The Atlantic’s Attack On New Speechwriter For Bernie Sanders Completely Unravels
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Journalist David Sirota was hired to work for Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign and immediately faced a backlash fueled by a staff writer at The Atlantic.
Edward-Isaac Dovere claimed Sirota “trashed” candidates, who Sanders is running against in the Democratic Party primary, without disclosing that he was hired by the Sanders campaign to be a senior advisor and speechwriter.
The report’s headline referred to Sirota as Sanders’ “Twitter attack dog.”
Reacting to the report, Daily Beast reporter Lachlan Markay declared, “Try to imagine Sirota’s reaction if, say, a ThinkProgress writer were found to have been secretly advising the O’Rourke campaign.”
“I remember quite clearly when many of us raised objections over the curious timing of David Sirota’s reporting, and we were told by some that we were peddling in conspiracy,” Charlotte Clymer, who works for the Human Rights Campaign’s communication team, recalled. “The revelation that he was working for Bernie while writing hit pieces should beckon some apologies.”
Adam Parkhomento, who is a Democratic Party strategist that worked for Hillary Clinton as an advisor, argued, “Media outlets that published David Sirota as a straight news journalist must now update their stories in which Sirota lied about what he was doing, pretended to be a reporter while carrying out oppo hits on Democrats on Bernie’s behalf.”
The harsh response may have been warranted if Sirota had engaged in the deception that was reportedly exposed. However, hours after publication, the central claim in the story unraveled.
The Guardian put out a statement. “David Sirota’s work last appeared in Guardian US at the end of December 2018. Once David Sirota was approached by Sanders’ team, he stopped writing for Guardian US. We hope The Atlantic will correct the story.”
As of 8 pm ET on March 19, the day Sirota announced he was joining the campaign, neither Dovere nor The Atlantic have bothered to correct the story. That is probably because if corrected it would undermine the majority of what was reported.
John Mulholland, an editor for The Guardian, responded, “This is totally untrue. Once David was approached by Sanders, he wrote nothing else for us.” And added, “If [Dovere] had contacted us before publication, we could have corrected the reporting error in advance. David’s last piece for us was end of December. The first contact he had from Sanders was mid-January.”
Dovere could have taken that information and updated his story. At a minimum, that would have been the responsible thing to do. Instead, Dovere chose to suggest Mulholland and The Guardian were not really telling the truth.
“The Guardian would seem to be basing this on assurances from Sirota and the Sanders campaign about when Sirota was working for Sanders, which neither disclosed until today as having happened, and which conflict with accounts of people who were familiar with the contact,” Dovere contended.
Dovere had zero proof that Sirota or the Sanders campaign were misleading The Guardian’s management. All he had to back up this wild assertion were “accounts of people who were familiar with the contact,” which is terribly vague.
Sirota worked for Sanders as a press secretary when Sanders was in the House of Representatives.
What Dovere, establishment journalists, and various Democrats are upset about is the fact that Sirota was one of the first journalists in December to examine Beto O’Rourke’s congressional voting record and call attention to campaign contributions from oil and gas industry executives. He penned a column arguing, from health care to fossil fuel production, it would be a “tragedy” to elect O’Rourke. He engaged in this journalism well before O’Rourke announced he would run for president.
That sparked an earlier backlash. On January 3, there were four articles written by liberal pundits who singled out Sirota’s journalism. They were written by Michael Tomasky of The Daily Beast, Nancy LeTourneau of Washington Monthly, Sady Doyle at Medium, and consultant David Brock for NBC News.
Brock was “integral” to Clinton’s 2016 presidential campaign and founded the super PAC, Correct the Record, which was responsible for some of the worst dishonest attacks against Sanders. In fact, Sirota was slated to lead Brock’s True Blue Media project until he backed out in 2017 because he did not believe the project had the necessary resources he desired for the “kind of independent, nonpartisan journalism” he wanted to keep producing.
The work Sirota did during the 2016 campaign was praised by Brock, who had suggested Sirota would bring “substantive, incisive, fearless reporting” to the liberal news website Share Blue, which spent the 2016 primary boosting Clinton’s campaign.
In early January, Sirota largely moved on from his reporting on O’Rourke. By the middle of the month, when The Guardian said he was asked to join the Sanders campaign, he was not writing about O’Rourke anymore.
Sirota wrote zero columns or reports for The Guardian in January.
For Capital And Main, which hired him in April 2018, he produced interview articles with Mayor Bill de Blasio and Washington governor Jay Inslee, who is running for president in February. His focus was on how Inslee would make climate change a top campaign issue.
The threat of climate change has been a key focus of Sirota’s work and drove much of his criticism of Democratic presidential candidates who are running against Sanders. The only other article he wrote in February that could explicitly relate to the 2020 primary was about Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal.
Additionally, in his article, Dovere noted, “On Monday night, after being contacted for a second time by The Atlantic with a list of specific questions about his undisclosed work for Sanders, Sirota did not respond to the email but deleted more than 20,000 tweets. He left fewer than 200 online.”
This action has been met with widespread disapproval. But why would someone delete their tweets before it was public that they were working for a candidate seen as a presidential contender?
Could it be because Dovere did the very thing someone would want to guard against?
Instead of recognizing the context, Dovere took one of Sirota’s now-deleted tweets and asked Faiz Shakir, Sanders campaign manager, what he thought about Sirota saying critics of his journalism were “deranged and/or running a deliberate disinfo campaign” and “positively unhinged.”
How else should someone view people like Joe Lockhart, former press secretary for President Bill Clinton, who cried, “It’s time for Bernie to step up and call off the dogs. If not, he’ll pay a high price for his bros”?
Dovere emphasized Sanders’ call for civility in an email to supporters, where he urged them to do their “very best to engage respectfully with our Democratic opponents — talking about the issues we are fighting for, not about personalities or past grievances. I want to be clear that I condemn bullying and harassment of any kind and in any space,” as if Sirota personifies incivility.
Those attacking Sirota equate his investigative journalism, and enthusiasm for certain issues like fighting climate change, with “bullying and harassment.” He never explicitly focused his attacks on the personalities or characters of Democratic candidates. His critiques always stemmed from policy positions.
“Civility” is often used as a tool to control dissent. In this case, that is exactly what Dovere and others are doing. They are livid that Sanders hired someone who has dissented so openly against the Democratic Party establishment.
In his announcement to followers, Sirota recalled, “As many of you know, I worked for Bernie 20 years ago, just after I got out of college when he was in the U.S. House. This was a formative experience for me. So, in addition to knowing that this job is an important contribution to a national effort, I am personally thrilled to be working for one of the most decent and honorable people I’ve ever known. This new job was not something I expected or planned for — but it is something I am excited to do.”
When Sirota was attacked for his reporting on O’Rourke, he said it was because the political/media class had such a deep resentment toward Sanders. He mentioned it was hard to get a job in news media after he had worked as his press secretary.
“I’ve done a lot of jobs for [Democrats] and for media outlets, but literally to this day, the only one that I get accusingly interrogated about is having worked for Bernie 20 years ago as a kid,” Sirota shared. “The bias and hatred against him is very deep and very real.”
The disingenuous reaction from establishment Democrats and the press, including a report built around a clear fabrication, further validates what Sirota once asserted.
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