With the political season ramping up, the volume — and the accompanying velocity — of sleight-of-hand, obfuscation, deceits and even outright lies continues its long run toward a November crescendo. It’s rampant among rank amateurs on social media, of course, but in our existing political culture, it’s become more common among those who call themselves “communications professionals” to dip their toes into that morass as well.
I saw it close-up last week. Like most newspapers, we get scores of press releases via email. The vast majority get tossed, with a delete key, into a digital dustbin. The fact is newspapers very rarely publish press releases as they’re submitted; if any are relevant and newsworthy, we’ll usually re-work them into a short staff or contributed piece, or “localize” them, as we phrase it, into a full-blown story.
But one arrived this past Friday morning and referenced — much to my surprise — the very newspaper you’re reading now. It came from the desk of the Press Secretary for the N.C. Republican Party, a fellow named Tim Wigginton, and began thusly: “The Chatham News and Record published an anonymous OP-ED from a victim of child sexual abuse detailing her opposition to the liberal majority of North Carolina’s Supreme Court. This letter highlights the importance of electing judges who will put kids over predators, unlike the current liberal majority.”
It took me by surprise, for sure. Aside from the whopping six mistakes I counted in the opening paragraph, I was at a loss trying to comprehend what was so newsworthy as to warrant a full-blown GOP release.
The fact was (and this is just for starters — there’s not enough space here to tell the whole story), we: 1) published a letter to the editor, not an “OP-ED,” and 2) the letter wasn’t anonymous. Perhaps small distinctions to most, but there are major differences between a letter and an “opposite-editorial page” piece for a newspaper; in addition, the letter wasn’t anonymous — it was written and then signed on behalf of a victim of sexual assault whose name we agreed to withhold for obvious reasons. No newspaper I know of would ever publish an anonymous op-ed piece.
The release referenced a letter published in last week’s edition, with a link to it online, so when I reached out to Wigginton to alert him to the errors, for some reason I naively expected he’d send out a simple correction.
That’s when things got squirrelly.
His nonsensical replies to my initial and then subsequent follow-up messages (including a promise to correct the release online, which I noticed Monday night he’d finally gotten around to doing) and his ensuing “crickets” in response to my multiple follow-up messages baffled me. As did the non-reply to my request of the state GOP chairman for an explanation for Wigginton’s refusal to send out a simple correction.
It gave new meaning (to me, at least) to the phrase “wigging out.”
The icing on this rotten cake was Friday night, when I tried to follow Wigginton on Twitter. It took him all of about 20 seconds to block me.
It was all very bizarre. I’m sure Wigginton’s errors weren’t intentional or mean-spirited. I get mistakes. I make ‘em. We make ‘em. You make ‘em. And as I pointed out to him in one message, “In our business, if we publish a story that contains gross factual errors, we take steps as soon as possible to correct. I would appreciate you doing the same.”
His response: silence. And to take the silence to another level by blocking me on Twitter.
Prior to all this, Wigginton had been pretty vocal. He’s filled my inbox the last weeks and months with press releases containing headlines teasing of shocking revelations (with liberal uses of “liberal,” “lie,” “cover-up” and, of course, “Cooper”). But he’s not alone. A cursory perusal of the N.C. Democrat Party’s recent press releases — available online, in case you want to keep score — is almost as disappointingly accusatory and hyperbolic. The Dems, it seems, prefer to use more active words like “blasts,” “slams” and the mysterious “dark money” when it comes to spreading the love.
It’s frustrating not getting answers. Wigginton’s website bio says he’s visited every Cookout restaurant in N.C., so I’d love for him to buy me a strawberry cheesecake milkshake and explain his quietude. Instead, he won’t even let me see pictures of his goldfish.
About the same time as Wigginton’s replies weren’t hitting my inbox, though, I got a sweet treat from one of my favorite thinkers, Seth Godin. In his daily blog post, Godin addressed the subject of cheating — which is really what’s going on when you put out incorrect information, spin a tale sideways or twist a message to suit yourself. (Can we all say, “Convention”?)
There are only two ways to approach cheating, Godin writes: “We don’t cheat.” Or, “We cheat when we can get away with it.”
If you believe in the “validity of the game itself,” he says, it shows you respect the process. But if you believe “in the ends at any cost,” and cheat when you can, you degrade the system. “(B)ecause,” Godin writes, “if everyone cheats, then there is no system left.”
My advice to everyone (including myself and my own reporting staff, and the guys and gals who write political press releases), especially these days, is: play fair.
It’s simple, and certainly worth repeating: Play fair.
“Because once cheating is normalized,” Godin writes, “the winner is the person who had the guts to cheat the most and destroy the system, not the one who deserved to win.”
When we all play fair, don’t we all win?
Or would we prefer destruction?