‘A Lot of Grit’: Media Love Affair with Triathlete Jack Smith Begins

Welcome back to Forgotten Fact Checks, a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we recap the thick praise the media has lavished on special counsel Jack Smith, look at a Washington Post take on LGBT rights in the Middle East, and cover more media misses.

Jack Smith: The Media’s Latest Hero

Now that his investigations into Donald Trump have yielded a pair of indictments against the former president, special counsel Jack Smith has been anointed by Democrats as their latest golden boy.

Attorney general Merrick Garland tasked Smith with handling the investigation into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.

Trump is facing 42 felony counts in the classified documents case and an additional four counts in the 2020 election case.

In the wake of Trump’s third indictment last week, the media has been fawning over Smith’s superhero-like athletic and intellectual prowess.

Smith’s participation in triathlons has inexplicably become a major highlight to reporters covering the legal proceedings.

CBS anchor Norah O’Donnell dedicated a portion of the network’s coverage of Trump’s arraignment last week to discussing Smith’s personal hobbies.

“I want to spend a moment on Jack Smith because he is essentially who Donald Trump is up against. And multiple of these indictments — the two, of course, the classified documents and January 6 the one, they’re sitting across from each other inside this courtroom,” O’Donnell said. “Jack Smith is somebody who has run and has competed in over 100 triathlons. He was reportedly at one point hit when he was on his bike by a truck and ten weeks later, he ran another triathlon.”

She added: “This is a man of a lot of grit and a lot of determination. And even what we have seen in these indictments is just a sliver of what they know and what his prosecutorial team knows, right?”

CBS News correspondent Robert Costa responded that Smith’s “aggressive approach to his personal health and exercise correlates to how he approaches his persecution and his strategy.”

The New York Times came to a similar conclusion, publishing an article that explained Smith’s “competitiveness is not limited to the law.” No, the Times also wants readers to know he’s “an avid runner and cyclist who began competing in triathlons in 2002, even though he was initially a weak swimmer who could barely complete a single lap. Since then, he has participated in at least nine full Iron Man triathlons, including in Germany, Brazil, Canada and Denmark.”

The Washington Post delivers yet another hard hitting report on Smith, who is “known to enjoy biking and has completed more than 100 triathlons and at least nine Ironman competitions around the world.”

Glenn Greenwald highlighted several other examples of the media worship of Smith, including from The Bulwark, which offered a report on Smith’s “steely-eyed gaze” and The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell, who took to X during Trump’s arraignment to share an important bit of news: “Trump is sitting in special counsel Jack Smith’s direct line of sight in the courtroom — and Smith almost certainly just looked at Trump.”

Despite celebrating Smith, MSNBC lamented Trump’s third arraignment as a “somber moment for most Americans.” CNN followed suit, calling it a “sad day for America.”

But MSNBC wasted no time using the latest indictment to gin up fear and outrage among its viewers, with Ali Velshi saying the 2024 race is “not the moment” to have policy debates, but instead will be all about “preserving democracy.”

“This is a candidate who is threatening people, promising retribution, talking that way dictators and authoritarians talk,” he said of Trump. “This election isn’t possibly about policy. You know me. I’m an economics guy. I like to talk about inflation. I’d like to talk about all these kinds of things, but that’s not what this is. That is not the moment we’re at.”

“So, if you like lower taxes, you like less regulation, this isn’t the moment to have that debate. This is a different debate,” Velshi added, to the agreement of panelist Joanne Freeman, who agreed the election is about “preserving democracy” and “bolstering” it.

Headline Fail of the Week

Washington Post reporter Mohamad El Chamaa suggests in a recent article that Middle Eastern countries that have shut down local LGBT pride events are actually “echoing efforts by prominent American conservatives.”

“Anti-LGBTQ backlash grows across Middle East, echoing U.S. culture wars,” the report says.

“Across the Middle East, LGBTQ communities face a growing crackdown, echoing efforts by prominent American conservatives to restrict the rights of gay and transgender people and erase their influence from society,” the article says, citing incidents in Lebanon, Jordan and Turkey.

While the report notes LGBT rights are a “legal gray area” in the aforementioned countries, it fails to mention the Middle Eastern countries where homosexuality is a crime.

Media Misses

• CNN contributor suggested Republicans are being racist and sexist when they criticize Kamala Harris. “I’ll just say, I think that this is happening for a couple of reasons: Most people don’t know what vice presidents do and now she is a history-maker. She is a woman. She is a black woman. And it’s the easy thing to do to say, ‘She’s the attack dog, go after her.'”
• Meanwhile, Harris was out this week creating new material for her critics. At an event in D.C., she imparted this bit of wisdom, “And so for years we have worked to expand investment in community banks because, you see, community banks specialize in providing loans and financial assistance to small business owners, in particular those in overlooked and underserved communities, including rural communities. And as the name suggests, community banks are in the community.” She offered a similarly jumbled comment when she spoke alongside Mongolian prime minister Oyun-Erdene Luvsannamsrai at the White House and discussed space exploration. “Today, I am pleased to announce that the next steps in our work together will be about further expanding our partnership. In particular, we will discuss the work that we will do together to strengthen our space cooperation,” Harris said. “You and I spoke briefly about the beginning of the next era — and, for you, what that means, in terms of your leadership and your vision for the future, and certainly, strengthening our space cooperation would be a part of that agenda — including, of course, using our space cooperation to think about how we strengthen the economic prosperity and development of our nations.”
• While there are valid criticisms of Jason Aldean’s new song, Try That In A Small Town, New York Times reporter Ben Sisario had to reach pretty far in uncovering a new one: that the song is a “call to racist vigilantism.” “Aldean has denied that ‘Try That’ is ‘a pro-lynching song,’ or that race plays any part in the song’s lyrics,” the piece reads, despite the song making no mention of race.
• Florida governor Ron DeSantis clashed with NBC News reporter Dasha Burns during an interview this week when Burns incorrectly tried to claim that Democrats do not support abortion until birth. The DeSantis War Room quickly followed up the interview with a fact-check: