The sloppy way the Elder story was reported doesn’t do the media any favors during a time when their credibility is at an all-time low.
Larry Elder, the leading candidate to become California governor if Gavin Newsom is recalled next month, insists the incident never happened, but the headline in Politico yesterday afternoon was disturbing. Alexandra Datig, a former girlfriend, claimed that “she broke off an 18-month engagement with the conservative talk show host in 2015 after he waved a gun at her while high on marijuana.”
Waving a gun at a woman would be a horrific act, and the headlines were soon everywhere, from Drudge Report to the San Francisco Chronicle.
A few hours later, the context arrived via the Los Angeles Times, a publication that’s been no friend of the Elder campaign and has painstakingly dissected his statements during a 27-year-long radio career.
The LA Times’ story was more than a little different: “Larry Elder’s ex-fiancee emerges as leading critic, with gun allegation, other claims.” The LA Times reported that during an interview she gave the paper last week, Datig said “that Elder did not ‘wave’ the gun, as later reported by Politico. After that account went online Thursday, Datig reiterated that point.” Her claim was that he slowly “walked over to the nightstand, opened the door,” took out a .45 pistol, and checked if it was loaded.
“Datig did not file a police report or seek a restraining order. She said she did not want to draw attention to herself or cause a sensation that might distract from her budding work as a political commentator and, later, her pursuit of a career in law enforcement.” She is speaking out now because there’s “too much at stake” in the election. She has publicly endorsed one of Elder’s rivals, former San Diego mayor Kevin Faulconer, for governor.
By this morning, the headlines had been changed. KTLA, a Los Angeles news station, reported that “California recall candidate Larry Elder denies showing gun to ex-fiancee during domestic argument.” Elder’s statement quoted him as saying, “I have never brandished a gun at anyone.” Noting that he grew up in South Los Angeles, an area with high violent crime, he added that, “I know exactly how destructive this type of behavior is.” A short time later he tweeted: “They’re coming at me with every dirty trick because they know what’s coming on September 14.”
California politics is replete with a history of last-minute allegations being hurled at anti-establishment candidates who are surging at the polls. The most infamous allegations involved the 1992 U.S. Senate election. Republican candidate Bruce Herschensohn had made up a 22-point deficit against Democratic congresswoman Barbara Boxer. Then, four days before the election, Bob Mulholland, the political director of the California Democratic Party, confronted Herschensohn at a campaign appearance in Chico with allegations that he had frequented a striptease club. He wound up losing by five percentage points. Since then, only one other Republican has ever come close to winning a U.S. Senate seat in the Golden State.
As for Mulholland, he insisted he operated as a rogue actor and no one knew about his intentions. But the LA Times reported that the day before the disclosure, a Washington political activist said she was told by a Boxer fundraiser that the disclosure was going to occur soon. We will likely never know just how this latest last-minute story was surfaced just as voters received their mail-in ballots for the recall election.
But we do know that the sloppy way the Elder story was reported doesn’t do the media any favors during a time when their credibility is at an all-time low.
The 1981 movie Absence of Malice features businessman Paul Newman being incorrectly targeted by reporter Sally Field as a suspect in the murder of a union official. A publicity line for the film sums up what Newman’s character feels: “Suppose you picked up this morning’s newspaper and your life was a front page headline. . . . And everything they said was ‘accurate’. . . . But none of it was true?”