Don’t believe those Congressional emails

Times Union does important story on dam infrastructure

The Front Page

Morning Update

Monday, December 20, 2021

By Ken Tingley

The power of journalism is truth. In the past, that truth often had the ability to shame or embarrass elected officials when they did wrong. It could cost them votes and sometimes elections.

Sadly, national politicians have no shame today.

They don’t care if they are caught in a lie.

They call it “fake news” or a “witch hunt” when they are called out.

The political machine understands that many of you in rural communities don’t read the factually challenged tweets and Facebook posts that get a lot of attention. They decided to bring their message directly do your inbox where they would not be scrutinized by pesky fact- checks.

What members of Congress have been doing - including our own Rep. Elise Stefanik - is sending out emails to constituents that have no relationship with reality.

One Republican member of Congress recently wrote that Democrats want to establish a “one party socialist state.”

A Democrat in Congress wrote that the Jan. 6 inquiry was at imminent risk because Republicans “could force the whole investigation to end early.”

Neither of course was true.

Since members of the press rarely have access to those emails to you, the New York Times undertook a project to hold members of Congress accountable. In August, Its reporters signed up on campaign lists of 390 senators and representatives running for re-election in 2022.

Its reporters read more than 2,500 emails to track how widely false and misleading statements were being used.

“Both parties delivered heaps of hyperbole in their emails,” the Times reported. But ultimately, it found the Republicans were a little better at it than the Democrats. Republicans included misinformation in about 15 percent of their messages, compared to about 2 percent of Democrats. They also found that Republicans often spread the same unfounded claims while Democrats rarely did that.

One of the common email threads by Republicans accused the Justice Department of targeting parents as “domestic terrorists” for challenging the teaching of critical race theory. The Times reported it was shorthand by conservatives for how some schools cover race and racism. It could also be shorthand for challenges to pandemic-related restrictions.

“Parents are simply protesting a radial curriculum in public schools, and Biden wants the parents labeled terrorists,” read an email form Rep. Jake LaTurner of Kansas. “Will you consider donating now to help us fight back against this disgusting abuse of power.”

A version of the same email was used by five other members of Congress, including Rep. Elise Stefanik.

What the Justice Department actually did was send a message to the FBI asking it to address “threats” against school personnel and school board members. There was no targeting of parents who made complaints.

Emily Thorson, a political scientist at Syracuse University, told the Times she was concerned that these claims came from people of authority (congress members)  and are being repeated over and over again.

Frank Luntz, a Republican pollster, said to the Times that the people behind the emails have “realized the more extreme the claim, the better the response; the more it elicits red-hot anger, the more likely people donate. And it just contributes to the perversion of our democratic process. It contributes to the incivility and indecency of political behavior.”

Since most of our national politicians are lying in plain sight on Facebook and Twitter, it doesn’t take much of a leap to do it directly to constituents who may already support them.

I sleep soundly because I still trust in the journalists I worked with and followed over the past four decades.

If you are trusting in your elected officials - especially nationally - you should be worried.

Real  journalism

Rick Karlin and Emile Munson teammed up on some real journalism in the Times Union this past week.

They dug into the safety of dams around the region and found 147 dams in the Capital District that did not pass muster. They described what could happen when this infrastructure is ignored by recounting what happened in Fort Ann with the Hadlock Pond Dam collapse.

The T-U reported that the latest state evaluations found that Edgecomb Pond Dam in Bolton, the Loon Lake Dam in Chester and the Lock C-12 Dam in Whitehall were rated at “high” hazard risks. There are many others rated “intermediate” risks.

I urge you all to check out the story and the map of the dams around the region.

Tweet of the Day

Heather Gardner @heathergtv

West Virginia ranks: 50th in child care 50th in public health 45th in education 50th in infrastructure 48th in employment And Joe Manchin can’t vote yes on the Build Back Better bill cause of inflation?