Cookie Monster
By Gadi Dechter
Media reports of Oreo cookies employed as a racist taunt during a 2002 Maryland gubernatorial campaign debate have recently come under dispute. Now, the media that reported the story—in many instances without independent confirmation or transparent sourcing—is struggling to explain how a racially charged (and apparently controversial) claim by Republican politicians became an accepted fact in major newspapers across the country.
At issue is the question of whether Republican Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, who is black, was pelted by, mocked with, or otherwise in the presence of Oreo cookies, which are white on the inside, at a raucous Baltimore debate between then-gubernatorial candidates Robert Ehrlich and Kathleen Kennedy Townsend.
Steele is now running for the U.S. Senate. The Oreo story acquired fresh political currency last month when an Internet blogger posted a doctored photograph of Steele as a minstrel caricature, prompting Republicans to promote as a campaign talking-point various incidents in which the black conservative has been the victim of perceived racial slights.
After UMBC political science professor and liberal commentator Thomas Schaller expressed doubts earlier this month about the veracity of the Oreo-slinging incident, Ehrlich decried what he described as “dangerous” attempts at historical “revisionism.” During a Nov. 12 appearance on WBAL (1090 AM) radio, the governor insisted that Oreos were indeed thrown and urged listeners: “Just go ask people who were there.”
Sun reporter Andy Green was already doing just that. In a story published the next day, Green quoted several nonpartisan sources who were at the event and who disputed the governor’s account and that of his spokesman, Paul Schurick, who is quoted in the story as saying, “It was raining Oreos. They were thick in the air like locusts. I was there.”
“That’s insane,” says former Sun reporter Sarah Koenig, who covered Ehrlich in the 2002 campaign, and who says she didn’t see any Oreos that night. “The air was not thick with anything except political bullshit.”
In the mini media furor that has followed Green’s article, Steele himself revised Schurick’s Oreo story, telling WTOP-AM radio in Washington that he never saw a “barrage of cookies,” and only recalled seeing “one or two” cookies roll up to his feet. Ehrlich told the Associated Press that he didn’t personally see the cookies being thrown.
So what actually happened? “The answer seems to be,” the Sun’s Green says, “that it is not possible to get a definitive answer one way or another.”
And yet for three years, many reporters, columnists, editorial pages, and pundits have produced definitive-sounding reports of the Oreo story, despite there being no published news report that has independently confirmed that Oreo cookies were even present at the debate.
A LexisNexis search shows that only people directly connected to the Republican Party have ever been quoted attesting to the accuracy of any version of the Oreo story.
That hasn’t stopped The Washington Times, The Washington Post, The Sun, the (London) Daily Telegraph, the Associated Press, The San Diego Union-Tribune, The Chicago Sun-Times, and this paper, among others, from reporting as fact, without transparent sourcing or attribution, some version of the incident over the years.
Of the two newspapers that have most frequently discussed the event, the Sun’s reporting has been largely circumspect, typically reporting the incident as a claim made by Republicans. The Washington Times, by contrast, has more freely propagated the most incendiary version of the incident, repeatedly reporting as a given fact that Steele was “pelted” by cookies at the debate.
“This is why we as journalists have such a hard time getting the public to trust us and [getting] people to talk to us,” says WTOP investigative reporter Mark Segraves, who last week broadcast a story harshly critical of Times reporter S.A. Miller’s articles on the subject.
Miller was at the debate in 2002 but acknowledges he didn’t see any Oreos. In neither of his two stories about Steele being “pelted” with Oreos does Miller cite his sources. “I heard it that night,” he tells City Paper. “I can’t remember where I heard it. It was repeated by people on the Ehrlich campaign.” Miller defends his reporting on the grounds that he has “no reason to doubt that it happened. It fits right in with everything else I know happened that night.”
Miller’s first “pelting” account was published Nov. 2 of this year, two days after an unsigned Times editorial also criticized “Steele-bashers” who “threw Oreo cookies” at the lieutenant governor.
The Times reports appear to have been influential. Days later, the verb “pelt” appeared in attribution-free accounts of the event by syndicated Union-Tribune columnist Ruben Navarrette Jr., the Chicago Sun-Times’ Mary Mitchell, the Times’ Tom Knott, and in editorials in Investor’s Business Daily, The Augusta Chronicle, and again in the Times.
“I think it entered the lexicon and people remember: Oh yeah, the debate where people threw the Oreo cookies at Steele,” says Post reporter Laurie Montgomery, who was at the 2002 debate and says she didn’t see any Oreos there. “It’s very sloppy, but it happens sometimes.” She adds, “I hope I didn’t do it.”
...
Full Story:
citypaper.com |
