By now, Free Press reporter Olivia Reingold has established her beat as doggedly reporting on her own humiliation. This is someone who excels not just at taking an L, but at putting all of her Ls in a big pile and showing them off to whoever happens to be nearby.
Reingold's latest embarrassment came at a rally in Michigan for U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, who has drawn the ire of pro-Israel media outlets like the Free Press due to his criticism of the Israeli genocide against Palestinians. Reingold attended the event, sent some tweets that tried and failed to mock attendees ("One girl hasn’t blinked in 20 seconds"—what?), then asked El-Sayed questions during a press scrum. One of those questions was about Israel's right to exist as a "Jewish state." Here's how Reingold described the interaction in her article:
Later that night, in a makeshift spin room assembled by the campaign, he rebuffed my question on whether he believes in Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.
“What do you mean by ‘Jewish state?’” he retorted, narrowing his eyes. “If you can’t answer that question, I’m not going to answer it.”
This description does not line up with video footage of the exchange, which many people had already seen because of how poorly Reingold handled it. In reality, she neglected to mention the excruciating silence she met El-Sayed's question with. She also sloppily misquoted him: What he actually said was, "If you can't define your question, I'm not going to answer your question." Weirder still was her choice to to describe El-Sayed "narrowing his eyes," when the footage clearly shows that he was just standing there and talking. If she'll embellish details of a public press conference, what else might she write when fewer people are around with documentation?
What Reingold wrote about El-Sayed is a useful example of how much contortion is required to portray left-wing, anti-Zionist political candidates as sinister or perfidious. An uncanny contradiction runs throughout Reingold's dispatch, which makes all these formal attempts to make the rally seem like a hostile event, but is simultaneously filled with El-Sayed making unobjectionable comments like, "All of us love and revere Jewish folk, our Jewish neighbors, the faith of Judaism," and, "I would like to live in a country where we don’t have money for wars because we’ve got to pay for daycare." A particularly deranging aspect of the Free Press's broader project is its demand that we view a politician who says such things as dangerous, and see a reporter who can't even articulate her own thoughts as righteous.
The good news for Reingold is that she's a digital journalist, which means that even though she couldn't describe what she means by "Jewish state" on the spot, she had plenty of time to cook up a thoughtful answer before her article ran. Here's what she came up with:
For someone who often waves around his respect for Judaism, he seemed unaware of something elementary: Judaism is not only a religion, but a people with a long-standing connection to Israel that runs through its prayers, traditions, and history.
When it comes to this particular beat, no journalist is producing finer work.
