Reporters Missed Katie Britt's Huge Lie; What Else Are They Missing?
The political media thinks what Britt did during her official State of the Union response was outrageous. Wait’ll they hear about this other guy and his whole political party...
I’ll get to him in a minute, but first a quick recap.
Both President Biden and Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) said many things during their speeches on Thursday, but most of the people who cover politics professionally for the country’s elite news outlets seem to recall little of their substantive remarks. They came prepared only to adjudicate performances, not assess the content of words for merit or truthfulness.
What they know in their bones is that Biden’s speech was feisty and partisan, while Britt’s was stylized and uncanny. They know Biden called Republicans out for disloyalty to the Constitution, and tussled with heckling right-wing House members. All of them know he used the term “illegal” as a noun but few could confidently recapitulate, or assess for accuracy, his explanation of the border-security bill Republicans killed at Donald Trump’s insistence.
Same with Britt. Her bizarre affectations are seared into the media’s collective imagination, so clownish and self-discrediting that her actual words lost political relevance.
That is, until the independent journalist Jonathan Katz noticed something off about a story she told, the purpose of which was to blame Joe Biden for the victimization of a Mexican woman who’d been sex-trafficked as a child.
“We know that President Biden didn’t just create this border crisis. He invited it with 94 executive actions in his first 100 days. When I took office, I took a different approach. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas. That’s where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at the age of 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoe box of a room, and they sent men through that door over and over again for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be okay with this happening in a Third World country. This is the United States of America, and it is past time, in my opinion, that we start acting like it. President Biden’s border policies are a disgrace.”
With a few minutes of straightforward research, Katz exposed this as a towering deception. Britt did travel to Del Rio, and she did speak with a woman named Karla Jacinto Romero who shared this story. But the events Romero described took place from 2004-2008, during the George W. Bush administration. And even then they had nothing to do with U.S. immigration policy: They didn’t take place in the United States or even near the United States. They took place in central Mexico.
An embarrassed press corps has since pressed Britt to explain herself, and to my mind she has two big questions to answer: first, why she sought to deceive the American public; second, why she thought it was acceptable to steal and contort a victim’s story to do so. But from there, reporters can demand explanations for a huge pile of unaddressed lies, which have become coin of the GOP realm.
THROUGH BRITTED TEETH
Having revealed that they are still capable of treating deception as a scandal, reporters might, for instance, take interest in the leader of Britt’s party, Donald Trump.