In something that was quite the funny incident on Tuesday, September 17, a reporter from the New York Times met his match when attempting to take down Trump’s Vice President pick and sitting Senator JD Vance. Sen. Vance, instead of backing down when the reporter pressed him on his rhetoric, torched the reporter and the New York Times.
As background, the reporter’s rude question was almost certainly prompted by Sen. Vance’s involvement in the outcry over Haitian migration into the United States, particularly as regards small towns like Springfield, Ohio. Sen. Vance helped push numerous uncorroborated and unproven stories about the town that took hold in the public imagination, such as that the pets of residents are being killed and eaten by the Haitian migrants.
Many in the media have attacked Sen. Vance for helping push those stories, arguing that it was irresponsible for him to do so. Amongst those who went on the attack was the New York Times reporter, who did so at a rally in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The reporter asked, “What’s something you’re willing not to say in order to make a point about something that’s important to you?”
Sen. Vance began by torching the New York Times, saying that he isn’t one who sees it as at all a “respectable paper” and so saying that it is one is something of which he is incapable. He said, “What I wouldn’t say is that the New York Times is a respectable paper. That’s one thing I wouldn’t be willing to say.”
Continuing, Sen. Vance said that, whatever the case might be with the New York Times, his comments about what is happening in Springfield were sparked by numerous reports from locals, not just one claim. He said, “All kidding aside, if one person had called me and said, ‘I’m seeing this in Springfield,’ we maybe let that pass.”
Building on that, he argued that is part of his duty as a senator to respond to and draw attention to such concerns from his constituents. He said, “When 4, 5, 6, 7 people are telling me they see something in Springfield, and on top of it that there are certain people who refuse to listen to them, who refuse to take their concerns seriously, that’s when it’s my job as a United States Senator to listen to my constituents.”
He then told the reporter, returning to the issue of not trusting the media to be respectable or do the right thing for America, that he sees situations such as the one in Springfield, Ohio, as one that he must personally investigate. According to him, he must do so because the media cannot be trusted to accurately report on the situation and describe what is really happening.
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Making that point and rebuking the NYT reporter with it, Sen. Vance said, “My standard for whether I talk about something is whether enough people that I trust bring it to me at least to the point where I feel like I’ve got to investigate it myself, not just trust the media to do their jobs, because a lot of the time, they don’t.”
Watch him here: