There are sins of omission and there are sins of commission, and, in its coverage of John Fetterman’s candidacy for the U.S. Senate, the American press corps has managed to commit both in swift succession. Last week, an NBC reporter named Dasha Burns explained on air that “Fetterman’s campaign required closed captioning technology for this interview to essentially read our questions as we asked them,” and noted that, “in small talk before the interview without captioning, it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation.” Within minutes, all hell broke loose. Hitherto, the AP confirmed in its peculiar piece on the contretemps, Fetterman had mostly ignored the issue, having kept “silent about releasing medical records or allowing reporters to question his doctors.” In an instant, that policy had been foreclosed. “Burns’ statement about Fetterman,” the AP griped, was “tweeted by political opponents, including the National Republican Senatorial Committee.” Despite the best attempts of the Fetterman campaign and the mainstream press, a debate had broken out at long last.
In response, the press pounced on . . . Dasha Burns. As a reward for having perpetrated her unforgivable act of journalism, John Fetterman’s wife, Gisele Fetterman, suggested that Burns should face immediate “consequences.” And so, of course, she did. Kara Swisher, Rebecca Traister, and Molly Jong-Fast insisted she was lying. She was called an “ableist,” accused of “overt discrimination,” told she had deployed “a stigmatizing tool,” and informed that she had helped to “worsen attitudes and violence towards disabled people.” Across the media, journalists condemned the interview in self-contradictory terms, flitting between the indignant insistence that there was nothing wrong with Fetterman and the conclusion that whatever is wrong with him doesn’t matter anyway. At Rolling Stone, Kara Voght described Fetterman’s wife as the “de facto candidate,” and then, having realized what “de facto” means, ham-fistedly attempted to retract her characterization. It was messy, and it was transparent.
A few among Fetterman’s savvier apologists have attempted to abstract the problem away. “Would Ms. Burns have made a similar remark if a wheelchair user couldn’t get around without a wheelchair?” asked David M. Perry in the New York Times. “Are you wearing contacts or glasses to read this essay?” But these analogies are weak. The Fetterman campaign insists that the symptoms with which their candidate is dealing are purely “sensory,” rather than “cognitive.” This, though, is sophistry. The diagnosis upon which Fetterman’s defenders have settled is auditory aphasia — a condition that renders patients’ brains unable to process the meaning of words. In a highly technical sense, that problem is, indeed, “sensory.” In practice, though, it is impossible to separate out the sensory and the cognitive, because, unlike with those who require, say, “contacts or glasses” or “a wheelchair,” the problem does not lie at the physical level, but with the brain’s conversion of stimuli into comprehensible form. Aphasia sufferers hear sounds normally; the trouble lies in their inability to map those sounds into comprehensible linguistic patterns.
That such a condition could diminish a person’s suitability to serve as a U.S. senator is both self-evident and supported by the history. In 2016, the Washington Post noted that “back in 2010, the Chicago Tribune endorsed Republican Rep. Mark Kirk for Senate, citing his ‘expertise and independence,’” but that, six years later, it was declining to repeat its affirmation on the grounds that Kirk had suffered a stroke in 2012 and that, as a result, he represented too great a risk to reelect. “We cannot tiptoe around the issue of Kirk’s recovery and readiness,” the Tribune’s editors wrote. “His health is a fundamental component of this race—a hotly contested matchup that could return control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats.” As such, even though “Kirk’s doctor attests to his good cognitive health,” the paper issued a “reluctant judgment”: “that, due to forces beyond his control, Kirk no longer can perform to the fullest the job of a U.S. senator.” As if to illustrate how inapt the comparison between stroke victims and the physically disabled is, the editorial board then endorsed Kirk’s opponent, Tammy Duckworth — who uses a wheelchair.
To understand why concern about Kirk caused no furor whatsoever, while concern about Fetterman has prompted an explosion of outrage, one is obliged to look no further than the obvious. In 2016, the race in Illinois was a “hotly contested matchup that could return control of the U.S. Senate to Democrats,” and it was the Republican candidate who had the medical liability. In 2022, the race in Pennsylvania is a hotly contested matchup that could return control of the U.S. Senate to Republicans, and it is the Democrat who is the subject of concern. Why are reporters being asked to “apologize” or face “consequences”? Why are the effects of a serious stroke being downplayed? Why are Americans being told that they are bigots for wondering if auditory aphasia might be a less-than-ideal burden for a U.S. senator to bear? The questions answer themselves.
Meditating upon Mark Kirk’s stroke back in 2015, the Atlantic proposed that it “seems fair to ask whether it has changed him for the worse,” and confirmed that “those closest to him expect and welcome the questions.” Those were the days.