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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.
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.
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