For Republican Candidates, Media Hit Jobs Are a Fact of Life

T he press’s coverage of Republican vice-presidential nominee J. D. Vance has a peculiar quality to it.

Marc Caputo, national political reporter for the Bulwark, last week put it well: The reporting is not merely “negative” but “reliably” so.

Case in point: The Associated Press on September 5 grossly misrepresented the Ohio senator’s response to a school shooting in Georgia in which four people were murdered.

“JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security,” said an AP headline.

The Hill likewise declared, “JD Vance calls for tightened school security, calls school shootings a ‘fact of life.’”

The Washington Post went with “JD Vance calls reality of school shootings a bleak ‘fact of life.’”

Here’s what Vance actually said (my emphasis):

I don’t like to admit this. I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools. We’ve got to bolster security, so if a psycho wants to walk through the front door and kill a bunch of children, they’re not able.

He also said: “If these psychos are going to go after our kids, we’ve got to be prepared for it. We don’t have to like the reality that we live in, but it is the reality we live in. We’ve got to deal with it.”

A reporter had asked Vance, who called the shooting an “awful tragedy” and described the alleged gunman as “an absolute barbarian,” what, specifically, could be done to curb or stop entirely the number of school shootings. The senator said prayer and more robust school-security measures are the most apparent immediate solutions.

Vance acknowledged, however, that he would not want to send one of his children to a school where such security measures are necessary.

“I don’t want my kids to go to school in a place where they feel like you’ve got to have additional security,” he said, “but that is increasingly the reality that we live in.”

“Having strict gun laws is not the thing that is going to solve this problem,” Vance argued. And he said what is inarguable: “No parent should have to deal with this. No child should have to deal with this.”

The vice-presidential nominee also called for sympathy and prayers for the victims of the Georgia shooting.

Vance’s meaning was clear. It was clear what he said, what he meant, and what he intended to communicate to his audience. There was nothing untoward, cold, or callous about his remarks.

Yet the initial headlines, with the AP first out of the gate, clearly suggest a heartless and tone-deaf response. Partisan operatives all too eager for an anti-Vance hit piece seemed to think so. Democratic officials from California governor Gavin Newsom to two-time failed presidential candidate Hillary Clinton to the Harris campaign wasted no time in harshly condemning Vance for something he never said.

What happened?

The AP’s initial report included Vance’s quotes in full context. Reporters and editors knew what Vance said. They — we hope — understood his meaning. Why, then, did we get the headlines that we did — headlines that Democrats eagerly added to their election-year arsenals? The AP later deleted its tweet with the distorting headline and revised the headline atop the report. But why did it put itself in this position in the first place?

The AP’s new headline reads, “JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and calls for better security.” Its new tweet bears the same headline. Unfortunately, the damage has already been done. Indeed, by the time the AP deleted the tweet associated with the original article, it had racked up an impressive 2.5 million views on the social-media platform. The new tweet with the more accurate headline attracted far fewer views.

So how did the AP manage to screw this up, especially when it had the quotes in hand?

It’s almost as if the “mistake” was no mistake at all.