The Salena Zito controversy, explained
A chronicler of heartland Trump voters stands accused of shoddy journalism.
The piece, by reporter Ashley Feinberg, was the culmination of months of speculation by reporters, but especially by a handful of anonymous Twitter accounts (including @rod_inanimate , @UrbanAchievr , @KT_So_It_Goes , and @cnn94cnn ), that Zito was plagiarizing, mischaracterizing interviews, and, in the most serious allegations, fabricating quotes out of whole cloth.
If true, the allegations are devastating. Zito responded Tuesday evening with a detailed New York Post column , including a recording, two transcripts, and a photograph of notes aiming to rebut some, but hardly all, of the allegations. She also addressed the controversy on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. (She declined to comment for this article, referring me to her New York Post column addressing the allegations.)
Zito, who before the fall of 2016 was a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review columnist with a local following, has benefited from Donald Trump’s rise in a way few others have. She made a name for herself by filing revealing dispatches from Trump country during the campaign, which featured conversations with “Main Street voters” whose “traditions, skills, jobs and lives” are under threat by the “cosmopolitan and political classes” exemplified by Hillary Clinton.
She admonished journalists that while they took Trump “literally, but not seriously,” Trump’s supporters took him “seriously, but not literally.” Her pieces explain that regular Joes out in Ohio and Pennsylvania don’t care that the president’s lawyer and campaign chair are guilty of numerous federal crimes because “as it stands we only really only [sic] have two parties; the party of the governing elite and the party of Trump.”
Her Trump voter–whispering columns earned her the New York Post job, a book deal ( The Great Revolt , co-authored with GOP political consultant Brad Todd, which came out in May), a CNN contributor deal , and a joint project with Harvard’s Institute of Politics . She became a favorite of both mainstream journalists — Jake Tapper said in a book blurb that she “picked up on a political phenomenon long before polls or pundits had any idea of what was happening” — and conservatives , who see her as a rare voice of America’s traditionalist heartland. The president even sang her praises:
But as Zito’s star has risen, so have the questions around her reporting. Feinberg’s article focuses on the most frequent claim against Zito: that she misrepresents reliably Republican officials and donors as swing voters whom Trump won over. Zito and her defenders (like her New York Post colleague Seth Mandel and the Law360 reporter Alex Parker ) insist that she always accurately portrayed the people she profiled, including disclosing their Republican Party histories when relevant.
But anonymous Twitter accounts have also unearthed three instances of apparent plagiarism by Zito, and the most damning claims against her, by far, have involved allegations that she fabricates quotes in stories . Zito has said she records “many” of her interviews, which would make verifying more contested stories possible, but she has yet to release any recordings in response to the fabulism accusations (though she did release one as part of the Post piece — more on that below).
Beyond the concrete allegations against Zito, the fight reflects widespread disdain among some journalists toward her anecdote-heavy, data-light, at times unduly credulous approach to political reporting. Zito prides herself on having caught a populist conservative wave that other analysts failed to see coming, and on doing it through interviews in small towns across the Midwest. But that leads to bolder proclamations that 2016 was “not a fluke” and was indeed a fundamental realigning event, as well as to overly charitable interpretations of her subjects’ intentions (as she once quipped , “There’s always ‘some’ portion of anyone’s followers who are racist”).
Incorrect analysis is obviously a very different problem than fabulism, plagiarism, and mischaracterizing sources. Those (especially the former two) are incredibly serious offenses that can get you run out of journalism. Doing political analysis in ways that feel wrongheaded to your critics, obviously, is not career-ending, nor should it be. But that disagreement helps explain why so many in the media have been willing to believe these claims about Zito, even without ironclad proof of the worst allegations.
Three cases of plagiarism
Let’s start with the easiest-to-evaluate charges against Zito: allegations of plagiarism. On two occasions identified by @rod_inanimate, Zito copied language without credit from other sources: once from a fellow Pittsburgh reporter, the other time from Wikipedia. On a third occasion, highlighted by @cnn94cnn , she appeared to pass off quotes from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette as ones she obtained herself.
On December 14, 2016, Zito began a New York Post column on the opioid crisis with this anecdote (emphasis in all the passages quoted is mine):
Exactly one month before Election Day, on a Monday, Rowen Lally boarded her school bus in McKeesport, Pa.
Before the 7-year-old left her house, she cared for her infant sister with a bottle and a diaper change, leaving her 3- and 5-year-old brothers at home with her parents.
On the way home from school, Rowen told the school bus driver her parents looked blue when she left the house and she couldn’t wake them up ; a quick call was made to the school, which notified police.
Authorities discovered Rowen’s parents had been dead since Friday of a heroin overdose.
Zito cites no source for the story, despite offering a link to the other overdose story she mentions. But it appears she took it from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Karen Kane, who wrote up the school bus detail in her October 6, 2016, story this way:
The discoveries had come after Rowen had told a school bus driver on her way home from school Monday afternoon that her parents had been blue and that she had been unable to wake them that morning . The bus driver notified school officials who contacted police. The children were taken to Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh of UPMC for evaluation then were placed in the care of Allegheny County Children, Youth and Family caseworkers.
If Zito had given Kane credit for the story, it would have been basically fine. In the absence of such credit, it looks like she stole an anecdote from another reporter’s story.
Arguably an even more egregious example of plagiarism comes in her book with Todd, The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics . Interviewing Wisconsin voter Amy Giles-Maurer talking about her father, Zito and Todd write:
“He went into the Marines, right out of high school. Just volunteered and he was sent to Vietnam where he fixed F-4 Phantoms,” she says, referring to the tandem two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather, long-range supersonic jet interceptor and fighter-bomber used extensively during the southeast Asian conflict.
If that feels like an oddly long and formal construction, almost like an encyclopedia entry, that’s because it was lifted directly from Wikipedia, the beginning of whose entry for the “McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II” currently reads:
The McDonnell Douglas F-4 Phantom II is a tandem two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather, long-range supersonic jet interceptor and fighter-bomber originally developed for the United States Navy by McDonnell Aircraft.
The book was published in May; Wikipedia’s page history reveals that the article has used this exact language since May 31, 2017 , and used nearly identical language for years before that. There is simply no explanation for the writing here other than Zito or Todd copying and pasting the relevant section from Wikipedia while not citing it.
There’s a third case of alleged plagiarism, highlighted by @cnn94cnn . It concerns a short news hit that Zito wrote for the Washington Examiner on February 21, 2018, titled, “Woman who had affair with GOP Rep. Tim Murphy is running for Congress.” @cnn94cnn alleges that, especially in its original form, it was uncomfortably similar to a Hill story by Lisa Hagen on the same topic, and originally, unlike the Hill , failed to credit the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette with the story.
Here’s how the Zito story read originally:
Edwards said at the Allegheny County Court House that she is running for office because Pittsburgh deserves someone who will fight the battles no one wants to fight. She also said she expects her relationship with Murphy will come up again and again during the campaign. “My opponents are likely to spend egregious amounts of time and money in an attempt to display my human mistakes for all to see,” Edwards said. “I was warned. I have been given explanations. I have been told to back down, and I am here to tell you, nevertheless, I will endure.”
That passage appears to imply that Zito herself saw Edwards say this at the Allegheny County Court House, when she is in fact quoting comments from Edwards originally heard and reported by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette’s Paula Reed Ward . Zito’s post has since been updated to include a link to the Post-Gazette story, but it is still not clear that the quotes from Edwards come from the Post-Gazette originally. Zito’s post states simply: “She also told the Pittsburgh Post Gazette she expects her relationship with Murphy will come up again and again during the campaign.” (Zito addressed this charge in her column and argued that this was a sufficient fix.)
These cases, to me, represent serious wrongdoing and are deserving of an editorial reprimand at the very least. And while Zito’s New York Post column defending her work addresses the final allegation, it does not touch on the first two at all.
Mischaracterizing Republican officials as swing voters
Key to Zito’s journalistic project is the idea that she is identifying voters in Midwestern states whom a Democratic Party ruled by liberal coastal elites can’t reach anymore. In her column defending her work, she cites this as a motive for her critics: “A few journalists, particularly those who rarely if ever leave the Washington Beltway or Midtown Manhattan, want to discredit my work because of what it reports. They want to silence the voices I listen to and record.”
Her critics argue in turn that this is a con, that, over and over again, the people she has chosen to feature in her reporting have turned out to be Republican Party officials, politicians, and donors.
Take Amy Giles-Maurer, the Wisconsin woman whose father built the “tandem two-seat, twin-engine, all-weather, long-range supersonic jet interceptor and fighter-bombers.” In the book, Giles-Maurer (also referred to as simply “Amy Maurer”) is depicted as a Republican who supports Trump in spite of his sexism and the Access Hollywood tape. In a New York Post column , Zito described her as “the married, educated, suburban mom whom experts missed in the 2016 election — and still don’t get today,” the kind of voter whom “the Clinton campaign tried hard to win over.”
The Post column doesn’t mention that Giles-Maurer is a Republican (although Zito’s book does); neither the column nor the book mentions that Giles-Maurer is the corresponding secretary of the Kenosha County, Wisconsin, Republican Party . An August 2016 article in the Kenosha News mentions her involvement in opening a field office for House Speaker Paul Ryan and Republican Sen. Ron Johnson, in which she praises Ryan for his “conservative agenda.” She is listed as a member of the Kenosha Republican Party board of directors as early as March 2015 . That, suffice it to say, does not sound like a 2016 swing voter.
The revelation that Giles-Maurer is a highly active Republican forced the conservative writer S.E. Cupp, who based a New York Times op-ed on Zito’s reporting, to issue a correction, saying she had no idea that Giles-Maurer is a Republican . She, apparently, was misled by Zito’s reporting.
Defending her use of Giles-Maurer to HuffPost’s Feinberg, Zito states that her book is “about the most surprising archetypes of voters who became part of this populist coalition, those voters are both Republican and Democrat. Much of the book is focused on the kind of normally Republican-leaning voters that Hillary Clinton unsuccessfully sought to convert to her campaign.” To Zito, Giles-Maurer fits that archetype.
In a Twitter thread , Zito further noted, “In the book, Amy Giles-Mauer, the woman in question, is clearly identified as not just a Republican, but as an engaged GOP primary voter.” In her New York Post defense of her work , Zito notes that her Post column about Giles-Maurer featured “a large photo of her wearing a Kenosha GOP board pin.”
That’s all true (the book notes that Giles-Maurer originally supported Scott Walker), but there’s a difference between being a primary voter and being a party official. And it remains the case that it would have been better to disclose Giles-Maurer’s role as a Republican activist, especially in the New York Post column, in a clearer way than a hard-to-read pin in a photograph.
There are other suspicious cases. Feinberg highlights Cynthia Sacco, a Michigan woman whom Zito describes in the book as having “spent most of her adult life voting mostly Democrat.” Zito neglects to mention that Sacco was a delegate to the Republican county convention in 1994 , which complicates the portrait of her as a longtime Democrat. To Feinberg, Zito replied, “The assumption that she cannot differ with her husband who was a delegate for the GOP in 1994 is a wee bit sexist,” but Sacco herself was a delegate too, as well as her husband.
Other cases are messier. @rod_inanimate attacks Zito for profiling Erie, Pennsylvania’s David Rubbico in her book, a man whom Zito describes in her statement to Feinberg as “a long time Democrat who liked Obama” who “could either turn hard against the congressional GOP during the 2018 elections or swing back to voting Democratic once Trump is done.” Rubbico was elected in 2018 to a local committee position in the Pennsylvania Republican Party. But that’s obviously after the 2016 election, which to Zito and her defenders confirms the narrative that Rubbico was energized to get into conservative politics by Trump, even if it makes the idea of him being a swing voter this year implausible.
@rod_inanimate and Feinberg also cite a letter that Rubbico wrote in January 2017 that said, “our nation … has been decimated by President Barack Obama over the last eight years,” and that Trump “is not a racist for saying that immigrants should be legal. He is holding America first by wanting to stop the invasion of illegal immigrants and Syrian refugees, both groups that are embedded with terrorists.”
That does make it feel implausible that he previously was sympathetic to Obama (and that he’d swing back to Democrats in 2018 or 2020). But the letter’s date is still post-election, so Zito’s version of events is still plausible. Zito has also published audio and a transcript of her conversation with Rubbico , a somewhat odd move given that the authenticity of his comments was never in doubt.
Another source Zito has cited is Anthony Ripepi, a chief of surgery who lives in Peters Township, Pennsylvania, a case documented by Zito critic Beau Boughamer .
Zito prominently featured Ripepi in a January 31, 2018, New York Post column originally headlined “Donald Trump is still the man to these blue-collar voters.” It has since been retitled “Donald Trump is still the man to this Pennsylvania home,” which is probably for the best, given that “chief of surgery” is hardly a blue-collar job.
Zito would later defend the original statements by saying she does not write her own headlines: “Obviously, reporters don’t write their own headlines, so this accusation tells you something about my trolls and the journalists who fell for the trolling.” (It’s true that at many, but not all, outlets, journalists don’t get to headline their pieces.)
She described Ripepi and his wife, Michelle, as “upper-middle-class suburban voters who live in a blue-collar, upper-middle-class exurb.” Per census data , the town has a median household income of about $110,000, or double the median for Pennsylvania as a whole; Peters Township is generally considered an affluent Pittsburgh suburb. I also don’t know what the phrase “blue-collar, upper-middle-class exurb” means.
The frequency with which Zito mentions Ripepi is also striking. She cites him in a November 11, 2016, Washington Post piece titled, “Trump’s voters won’t mind if he doesn’t keep all his promises” ; he is one of only three voters cited to prove that contention. She also cites him in a January 5, 2017, Washington Examiner piece titled, “America to Obama: Stop now. You lost,” in which Ripepi is upgraded from speaking for Trump voters to speaking for “America” (he is, again, one of just three voters). He appears yet again in a November 9, 2016, piece in the New York Post , in which he’s described as a foe of the “cosmopolitan class” and their “constant mocking of those who live in flyover country.”
Zito makes some fair inferences about him in that piece, noting, “The fundamental truth is that the Trump voter was still predominantly white, but both male and female, with a salary ranging from middle- to upper-middle-class to well-off and college-educated.” That’s more honest than claiming he speaks for “blue-collar” people (which, granted, could be chalked up to a headline writer’s flub). But citing the same “man on the street” — a surgeon, no less — four separate times is, if not unethical, then at least strange.
The most serious charge: fabulism
Zito has repeatedly cited voters without giving their names, or their last names, or other information that might allow other reporters to track them down and verify their stories. This is unusual (as several reporters on Twitter have noted, the norm is to always get a name when talking to voters and other “people on the street”), and it becomes a problem when some of her stories are, frankly, a bit hard to believe.
The most startling cases to me (also highlighted by some other reporters like the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale ) involve remarkable things Zito has claimed to have heard at gas stations.
As highlighted by @KT_So_It_Goes and @cnn94cnn , on at least three occasions Zito has claimed to hear remarkable impromptu political statements by voters at gas stations.
There was the time in Hagerstown, Maryland, that two friends were shooting the shit about Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) letter , cosigned by 46 Senate Republicans, to the government of Iran:
Dodging raindrops and balancing bottled water and a bunch of power bars under one arm, a young man returned to his car at a Sheetz gas pump along old U.S. 40 in this western Maryland town, sandwiched between Pennsylvania and West Virginia.
The local public radio station blared through the open car door, reporting on the letter to Iran from 47 Senate Republicans. Adjusting his seat, he said to a traveling companion: “Good for them.”
“Wait, who?” his friend asked.
“The guys who sent the letter to Iran, that Cotton guy,” he replied. “For all we know, the president will issue an executive order and give Iran whatever they want.”
Then he shut the car’s door and drove east toward the U.S. 522 overpass.
There was the time she pulled over off US 422 and heard a gas station manager complaining about Democrats, and Martha Plimpton in particular :
A clip of Martha Plimpton’s exuberance over the “best” abortion she ever had played out on the television overhead of a gas-station counter somewhere along U.S. Route 422 between Ohio and Pennsylvania. A woman with a name tag noting her as the manager rolled her eyes and said to no one in particular as she went about stacking the shelves behind the counter, “And they wonder why people don’t vote for Democrats around here anymore.”
In 2014, in a Pittsburgh Tribune-Review piece reprinted in RealClearPolitics (I haven’t been able to find a dateline), Zito claims she heard this:
Standing at a gas station pump, as news blared overhead about the Fort Hood shootings, a young mother with two children buckled into her sedan’s car seats sighed. “I hope someday if, God forbid, tragedy strikes again at a military base, whoever is president doesn’t still head to a fundraiser,” she said.
I’d be remiss here, though, if I left out the time she claims to have hung out at an abandoned gas station until someone came and gave her a perfect quote about the gas station’s sign, imploring customers to support them over big businesses:
Last week, a man and his family pulled into the gas station and was surprised to find it closed, “I kept meaning to stop here on the way home, but other things got in the way,” he said. He read the sign and sighed, “They [the gas station] kept telling us we need you, and we kept thinking we’ll get there soon, they will always be around,” he explained.
There are more, like the French girl who used the somewhat archaic English phrasing “people young and old,” which seems like an odd thing for a non-native speaker to say but which is phrasing Zito herself has also used . Nonetheless, Zito has, in her New York Post defense of her work, produced a transcript of her interview with the girl, confirming the girl said that; I personally find her defense there sufficient.
Then there’s her interview with “Greg,” a “small businessman” and “lifelong Republican” who issues quotes like this:
“We cannot let these hard-liners undermine every imagined slight or, even worse, do it simply based on the ‘stagery’ that attracts viewers or clicks,” Greg said.
I had never heard of the word “stagery” before Greg said it in Zito’s piece, but it appears she uses it in her own articles quite a bit . Zito has produced notes from the interview with the word “stagery” written on them:
A skeptical observer would note that famous journalistic fabulists like Stephen Glass have fabricated notes — but as a reporter who has certainly quoted people from notes without an audio recording attached, I’m willing to give Zito the benefit of the doubt on this case.
Then there’s the time Zito claims a presidential campaign staffer admonished her for saying “God bless you” :
There’s the time she followed up a favorable retweet of a point former Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer made with a perfect quote from a guy at a gas station backing up Fleischer’s argument:
There’s the two separate times she claimed people in cars with “COEXIST” bumper stickers gave her the finger:
And the time she claimed to have interviewed protesters for “Demand Protest,” a fake organization purportedly paying people to protest Trump that Fox News’s Tucker Carlson, of all people, exposed as a hoax that didn’t actually hire any protesters. That makes her claim to have met the fake group’s employees a little fishy-sounding:
Despite what @UrbanAchievr says above, I don’t consider these incidents ironclad proof she makes stuff up. My own attempt to dig deeper into the fabulism claims came up empty. On June 16, 2018, Zito published an account in the New York Post of several trips she took with Harvard students, aiming to give them a sense of what the “heartland” is really like. It ended with this anecdote:
In our final week, the class attended Mass at St. Stanislaus, a Polish church in the Strip District of downtown Pittsburgh. Before then, only two of my students had set foot in a Catholic church.
At the end of Mass, an older gentleman came up to me and said how nice it was to see young people dressed up and going to church. When I told him they were students from Harvard, he beamed.
“I have been reading for years that college kids these days are thin-skinned, what’s that word … ? Snowbirds, snowflakes, anyways … that they have no easiness with meeting someone new or trying something different or won’t be open to opposing opinions,” he said.
He smiled as he gave my kids an approving thumbs-up.
“Don’t you just love when a stereotype is blown up right in front of you?”
This felt suspicious to me, and to a number of others on Twitter . But Zito named the Harvard students on the trip, and I was able to talk to five of them. Four of the five remember going to Mass, and one of them recalls the final quote.
“Although I don’t remember the part about thin-skinned students clearly, he did say the bit about stereotypes being blown up and he was very pleased to meet us,” Malcolm Reid, Harvard ’21, told me. “I do think it was an accurate representation of that conversation.”
That said, Reid and three other students on the trip told me they had been in a Catholic church before, putting a lie to Zito’s insistence that “only two of my students had set foot in a Catholic church.”
But that’s a relatively minor factual error in the scheme of things, and nothing in my conversations with the students provided positive evidence that Zito was fabricating; Reid’s testimony inclined me to believe the “stereotype” line is accurate.
The Harvard story almost feels like the Salena Zito problem in microcosm. There’s no absolute proof of fabrication, though it would have been much better journalistic hygiene for her to name the man she met in the church to help her editors and others with fact-checking. But it’s sloppy (two students who’d been to Mass versus four-plus), and there’s no confirmation that the most fake-sounding quote (“Snowbirds, snowflakes”) is real.
Zito has been defiant throughout this controversy. In a long thread replying to @rod_inanimate , she alleged the account and others “lied, in an attempt to discredit my hard-earned reputation, and my hard work.” She then elaborated on Face the Nation and in her New York Post column .
Seth Mandel, her colleague at the Post, “spent his entire Labor Day weekend, late into the night last night, and all day today, helping Salena compile” a defense of her work, Mandel’s wife, Bethany Shondark Mandel, said on Twitter. Seth Mandel has argued that “anyone with a shred of integrity will acknowledge [Zito’s] debunking and move on.”
That’s not likely to happen, and given Zito’s cases of plagiarism and the highly suspicious nature of some of the quotes above, I’m not sure that it should happen. The controversy will likely only be resolved if Zito releases audiotapes for the suspicious incidents, proving that her anonymous men on the street said what she claims they said. The only audio released so far has been that of Rubbico; she has produced no verification of any of the gas station incidents, for instance, or that she really met people hired by Demand Protest. Until she produces more audio, the doubts will remain, and her defenders will remain indignant that people believe them.
I remain skeptical of some of Zito’s reporting. I would still like to hear audio of some of her more fantastical anecdotes, and the plagiarism, especially the Wikipedia case, is unacceptable. But fabulism is an incredibly serious charge, and if people are going after Zito’s job, they’ll need much firmer evidence than currently exists.
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Credibility strained beyond the breaking point.