J.D. Vance Is Getting Smeared

I learned in college that there are some arguments you have to stay out of. But I’m not in college, so here goes. J.D. Vance didn’t admit to lying about the Haitian residents of Springfield, Ohio, and their supposed poaching of cats and dogs. I think he’s lying about the Springfield situation. I doubt that the Senator’s constituents called to say that their pets had been stolen and devoured. If they did call, the Senator didn’t believe them. He’s lying about innocent people because they’re dark and foreign, and someone may get killed as a result. But he didn’t say that he was lying, and The Guardian and The New York Times should stop being cute about this fact.

Let’s go to the video tape. The Ohio senator and GOP vice presidential candidate was being questioned about Springfield’s immigrant situation by Dana Bash of CNN. At 11:18 we hear Vance saying: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do, Dana, because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.” He then throws some sand by saying Bash should’ve given Kamala Harris a hard time over the Inflation Reduction Act. Bash ignores this to zero in on a key phrase. “You just said that you’re creating a story,” she says.

A silence falls. It lasts six seconds. Vance had been talking in boxcar fashion (“food-and-housing-you-ought to-be-talking-about,” etc.), but during the six seconds his face becomes still. He stares at Bash over on her side of the screen. At last Bash says, “You just said you’re creating a story.” Vance: “What’s that, Dana?” Bash: “You just said that this is a story you created. So that… the eating-dogs-and-cats thing is not, not accurate.” Vance answers, “We are creating, we are…” Impatient head wag. He picks up again: “Dana, it comes from first-hand accounts of my constituents. I say that we’re ‘creating a story,’ meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it. I didn’t create 20,000 illegal migrants,” etc.

It’s a lie that the Haitians of Springfield are in the United States illegally. As Bash pointed out earlier in the interview, Vance just doesn’t like the process by which they gained legal status. That didn’t keep Vance from repeating his lie. But the interview also contains several occasions when he says he’s just reporting what his constituents have to say about vanished cats and dogs. His clarification about “creating a story” was only the latest time he made this point. Vance’s line was clearly that he took facts (“facts,” in my view) and used them to create a hook, an angle that the press couldn’t resist. The media would show up in Springfield to report on the missing pets (or, in my view, “missing pets”), but it would stay to report on the problems that come with absorbing 15,000 or 20,000 immigrants into a small city—that was his claim.

I don’t believe it. But The Guardian and the Times shouldn’t write about these remarks as if he’d owned up to his games. Here’s The Guardian: “JD Vance Admits He Is Willing to ‘Create Stories’ to Get Media Attention.” Now the Times: “Vance Sticks By Pet-Eating Claims and Says He’s Willing to ‘Create Stories.’” Anyone seeing those headlines would take “create stories” to mean making up stories, which is to say lying. Down in the fourth paragraph, the Times article mentions Vance’s clarification as if it were no big deal. The Guardian puts the information in the third paragraph, again as if it were no big deal. Up top they sound a different note. The Times deck: “Mr. Vance, who amplified false claims that Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets, said he was willing ‘to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.’” Now The Guardian’s: “Republican vice-presidential candidate defends spreading false, racist claims demonizing Haitian immigrants.” I agree that the claims are false and racist, but The Guardian’s head and deck make it sound like Vance agrees too. He doesn’t.

In a follow-up story, The Guardian let fly with “The comments, in which he appeared to say that politicians can brazenly lie, drew immediate rebuke.” Yes, they “appeared to” for the brief while before he addressed Bash’s comment. Any journalist knows the difference between “story” as in lie and “story” as in facts that come bearing an angle useful to the media. The journalists involved in these articles saw no need to make this distinction clear.

It should’ve been their first job when reporting out his remarks.

I can hear college students from my past baying across the table in discussion group. Yes, Ohio’s governor, a Republican, says the claims are full of it. Defenders of the story have to settle for clips showing Bosnians spit-roasting a goat (supposedly a dog) somewhere else in Ohio, and Africans barbecuing chickens (supposedly cats) in yet another Ohio town. The Facebook post that kicked off everything cites a single source, a woman who now says we probably shouldn’t listen to her (“I’m not sure I’m the most credible source because I don’t actually know the person who lost the cat”). The chain of information behind the post was like the one for some scare story about tarantulas in a supermarket pineapple, so that the whole thing traces back to the unknown acquaintance of a friend of a neighbor of a ding-a-ling who posts on Facebook. It’s disgraceful that this chain now goes acquaintance-friend-neighbor-poster-presidential candidate, with Donald Trump bellowing out the nonsense during a debate watched by 67 million people.

I’ll add that Vance’s cover story doesn’t even make sense: the MAGA right believes that the media’s insufferably woke, so Vance wouldn’t think they’d run something about horrible doings by black immigrants. But that’s his story, he’s sticking to it, and the press shouldn’t pretend otherwise.