Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri recently offered an alternative to a national $15 minimum wage, proposing a system whereby tax dollars would be used to boost incomes for low-earning workers.
It is a unique proposition, to say the least, one that deserves both criticism and praise on its merits.
However, rather than offer any sort of in-depth analysis of the senator’s proposal, the New York Times instead dispatched a team of reporters to hunt down his high school prom date and middle school principal for an expose titled “Josh Hawley Is ‘Not Going Anywhere.’ How Did He Get Here?”
Well, if anyone knows the answer to this question, it’s surely two individuals with whom Hawley was familiar some 20 to 30 years ago.
“In recent weeks,” the report reads, “some of Mr. Hawley’s old classmates and teachers have been aghast at his role in undermining confidence in America’s elections.”
“I’ve been very disappointed to see who he has become,” the senator’s prom date, Kristen Ruehter-Thompson, told the New York Times.
The woman identified by the newspaper as a one-time “close friend” of Hawley also says the senator’s father “was more of the influence,” adding, “There were always discussions of Rush Limbaugh.”
Ruehter-Thompson and a few others dredged up by the New York Times, including former Hawley classmate Andrea Randle and high school vocal music teacher Tim Crosson, recall that the senator signed their eighth grade yearbooks with variations of “Josh Hawley 2024,” which is maybe a little too on the nose to be believable.
The article then includes a quote from Hawley’s middle school principal, Barbara Weibling, who says, “I’m not surprised he’s a politician and that he’s shooting for the presidency.”
“The only thing is,” she adds, “I think he had a strict moral upbringing, and I was really disappointed he would suck the country into the lies that Trump told about the election. I just think that’s wrong.”
Aside from the fact that the quoted individuals obviously have nothing relevant to say about who Hawley is today, ultimately wasting the reader’s time, the problem with this kind of journalism is that it is so tired. Indeed, it seems we get this type of coverage from legacy newsrooms every time a high-profile conservative or Republican is at the top of the news cycle. Recall that the Guardian published an opinion article in 2020, during the Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett, titled “Amy Coney Barrett went to my all-girls high school. I hope she’s not confirmed.”
In what way is Barrett’s one-time classmate from decades ago qualified to comment on the conservative judge’s qualifications for the Supreme Court (or even Barrett’s legal jurisprudence for that matter)? In what way is their clearly expired relationship, if ever there was one, relevant to current news developments?
Likewise, the problem of highlighting people such as Ruehter-Thompson is that she apparently has exactly as much insight into the current thinking of the subject of the New York Times’s expose as the rest of us, which is to say not a lot.
Ruehter-Thompson and the rest of them clearly don’t know much about Hawley beyond what they remember when he was still a child, which leaves the reader with one unavoidable question: Who cares?
