It Matters That Mainstream Media Missed Katie Britt's Lie
Last week's SOTU response contained a major falsehood and big name news outlets got beat to it by a guy with a newsletter and a TikTok account.
Hey everyone. Parker here.
In her GOP response to last week’s State of the Union, Sen. Katie Britt (R-AL) shared a harrowing story of a young woman sex-trafficked from the age of 12, implying Biden's border policies were to blame. [Bolded emphasis mine]
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 shoebox 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.
Hearing that, you’d be under the impression that a.) this happened either during Biden’s time as president or, to be generous to Britt, his time as vice president; b.) that this involved cartels; and c.) that this happened in the U.S. It turns out that none of that was true.
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Independent journalist Jonathan Katz's investigation revealed that the story, related to Karla Jacinto Romero, occurred from 2004 to 2008 in Mexico, far from the U.S. border, during George W. Bush's presidency.
Contrary to Britt's claim, the crimes weren't linked to drug cartels but a “professional pimp,” and involved foreign sex tourists. Britt's misuse of Jacinto's story, which she encountered at a press conference and not through personal discovery, unjustly attributed blame to Biden and/or Democratic policies. Despite the clear disconnection from Biden’s tenure as president or vice president, Britt had repeatedly used this narrative for over a year without being challenged — until Katz's reporting revealed the truth, leading to a reluctant acknowledgment from Britt's office.
Here’s Katz’s TikTok debunk of Britt’s story:
This ordeal highlights the importance of scrutinizing political rhetoric and the misuse of victim stories for political gain. Where was the mainstream press on this? Why did it take an independent journalist like Katz digging into the details of this story for it to come to light that the points within were built on misrepresentations, if not outright lies?
Journalist Maria Bustillos interviewed Katz about that question for Flaming Hydra, a writers’ collective of which Katz is also a member. It’s a great read, and I’ll excerpt a few sections below:
“There Should Be Newspapers That We Work at Where We Do This” (Flaming Hydra, A conversation with Jonathan Katz, 3/10/24)
Maria Bustillos: How is it that something this important got past everyone? You mentioned in your TikTok that she'd been repeating the story for a long time. Do we know for how long?
Jonathan M. Katz: The trip was in January '23 and there were hits all throughout 2023. Some of it was on her own website, and some in interviews with other people.
So yeah, I just plugged it into Google, honestly. I was just like, What's going on? Is there any information here? I think the first thing I typed in was just sort of like, “Senator Britt rape” or something along those lines, or “rape border,” and all these different things came up and as far as I can tell, no one had dug in.
In fairness to everyone else, this was certainly the most prominent space in which she’d ever told the story. So I don't know what kind of coverage the Times is doing of Alabama politics, or of the junior senator from Alabama.
Dude, she's a senator.
Yeah, this is true. It's a good point. I'm not trying to make excuses for them. I'm just trying to sort of think through it.
It's somebody's job; she's a senator?
Yeah. No, this is true. This is true. She's not a senator I cover... I just watched the State of the Union, and then I kept watching while the rebuttal came on and I was like, this is weird… very weird.
“It’s somebody’s job.” Exactly! Why didn’t the Associated Press, New York Times, Washington Post, or any other news organization have this story? Would any of them have eventually fact-checked that portion of her speech? Would they have all just let it slide?
This reminds me a lot of what happened in 2022 as the story of then-Rep.-Elect George Santos (R-NY) began to unravel. The Times reported on it, but missed it until after the election was over (and proceeded to get really irritated at the implication that the New York Times should do in-depth pre-election reporting on New York congressional races).
This is a fraught time for the press. As news organizations nationwide continue to cut staff, we must hold the legacy outlets that are thriving to a higher standard. There’s no reason for the New York Times not to have a fact-check on Britt’s comments ready. I get that they’re focused on the really important stories out there, but this was an inexcusable miss.
What’s even worse is the Times’s reluctance to accept that they fell flat. One of the paper’s updates said that “questions [arose]” about the speech and that it “wasn’t fully accurate,” which is a bit of an understatement.
Even the paper’s eventual headline on the story undersells just how bad it was.
She delivered a prepared address that millions of people saw, built around a massive lie. That’s more than just “misleading.” It’s the type of lie that politicians should be shamed out of office for making and should be treated like a scandal. Instead, it’s just business as usual at the Times.
If they missed this, what else are they missing? Getting beaten to the punch by someone without any of mainstream media’s resources demonstrates a lack of focus on those organizations’ parts and is a failure of basic accountability. By allowing stories to run without calling out the lie, these news organizations are helping Britt misinform the public. She exploited a victim’s story to shape a political narrative around a hot-button issue, and if not for Katz, she may have gotten away with it.
We shouldn’t have to rely on independent journalists with TikTok accounts and newsletters to catch these lies. That’s the point.
That’s it for me today. I’ll be back with another edition of The Present Age tomorrow.
Parker
So this is international sex tourism, where American men go to Mexico to rape underaged Mexican girls, and it gets twisted to serve a lie where Americans are somehow being victimized by people from South of the border. It's hard to get more fucked-up than that, but it is only Monday, just give 'em time.
Everyone expected Saturday Night Live to cover Britt, but I was a bit pleasantly surprised that they picked up on the falsity of the story. Before the New York Times?