The bully plays the victim

By Will Doolittle

Stefanik’s attack on ‘the media’ is all wrong

It's too bad Ruby Cramer, a reporter for the Washington Post, didn’t check with reporters and editors from Elise Stefanik’s district about her scapegoating of the local press, with her and her staff calling us vicious and sexist and saying we questioned whether she could do the job after she had a baby.

None of that is true.

Here is an excerpt from Cramer’s story:

“There had always been little things she noticed. In her first election, as she faced a series of male candidates, newspapers printed her age without fail, even when they didn’t for the men.”

This is easy to check by going to the Post-Star’s website, searching “Elise Stefanik Bill Owens” and going back to the earliest stories the paper published.

The first one, published on July 20, 2013, is headlined “Potential challengers to Owens exploring run,” with a subhead: “Republican businesswoman with White House experience among possible congressional candidates.”

The story includes a photo of Elise Stefanik but does not include her age.

The second story, published Aug. 6, 2013, concerns her campaign announcement and does include her age, but the several subsequent stories — the first of hundreds — do not. Stefanik is identified as “a businesswoman from Willsboro” and “a businesswoman and former Bush administration White House aide from Willsboro.”

The Post-Star, the paper most central to Stefanik’s district, did not “print her age without fail.” Mostly, the paper left her age out of stories. The Post-Star never questioned her ability to do the job because of her age or her status as a parent.

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When Stefanik was at her youngest — the first time she ran — The Post-Star did not endorse her. It opted for a Green Party candidate from Glens Falls who had no chance of winning. When she had her son, The Post-Star congratulated her in an editorial. I should know, because I wrote it.

The charge that the paper made personal, “vicious” attacks against her is false but not surprising because that is the sort of thing that Stefanik’s top aide, Alex DeGrasse, is infamous for. Cramer could have called around about DeGrasse, or just looked back at his Twitter feed, to discover that he revels in calling people names, impugning reputations in slanderous ways and kicking people who are down. Instead, she allows him to express his sorrow over a 2021 blog post in the Times Union — written by community members, not newspaper employees — that made a crass remark about Stefanik being “childless.” She does not mention that the Times Union editor not only removed the post after it was brought to his attention but also took down the entire blog.

The narrative pushed by Stefanik and her staff — that “the media” has been unfair to her and picked on her — is false from top to bottom. When it comes to the Post-Star, the opposite is true — the paper printed every tiny press release her office put out, no matter how lacking in newsworthiness, frequently with a photo of her. That sort of coverage literally cannot be bought.

Cramer could very easily have discovered the truth, either by calling a few of the editors at the papers in Stefanik’s district or, even easier, by searching their websites. A five-minute search on the Post-Star’s site shows that the “printed her age without fail” claim is a bald-faced lie.

The story is well-written and, perhaps, the reporter was given an assignment to write it from Stefanik’s point of view — a puff piece. But it shows a certain condescension toward small newspapers that the Washington Post felt compelled to check with teachers and administrators at Stefanik’s prep school, Albany Academy, but not with the small-town journalists she and her staff were villainizing.

Stefanik portrays herself as a victim of “the media,” a charge that, for some reason, never seems to require evidence. But she is the Goliath in this story. Many of the reporters and editors who covered her, like me and Ken Tingley and Maury Thompson at The Post-Star, have left daily newspaper journalism and have not been replaced. The newspapers in her district have been devastated by technological and cultural change and, with most of their newsroom workers laid off, are now a shadow of their former selves. These are local jobs — why hasn’t Elise Stefanik been an advocate for the survival of small-town newspapers?

A free press is also supposed to be a pillar of our free society, considered so important by the men who wrote the Constitution that it is in the First Amendment. But our congresswoman spends a lot of energy attacking it and sometimes, as in this case, she gets help from the free press itself.