Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was diagnosed with brain cancer this week, and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times wants you to know that he once supposedly dismissed a couple who suffered from the exact same affliction.
The problem with Jessica Roy’s anecdote, which went viral on social media before she deleted it Thursday afternoon, is that she provided exactly zero evidence for her story.
“My friend’s husband died of glioblastoma in AZ. They wrote a letter to McCain begging for his help. He advised them to move,” the Times reporter said in a since-deleted tweet Wednesday evening.
Pushed for proof of her claim, she responded, “I asked her if she had it. She moved recently and says it’s in a box somewhere, but she’ll look.”
Well, that’s a good story.
After a bit of digging, the Washington Free Beacon’s Alex Griswold appears to have found the supposed friend from Roy’s anecdote. As it turns out, the alleged friend responded this week on social media to news of McCain’s illness.
“When the brain cancer that killed my husband is ‘trending’ because it was diagnosed in the State Senator who specifically backed the State cutting insurance for a ‘dying man,'” the alleged friend wrote.
She explained further, “We wrote to McCain in 2010 to beg him to help Wash keep his [Arizona Health Care Cost Containment System] insurance. McCain sent us a letter back saying it might be best to move out of Arizona because he did not consider health insurance (and thus, access to healthcare itself) a human right. [ironies].”
If this is indeed the person to whom Roy was referring (the Times reporter still has not responded to the Washington Examiner’s request for comment), it’s worth laying out some context regarding the AHCCCS.
“[It’s] a state-run agency subject to state laws. McCain doesn’t set or vote on Arizona law,” Griswold noted, adding “unless they were asking him to completely revamp federal Medicare law. In the span of months. While he was in the minority party. But it’s also not clear what McCain was supposed to do. The law was stupid, but it was being correctly applied.”
He added, “So McCain’s advice might’ve been sound. If Arizona remained obstinate, the best move would be to seek out states with better Medicaid. It’s hollow advice … but when you ask someone powerless to change the applicable law, that’s what you usually get.”
Put all this aside for a moment — the state law is deserving of its own separate criticism — and there’s a huge media criticism to be made. Namely, Roy’s actions here are irresponsible for a regular social media user, and totally inexcusable for a journalist.
What was she thinking sharing this story without providing any sort of corroborating evidence? Her claim, which comes precisely because McCain has been diagnosed with brain cancer, has gone viral and has been shared by thousands of social media users.
Yet, there’s nothing to back her story except for a half-hearted promise to (maybe) follow up at a later time. Even then, there’s the likelihood that the letter, if it exists, wasn’t even written by the senator himself, and was written instead by a staffer. Then there’s the question of what it actually says, and the tone in which it was written.
There are so many unanswered questions, and the fact Roy didn’t even attempt to address them is a major failing on her part.
“I deleted an earlier tweet because it did not meet my employer’s standards for verification and publication,” she said Thursday afternoon after she scrubbed her McCain anecdote from her Twitter timeline. “I regret what I wrote and sincerely apologize.”
But hey — at least she got those sweet, sweet retweets.
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This post has been updated to include Roy’s apology.
