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1. Two months ago I wrote that the "issue" of Elizabeth Warren's Native American identity was going to become the "But her emails" of 2020. Every word is still true: washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-lin…
So let me issue a challenge to reporters...
So let me issue a challenge to reporters...
2. I dare you to include in one of your stories about Warren an explanation of why this is important. Not politically important, not because it "overshadows" other things or because it "raises [unspecified] questions"...
3. ...but an explanation of why this is substantively meaningful to judging the kind of president Warren would be. I've never seen a single journalist try. Probably because it can't be done....
4. To be clear, I'm not saying she made no mistakes or there are no grounds to criticize her. But the question of how she described her ethnicity is now being framed by pretty much every political reporter as the single most important thing about Elizabeth Warren...
5. It is getting to the point where it is mentioned in EVERY story about her, no matter what she's doing or saying. And as usual, reporters are describing their own decisions as some sort of force of nature that exists outside themselves and they're powerless to resist...
6. When you write that "The issue of her identity threatens to overshadow her campaign," that's because YOU are deciding it's so important that it must be discussed in every story about her. You could decide otherwise, but you aren't.
7. You can like Warren or not, you can support her or somebody else. But the idea that an "issue" like this one is how we decide whether someone should be president is positively bonkers. Especially...
8. Especially given how miserably most of the media failed in 2016. Faced with the possibility that perhaps the single most corrupt human being in the United States of America could become president, they centered their coverage on whether Hillary Clinton used the wrong email.
9. If you disagree with any of this, I repeat: Try to articulate not just what Warren's identity tells us about the kind of president she would be, but why it must be the single most important issue around her candidacy. Can you do it? /end
