Iowa newspaper shows how not to report on antisemitism

an editorial failure

Aug 11, 2024

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The morning after Vice President Kamala Harris selected Minnesota Governor Tim Walz as her running mate, the Cedar Rapids Gazette published a lengthy article about an explosive claim. Republican Party of Iowa state chair Jeff Kaufmann asserted that it was “blatantly antisemitic” for Harris to pass over Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro.

Thanks to the Gazette’s content-sharing arrangement with the Lee Newspaper group, the story inspired by a GOP event in Cedar Rapids reached thousands more readers through the Quad-City Times, Sioux City Journal, Waterloo/Cedar Falls Courier, and Mason City Globe Gazette.

The piece was an editorial failure on several levels.

HEADLINE VALIDATES A GOP CLAIM

As media critic Margaret Sullivan explained, “headlines matter a lot. It’s as far as most people get. The nuances of a story, no matter how much they may matter to reporters and their editors, don’t always break through. Headlines do.”

The full headline on Marissa Payne’s article was “Iowa GOP chair calls it ‘blatantly antisemitic’ for Kamala Harris to pick Tim Walz as running mate during Cedar Rapids event.” The newspaper shared the same headline on its X/Twitter feed, which has nearly 57,000 followers. The Gazette shared the story as well as an accompanying video on its Facebook page, which has 94,000 followers.

Anyone who saw the headline without clicking through might assume there was good reason to consider Harris’s choice bigoted. “Blatantly” suggests there can be no debate about the conclusion. Yet Kaufmann wasn’t in a position to know why the Democratic nominee selected Walz instead of Shapiro.

I call this an editorial failure because at many newspapers, reporters don’t write their own headlines. And even if the author did suggest this one, someone higher up on the chain could have and should have fixed it.

All the more so since Payne (a good journalist) was off her usual beat covering Cedar Rapids government. Someone with more experience handling political stories should have considered whether this frame was newsworthy enough to be the focus of a full-length article. Kaufmann routinely winds up Republican audiences by bashing Democrats. Iowa newspapers don’t need to amplify his talking point of the day, just because a reporter was assigned to cover a local event.

The Gazette hasn’t published any comparable story centering Iowa Democratic attacks on Senator JD Vance, the Republican nominee for vice president.

A bad headline can skew perceptions even when the article is well-sourced and nuanced. Unfortunately, this reporting was no better than the headline.

NO INSIGHT FROM JEWS OR ANTISEMITISM EXPERTS

Would the Cedar Rapids Gazette publish an article about a supposedly racist act without citing a single Black person? Probably not.

Yet this article quoted no Jews. No rabbis or Jewish community leaders. No scholars who have studied antisemitism. None of the three Jews currently serving in the Iowa legislature. (As it happens, all of them live within the Gazette’s coverage area.) State Senator Janice Weiner is a past president of the Agudas Achim Congregation in Coralville and has spoken out about antisemitic incidents. State Representative Adam Zabner is a Democratic National Convention delegate, so would have an insider’s perspective on the merits of the VP contenders.

As one of this state’s few Jewish reporters, I am acquainted with many politically active Iowa Jews. None have told me they thought Harris made an antisemitic decision. Rabbi Henry Jay Karp of Davenport (who personally preferred Shapiro) considers Kaufmann “the last person qualified to pass judgement on what is and what isn’t an act of antisemitism.”

Readers may not have understood that the Gazette article didn’t reflect any Jewish viewpoints, because nowhere did the reporter clarify that the Iowa GOP leader is not Jewish.

That fact may seem self-evident, since Christians dominate Republican politics in Iowa and many other parts of the country.

But some readers—especially those who have lived in areas with larger Jewish populations—may assume a person named Kaufmann is a Jew. A Bleeding Heartland reader who grew up on the east coast messaged me last week, wondering about that.

Since the Gazette devoted most of the article to Kaufmann’s accusation, a reader might guess he has some expertise about the topic.

Again, this was an editorial failure. If it didn’t occur to Payne to reach out to someone better placed to assess whether Harris made an antisemitic decision, an editor should have insisted on it.

If the reporter didn’t have time to check in with Jewish sources before deadline, an editor should have held the story until that context could be added.

THE SO-CALLED DEMOCRATIC “PROBLEM”

Only one sentence in the Gazette article provided a counterpoint to Kaufmann’s assessment: “Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, is Jewish.”

Immediately following that sentence were several more paragraphs quoting Kaufmann “absolutely” standing by his remarks and demanding that Democrats condemn those who urged Harris not to pick Shapiro.

A clip of the reporter’s seven-minute interview with Kaufmann was uploaded to the Gazette’s YouTube channel, centering his claim in the title: “Republican Party of Iowa Chair Jeff Kaufmann calls Gov. Tim Walz ‘antisemitic,’, radical.” The video was embedded in the middle of Payne’s article, for readers who read it online instead of in print.

Those who didn’t take the time to watch—probably most readers—saw a still image of Kaufmann above a caption that reinforced the frame: “The Democrats have a problem.” Here’s how that portion of the article looked on my computer screen:

But do Democrats really “have a problem” with Jews? The evidence overwhelmingly suggests they do not.

Here are some facts missing from the Gazette article:

Of the nine current U.S. senators who are Jewish, all caucus with Democrats, including Majority Leader Chuck Schumer.
Of the 26 Jews currently serving in the U.S. House, 24 are Democrats.
Most Jews who have ever served in Congress were Democrats (especially since the 1920s).
All four current Jewish governors are Democrats.
Democratic presidents nominated seven of the eight Jews who have ever served on the U.S. Supreme Court.
No Jewish person has ever appeared on a Republican presidential ticket. In contrast, Vice President Al Gore chose Senator Joe Lieberman (an observant Jew) as his running mate in 2000.

Every Jew elected to Iowa state or federal office in my lifetime is a Democrat.

Public opinion research has long indicated that large majorities (typically more than 70 percent) of American Jews are politically liberal and align with Democrats. That’s not surprising, since Jews overwhelmingly support abortion rights, same-sex marriage, stricter environmental regulations, government aid to the poor, and other views commonly held by Democratic politicians.

Readers who don’t know many Jews—which probably encompasses most subscribers to the Gazette and Lee newspapers in Iowa—could come away from Payne’s article with the mistaken impression that the Republican Party is more in tune with Jewish concerns.

Side note: very few Jews reside in Alliance, Nebraska or Mankato, Minnesota, where Walz worked as a teacher. Yet he wrote a master’s thesis about Holocaust education in high schools. Many years later, Governor Walz “supported and signed a law requiring the state’s middle and high schools to teach about the Holocaust.”

LITTLE CONTEXT ON OTHER REASONS TO PICK WALZ OVER SHAPIRO

The Gazette article devoted about 1,100 words to Republican criticism of the Harris/Walz ticket. Here’s the most relevant portion from Kaufmann’s remarks to the crowd at the Cedar Rapids County Club:

“There’s a reason why Kamala Harris didn’t make the most obvious choice” for running mate, Kaufmann said. “The brightest choice you could have made was to name the governor of Pennsylvania.
“Make no bones about it — that’s why he was not named,” he said. “And the Republican in me is happy about that, because Tim Walz is easier. But, my lord, think about that. … the story behind all of that is as blatantly antisemitic as anything you could ever see or think about.”

Here’s an excerpt from Kaufmann’s comments to Payne after the event:

“The smart choice, by anybody’s standard — anybody’s political standard — she would pick the young, energetic governor who actually outperformed the president in your biggest swing state,” Kaufmann told The Gazette.

“Obvious choice,” “brightest choice,” “smart choice.” Those adjectives imply Harris couldn’t have had any valid reason to pass over Shapiro.

Fourteen paragraphs follow with more GOP bashing of Harris and Walz.

Readers have to get all the way to the end to find two short paragraphs (68 words total) describing Democratic praise for Walz. The article notes he is a Midwestern governor who has enacted progressive policies and can appeal to rural voters as a “former high school teacher, football coach and National Guard veteran.”

I would add that Walz is a more natural communicator on television. Shapiro is a good speaker but can come across as rehearsed.

Kaufmann didn’t acknowledge any of Walz’s admirable qualities, or Shapiro’s weaknesses. The Pennsylvania governor got crossways with some labor unions over his support for taxpayer-funded school vouchers. He faced criticism over his handling of a sexual harassment complaint against one of his staffers (who was a Republican). According to Politico, advisers to Democratic Senator John Fetterman of Pennsylvania “suggested to Harris’ team that the senator believes that Shapiro is excessively focused on his own personal ambitions.”

Finally, the New York Times has reported (based on “conversations with about a dozen people involved in the selection process”) that Harris had a better connection with Walz during final interviews, and the campaign’s internal polling did not show Shapiro “would bring a decisive advantage” in the race for Pennsylvania’s nineteen electoral votes.

There’s no evidence to suggest Harris went a different direction because some Democrats balked at nominating a Jew, or called Shapiro “Genocide Josh.”

The Gazette editors were well aware of the case for Walz. On the day Harris announced her choice, the newspaper published an Associated Press story that walked through what he brings to the ticket. (“Harris hopes to shore up her campaign’s standing across the upper Midwest, a critical region in presidential politics that often serves as a buffer for Democrats seeking the White House.”)

Incidentally, the Gazette did publish a separate story by Tom Barton that quoted several Iowa Democrats hailing the Walz pick. That piece included a section in the middle (around 230 words) with negative comments from Kaufmann and other Republicans. Why was there more “balance” in the article with a generally positive take on the Democratic nominee for vice president, and almost no balance in the article about the antisemitism claim?

Speaking of which…

NO CONTEXT ON ANTISEMITISM FROM THE RIGHT

Antisemitism isn’t restricted to one end of the political spectrum. But while hateful voices on the left exist, those voices are louder and more numerous on the right.

I’m not talking about hate mail or Twitter trolling from randos—though I’ve seen vastly more of that from right-wingers, especially since Elon Musk bought the social media platform.

In May, the New York Times showed how Donald Trump and Republican members of Congress “have mainstreamed anti-Jewish rhetoric” and antisemitic tropes about “globalists” like George Soros controlling the government or “destroying our country.”

The review found that last year at least 790 emails from Mr. Trump to his supporters invoked Mr. Soros or globalists conspiratorially, a meteoric rise from prior years. The Times also found that House and Senate Republicans increasingly used “Soros” and “globalist” in ways that evoked the historical tropes, from just a handful of messages in 2013 to more than 300 messages from 79 members in 2023.

Trump’s top Iowa surrogate, Attorney General Brenna Bird, joined the chorus when she claimed in a 2023 video for a conservative group that “Soros prosecutors” endanger communities and hurt crime victims.

Kaufmann lectured Payne last week about questions reporters should be asking Democrats.

“They’ve got explaining to do. But, of course, they’ve got to be asked the question. And the answer’s got to be more than, ‘Well, I know this Jewish person or that Jewish person.’ Ask the question of, ‘Then do you refute and do you condemn all the other Democratic leaders that told you not to pick him?’ ”

Reporters should ask top Iowa Republicans to refute and condemn their presidential nominee’s hateful rhetoric and conspiracy mongering.

And Cedar Rapids Gazette readers should be informed that “For all of their rhetoric of the moment, increasingly through the Trump era many Republicans have helped inject into the mainstream thinly veiled anti-Jewish messages with deep historical roots.”

PODCAST DISCUSSION A MIXED BAG

I was dismayed to see The Gazette named the latest episode of its “On Iowa Politics” podcast “Republicans attack new Harris, Walz Democratic ticket.” Here’s how the newspaper promoted the podcast on social media.

I know firsthand from working on “KHOI’s Capitol Week” that it’s hard to come up with good titles for weekly podcasts. But why lead with “Republicans attack”? Doing that tells readers the GOP assessment of Walz was the most important angle on the week’s biggest political story.

“On Iowa Politics” episode titles are typically neutral descriptions of the lead topic: “Iowa Supreme Court abortion ruling,” “Aftermath of attempted assassination of Donald Trump,” “Iowa reactions to the presidential election shakeup.” They could have called this one “Harris picks Walz” or “Iowa reactions to Tim Walz on the ticket.”

In this case, the content was better than the headline. Listeners who click through will hear the reporters spend several minutes talking about Walz’s strengths and rationales for the VP selection before getting to Kaufmann’s allegations.

Sioux City Journal reporter Jared McNett injected some balance into that conversation, saying he would “be surprised if we’re hearing about the pick being antisemitic in a month.” McNett noted that line of attack invites Democrats to bring up topics like Trump “having dinner with Kanye West, who’s defended Hitler, and Nick Fuentes, who’s a Holocaust denier who’s said that he wants a total Aryan victory.”

Barton, who was moderating the podcast episode, highlighted another logical flaw: “How are voters supposed to believe that a woman who is married to a Jewish man is antisemitic?”

After a clip of Kaufmann was played during that podcast, McNett asked Payne an excellent question: do you think the GOP leader would be “hammering” Shapiro if he had been the pick, or would he have found that “totally fine” and praised the Democrat’s decision?

The podcast played another clip of Kaufmann, and Payne took his comments at face value: Kaufmann thinks Walz will be easier to beat, so is relieved Harris didn’t go with Shapiro. At the same time, he is worried about “radicals” in the Democratic Party who supposedly discouraged the nominee from “doing the right thing.”

Give me a break. Anyone who follows Iowa politics knows Kaufmann will spin any big news in the worst possible way for Democrats. If Harris had selected Shapiro, the GOP leader would have complained that the nominee abandoned the Midwest and snubbed veterans and rural folks by picking an east coast lawyer who has spent his entire career working in politics. (Walz will be the first Democrat on a national ticket who didn’t go to law school since Jimmy Carter.)

I wish the podcast team had made clear that Kaufmann had no evidence to back up his main assertion. I wish they had conveyed to their largely non-Jewish audience that most American Jews and Jewish politicians are Democrats.

A couple of larger takeaways for political journalists and their editors: you don’t have to be stenographers for bad-faith arguments. You also don’t have to publish a full-length story about every partisan gathering a reporter attends. I’ve gone to lots of Democratic events and decided not to write them up.

Articles like this one do little to inform readers but do a lot to reward Republicans for working the refs.

Iowa politics with Laura Belin

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