Political journalism’s problem of historical illiteracy is as “catastrophic” as ever, and I don’t think it’s going to get better any time soon.
NBC News reporter Marianna Sotomayor stepped in it this weekend when she claimed incorrectly that 2020 would be the first year that more than one woman has run for president in the United States.
“For the first time in history, there is more than one female politician running for president. Sen. Klobuchar became the fifth woman to announce today,” she said in a since-deleted tweet.
That’s not even close to being true.
In 2016, the field of presidential contenders included not just former Democratic Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, but also Republican businesswoman Carly Fiorina and Green Party candidate Jill Stein. It was just a little over three years ago that women in the United States broke the record for most presidential candidates. How easily we forget!
It’d be one thing if Sotomayor was a food critic or a business journalist, but she covers politics for NBC!
To her credit, she at least corrected her false tweet roughly 15 hours later, writing, “Correcting an earlier tweet. What I should have written is that the field of Democratic women presidential candidates is the largest in history.” Yes! Yes, that is the correct take.
It seems like everyone in political journalism today wants to be the person with the “Big Important Observation” for whatever is happening at that moment in the news cycle. The problem is: Few, if any, in the political press are willing to do the hard work of being well-informed enough to have an observation that is worth making.
