Jefferson Beauregard Sessions seems to be on his way to becoming attorney general. Many people are angry and frightened, that the person in charge of the Justice Department could be a man whose public record demonstrates hostility to the idea of equal rights under the law. In particular, Sessions brought vote fraud charges, threatening decades of prison time, against voting rights activists who had worked with Martin Luther King; he has referred to the Voting Rights Act as “intrusive,” and supported voter suppression.
That’s part of why there have been sit-ins and phone banks and multi-group public statements, reflecting the large number and wide range of people familiar with Sessions who state that his record, not his accent or personal demeanor, make him unfit for office.
In this light, the January 8 New York Times editorial struck me as highlighting, painfully, the limits of elite media.
“What Are You Hiding, Jeff Sessions?” was the headline, and the thrust of the thing was that Sessions has been insufficiently forthcoming:
If anyone requires a thorough vetting, it’s Mr. Sessions, the Republican senator from Alabama who trails behind him a toxic cloud of hostility to racial equality, voting rights, women’s rights, criminal justice reform and other issues at the heart of the Justice Department’s mandate.
See, some would say that toxic record constitutes such a vetting. But for corporate media, some questions are forever being “raised”…even when many another would suggest they’d actually been answered.
Indeed, all the while it was criticizing Sessions’ lack of disclosure, the Times was making clear that it isn’t necessary: Sessions claimed there’s no record of many of the interviews he’s given, “but a quick Google search disproves that.” The paper detailed his rejection for a federal judgeship, based on testimony about his racism from former colleagues, then stated that Sessions himself “made no mention” of it on a questionnaire that specifically requested the information. He’s now saying he personally litigated desegregation cases, which the paper calls a “myth” that has been “debunked.” He “failed to mention” comments to Fox about Trump’s bragging about sexual assault, comments the Times provided a link to. And so on.
Yet despite all this, the editorial’s upshot was that “Mr. Sessions is trying to hide from the American people the things he said and did.” And the answer: “Dianne Feinstein, the committee’s ranking Democrat, needs to take the lead in ensuring that Americans know as much as possible about the man who would be the nation’s top law enforcement official.”
Hmm. If only there were some other social actor or institution, positioned to prevent a politician from hiding his record from the public…who could help ensure Americans know as much as possible about him…? Who would that be?
Not the corporate media, presumably, if asking what Jeff Sessions is hiding is as far as they plan to go with regard to what’s in plain sight.
Janine Jackson is the program director of FAIR and the producer and host of CounterSpin.
You can send a message to the New York Times at letters@nytimes.com, or write to public editor Liz Spayd at public@nytimes.com (Twitter:@NYTimes or @SpaydL). Please remember that respectful communication is the most effective.