over by Republicans, and it will probably be Red Team's downfall. Elon Musk has touted X as "you are the media", but it has been lackluster and for better or worse the mainstream media still shapes the narrative. Not just what's true, but what's even worthy of discussion and what people will argue about.
The father of suicide victim Dagny "Nex" Benedict raped her and is also trans himself. This story got suppressed hard to prevent people from even potentially thinking that Dagny killed herself due to her father's sexual abuse, which would be a far more heavy factor than the "transphobic" (not really) fight in the school bathroom.
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Links: 1 2, overview
He's still listed as ninth place on aggregator ElectionBettingOdds.com—but tied for 10th on Kalshi, tied for 11th on PredictIt, and 12th on Polymarket.
Thanks for the links!
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