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Now and then, the anonymous, sardonic NYT Pitchbot account will post a “Dems in Disarray” message on social media. Sometimes there’s a news peg for it, but just as often, it comes out of nowhere. Pitchbot can now retire the phrase, because our political media pick it up just as frequently, under the guise of something they might call “news analysis”—as we saw in the Michigan Senate campaign.
You’ll recall that last weekend, Haley Stevens, the Democrat who had narrowly lost to Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan’s primary for the United States Senate, endorsed the Republican in the race, Mike Rogers. Stevens said she had been snubbed by El-Sayed’s campaign, and that she was troubled by his stance on Israel. That followed days of sniping between the Stevens and El-Sayed camps.
The conflict led our press to tell the public that This Very Important Issue Is Throwing the Democrats into Disarray. El-Sayed “went so scorched earth on Haley Stevens that he’s having a lot of trouble putting that coalition back together again,” said Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark. “Democrats are still struggling to unite behind El-Sayed,” reported PBS. Their “fragile truce is shattering as El-Sayed and former primary rival Rep. Haley Stevens reignite their fraught feud,” warned Politico.
Then, on Tuesday, El-Sayed thrashed Rogers by 7 percentage points. He coasted in Democratic strongholds like Wayne County (which includes Detroit), where his margin of victory was around 44 percentage points, and Washtenaw County (which includes Ann Arbor), where he beat Rogers by 50 points. His margins there even exceeded those rung up by Elissa Slotkin, a Democratic Senate candidate, who beat Rogers in 2024.
And this shouldn’t have come as a huge surprise. In a Marist poll a few weeks before Stevens’s announcement, El-Sayed was getting the support of 95 percent of Democrats.
Recency bias is a powerful drug. Our political press ought to read the warning label before delivering their hot takes.
Every so often, a news organization faces up to its past and confronts not just a single screwed-up story, but a systemic failure of judgment on an important subject. The latest example comes from Serbia’s Radio Television of Vojvodina (RTV), which recently issued as searing an apology as you’ll ever hear from a newsroom. It arrived shortly after voters refused to re-elect Aleksandar Vučić, the strongman who had held high positions in the government for more than a decade. During his rule, RTV had fostered a reputation for dismissing independent journalists and quashing investigations that might have displeased the regime.
No more, anchor Goran Eror told viewers: “For many years, this public broadcaster failed to fulfill its role. We kept silent, turned a blind eye, provided one-sided information, and reported uncritically. The right questions were not asked—or no questions were asked at all. And for that, we owe our viewers an apology.” The station then aired video of crowds celebrating the election result—footage RTV hadn’t shown the day before.
RTV’s record was troubling. Two years ago, a roof collapsed at a Serbian train station, killing sixteen people and triggering massive demonstrations. Still, as Predrag Novković, RTV’s program director, told me in an email, “we didn’t report on the student protests and citizen gatherings that lasted more than a year” after the incident. “We avoided stories about high-level corruption, police violence, and legal abuse.” But the day after the election that Vučić lost, “a group of RTV employees went to the general manager and asked to remove the editor in chief.” A new editor “proposed this apology at the start of the news, and many colleagues supported it,” Novković said.
It would have been better if this had come earlier, while Vučić was still in power. Doing it now could be viewed as a ploy to curry favor with an audience whose political preferences are already known. Still, we should applaud any institution—especially one so closely tied to the state—that comes to terms with the past.
And look again at those terms of RTV’s apology: “Kept silent.” “Turned a blind eye.” “Reported uncritically.” Will any US news organization ever issue a similar nostra maxima culpa? Perhaps. But we might have to wait until after Inauguration Day, 2029.
The Trump Justice Department doesn’t always follow what we so innocently used to call “norms,” but its raid on the home of Ilhan Omar, a Democrat who represents Minnesota in the United States House of Representatives, less than a month before the election, was a stunning event. We’ve known for years that Trump has a particular animus for Omar, but raiding the home of a politician over years-old allegations, so close to the end of a campaign, was highly unusual.
The press, understandably, wants to get to the bottom of it, and so last week the New York Times published a piece under the headline “Ilhan Omar Investigation Involves New Scrutiny of Long-Disputed Marriage.” It was, as Oliver Twist would say, thin gruel.
The core allegation against Omar, which has been investigated for years, is that she married her brother to get him a green card. (She has never been charged, and her spokesperson recently denied the claim as a “baseless, disgusting conspiracy theory.”)
With that in hand, the Times went forward, and things started getting shaky right from the second paragraph. The story states that investigators “found some evidence” that Omar’s 2009 marriage “was fraudulent.” From there, various allegations in the story are attributed to unnamed “current and former officials.” Throughout the piece, hard evidence is hard to find. Instead, the story rehashes many previous accusations, filled with words like “murmurs,” “rumblings,” “murky,” and such phrases as “evidence suggesting,” “it is also unclear,” and “speculation…has shadowed.”
The fact is, we—and, evidently, the Times—don’t fully know what happened here. Omar has, by her own account, been married multiple times, and it’s possible that somewhere along the way, she entered into a sham marriage. But as the article mentions, there isn’t an obvious path to charging her with a crime. It’s also worth noting that the agencies involved—the FBI and, in particular, the Department of Homeland Security—have chalked up a dismal track record of late when it comes to providing accurate information about investigations or crimes. This story has some interesting threads, but the Times doesn’t have the goods. It ought to wait to publish until it does.
In May of 2025, a company called CoreCivic Inc. asked the State of Minnesota if officials would like to buy its old, long-vacant prison for seventy-five million dollars. The state declined, citing the difficulty in staffing the prison in the remote town of Appleton. That was a lucky break for CoreCivic, as reporters at KARE 11, the NBC affiliate in Minneapolis, discovered. Last August, the US Department of Homeland Security popped up as a buyer, and closed on a new price: four hundred and ninety-five million dollars, or more than six times what the company had suggested to the state. As KARE reported, CoreCivic has been on a roll recently, having sold prisons in California and Kansas for a combined sum of more than 1.7 billion dollars. Apparently, they’re good at real estate, but as KARE notes, this may also demonstrate a sweet return on investment of the company’s five-hundred-thousand-dollar contribution a few years ago to the Trump inaugural committee.
Because I have no life, I spent part of a beautiful Saturday afternoon perusing local Michigan websites to see how they were playing that conflict among Democrats over the Senate race. While on MLive, which covers various communities in the state, I came across this Justine Lofton banger about—are you ready?—a couple dozen sturgeon trapped in murky, shallow pools beneath a dam on the Ontonagon River. Here’s what happened: A twelve-year-old boy discovered the fish and alerted authorities. Before long, some state fisheries technicians, along with members of the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community, came to the rescue. You have to be pretty ingenious to figure out how to yank a bunch of decades-old, thirty-pound fish out of one body of water and keep them alive while schlepping them for up to twenty-five minutes to cleaner waters. But they did it, the sturgeon survived it, and you should read it.
Hat tip to Adam Johnson of the Citations Needed podcast for his notes on the El-Sayed election.If you have a suggestion for this column, please send it to laurelsanddarts@cjr.org. We can’t acknowledge all submissions, but we will mention you if we use your idea. For more on Laurels and Darts, please click here. To receive this and other CJR newsletters in your inbox, please click here.
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