If you want to know who the press favors in the 2020 Democratic primary, look for the candidate who enjoys the softest, most defensive coverage from mainstream newsrooms.
By that measurement, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is the clear favorite.
No other 2020 Democratic candidate is treated as gently as the senator from Massachusetts, as we were reminded again this week following the release of records that appear to contradict Warren’s oft-repeated claim that she was fired from her job as an elementary school teacher in 1971 for being “visibly pregnant.”
The Washington Free Beacon, which was the first to obtain the records, reports:
Minutes of an April 21, 1971, Riverdale Board of Education meeting obtained by the Washington Free Beacon show that the board voted unanimously on a motion to extend Warren a “2nd year” contract for a two-days-per-week teaching job. That job is similar to the one she held the previous year, her first year of teaching. Minutes from a board meeting held two months later, on June 16, 1971, indicate that Warren’s resignation was “accepted with regret.”
There are other reasons to question Warren’s assertion that the Riverdale principle “showed [her] the door” because she was pregnant. In 2007, the senator said she left because of a certification issue, suggesting that it was her choice to leave. A contemporaneous local news report also claimed she “resigned for personal reasons.”
It was not until after Warren was elected to the Senate in 2012 that she started telling people she was fired for being “visibly pregnant.”
To be fair, Warren could have been fired for being “visibly pregnant” and there could have been a certification problem on her end. But there is still the problem of the Riverdale minutes, the contemporaneous news reports, and Warren herself suggesting in 2007 that it was her decision to quit.
You would think that in this supposed golden-era of media fact-checking, when the truth matters now more than ever, that our very trustworthy and skeptical press would dig deeper into the matter.
Ha! Of course not. Newsrooms are hard at work this week running interference for their favorite 2020 Democratic candidate.
“Elizabeth Warren Details Her Account of Losing Teaching Job Because of Pregnancy,” the New York Times reported Tuesday, adding in its subhead, “Ms. Warren said she had grown more comfortable talking about her experience over the years, explaining why her description of the 1971 episode in her stump speeches differs from how she discussed it in the past.”
Oh, well in that case. Good enough for me!
The Washington Post published an op-ed, titled “Anatomy of a fake GOP scandal about Elizabeth Warren,” characterizing the Free Beacon report as fake news. The Post has published no original news coverage of the Riverdale documents. The most that the newspaper has done to report on the board minutes has been to host an Associated Press article on its website titled, “Warren stands by account of once being fired for pregnancy.”
“Elizabeth Warren stands by account of being pushed out of her first teaching job because of pregnancy,” reads a CBS News headline. The report includes the following passage:
“The rule was at five months you had to leave when you were pregnant. Now, if you didn’t tell anybody you were pregnant, and they didn’t know, you could fudge it and try to stay on a little bit longer,” Randall said. “But they kind of wanted you out if you were pregnant.”
Amazing. The two retired teachers CBS managed to hunt down have no memory of anything happening as Warren describes, but the newsgroup quotes them anyway as saying the senator’s story sounds close enough to the truth. Even more amazing than CBS publishing testimony that amounts to little more than “it rings true” is that certain pundits have highlighted the above passages, suggesting they actually vindicate Warren.
“CBS found a teacher who taught the same year Warren did at the same school, who couldn’t corroborate Warren’s exact circumstances but did confirm a culture of firing visibly pregnant teachers,” said New York Times opinion columnist Jamelle Bouie. Yes, that is the part of the report you definitely want to underscore.
I feel like I am taking crazy pills. There is no reason to give Warren the benefit of the doubt against contemporaneous news reports, documentation, and her own previous account of her departure from Riverdale. There is especially no reason to give her the benefit of the doubt after she has been caught already in one massive, glaring lie about her life story. Yet newsrooms are giving her exactly this.
The most shameless display of pro-Warren sycophancy this week comes from MSNBC, which brought on, of all people, EMILY’s List’s Vice President of Communications Christina Reynolds to discuss the 1971 education board minutes.
“There may be multiple reasons why she didn’t come back to that job, but I think what’s clear is we know — listen, women were not allowed to get a credit card without their husband’s approval pretty recently,” said Reynolds.
Look, I understand people like Reynolds are in the business of supporting pro-abortion politicians like Warren. But MSNBC has no good reason to host her during news programming hours to run defense for Warren — unless, of course, that is the entire point.
“It holds water to me that maybe that’s not something she wanted to come out with initially,” Reynolds continued, praising the senator for starting an “important” conversation.
Speaking of carrying water, the press’ reflexive defenses of Warren this week are evidence they know a thing or two about it.
