{"id":11051,"date":"2025-07-07T14:06:11","date_gmt":"2025-07-07T14:06:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/an-elderly-lawmakers-staff-keeps-walking-back-things-she-tells-reporters-should-they-keep-quoting-her\/"},"modified":"2025-07-07T14:06:11","modified_gmt":"2025-07-07T14:06:11","slug":"an-elderly-lawmakers-staff-keeps-walking-back-things-she-tells-reporters-should-they-keep-quoting-her","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/an-elderly-lawmakers-staff-keeps-walking-back-things-she-tells-reporters-should-they-keep-quoting-her\/","title":{"rendered":"An Elderly Lawmaker\u2019s Staff Keeps Walking Back Things She Tells Reporters. Should They Keep Quoting Her?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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A few weeks ago, my Blue Light News colleague Nicholas Wu and NBC\u2019s Sahil Kapur ran into D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton in the Capitol. Like good congressional reporters, they jumped at the opportunity to pepper a lawmaker about the news of the day. In this case, one question concerned Norton herself, a civil rights icon who is now the oldest House member: Would she run for another term next year, by which point she would be 89 years old? \u201cYeah, sure,\u201d Norton said.<\/p>\n

Coming on the heels of multiple stories<\/a> about<\/a> Norton\u2019s alleged cognitive decline<\/a>, the statement made news. But a few hours later, Norton\u2019s office began unmaking that news. The Democrat \u201cwants to run again but she\u2019s in conversations with her family, friends, and closest advisors to decide what\u2019s best,\u201d a spokesperson told Wu<\/a>. There was still no final decision.<\/p>\n

It was all awkward and embarrassing \u2014 and did little to buttress Norton\u2019s insistence that she\u2019s as sharp as ever. And then, amazingly, it happened again<\/a>. Last week, Kapur once again approached the delegate and asked about her plans. Once again, she said she\u2019s running: \u201cYeah, I\u2019m going to run for re-election.\u201d And once again, her spokesperson quickly walked back the comment, telling Axios that \u201cno decision has been made<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The spokesperson, Sharon Nichols, did not offer any explanation for the discrepancy. She also didn\u2019t respond when I asked her for details of what happened or whether journalists should take future Norton statements at face value.<\/p>\n

That last question is relevant even if you don\u2019t much care about the electoral plans of one non-voting delegate. For people interested in how Washington works, it\u2019s an increasingly common issue in our era of gerontocracy: Just how are you supposed to interact with an elected official who might not be all there?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s an ongoing private conversation among reporters, animated by a sense that the watchdogs haven\u2019t been zealous enough \u2014 but featuring no real agreement on how to handle these moments.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m on the fence about it,\u201d said New York Times<\/i> congressional reporter Annie Karni, the author of her own recent piece about Norton\u2019s struggles<\/a>. \u201cIs it newsworthy to be even doing this dance where you ask her a thing, she says something that makes no sense, and staff has to walk it back? Like, what are we doing? Or are we showing the problem? I don’t know what the answer is.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cEvery reporter has a story about this,\u201d said Kristin Wilson, who was a BLN Capitol Hill producer until last year. Incidents that couldn\u2019t be explained away sometimes made news, like the time the late GOP Sen. Thad Cochran got lost in the Capitol<\/a>, or the time a colleague had to instruct late Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein to \u201cjust say aye<\/a>\u201d at a vote. When Texas Rep. Kay Granger struggled with dementia<\/a> at the end of her term last year, it fell to a Dallas news site to reveal it. But many quieter interactions involving nonsensical quotes never got published. \u201cI think we have pulled punches,\u201d Wilson said.<\/p>\n

Wilson recalled an incident when her team was interviewing the late GOP Sen. Orrin Hatch for a story on senators\u2019 hideaway offices: \u201cHatch kind of went off on a tangent of a story, and as he’s telling the story, his aide is just like looking at me and his eyes are just massive, like he knew Hatch had just sort of gone down a bad path.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, the tangent wasn\u2019t germane to the story. \u201cBlue Light News is like living in a small town,\u201d Wilson said. \u201cAnd you know all these people, and you’re around them all the time. Are you going to be that<\/i> person in that small town that you’re in?\u201d<\/p>\n

For journalists, the answer to that question is supposed to be: Yes, that\u2019s exactly who we are! But the exigencies of managing a Hill beat that requires a daily stream of scoops makes it tough to latch onto every potentially embarrassing comment. Publishing them, after all, might enrage the staffers who tip you to those scoops \u2014 and confuse readers who just want accuracy.<\/p>\n

It turns out Norton\u2019s staff had good reason to think they could simply contradict their boss\u2019 comments without it becoming a story: There\u2019s a long history of spokespeople cajoling media outlets into cleaning up the incorrect, impolitic, or downright addled things that lawmakers say when they get buttonholed by Capitol Hill reporters.<\/p>\n

Oftentimes, these involve non-craven fixes. \u201cMy rule of thumb was that I’m not in the business of playing gotcha,\u201d said Todd Gillman, a former longtime Washington bureau chief for the Dallas Morning News<\/i>. \u201cPeople misspeak. They mix up a bill, a vote or a person. There’s a slip of the tongue. I’ve always let people clean up things like that. I’m going for substance.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet the culture of cleaning up makes it harder to say no when you suspect that the slip of the tongue may actually be<\/i> the substance. \u201cSeems like the tradeoffs don’t change, though the calculus might,\u201d Gillman told me. \u201cAre you willing to incur some wrath for ignoring their lobbying?\u201d Until Joe Biden\u2019s presidency pushed the national conversation about aging officials, the answer wasn\u2019t always self-evident.<\/p>\n

And it comes up particularly often in the Capitol, one of the strangest media environments in America, a place where beat reporters can count on running into VIPs in public hallways and asking for quotes on even the most obscure matters. It\u2019s as if Hollywood reporters could count on buttonholing Clint Eastwood every time he was at the office.<\/p>\n

For staffers, this means a lot of work keeping track of potential messes. Brad White, who ran Cochran\u2019s senatorial office before the Republican\u2019s retirement amid health problems at age 80, said his colleagues\u2019 clean-up work was more often about vernacular than mental capacity. \u201cHe would confuse some reporters because somebody would say, \u2018Well, how are y’all coming on the budget negotiations?\u2019 And he would say something that was more of a generational statement from Mississippi, like, \u2018Well, we’re getting down to the lip lock.\u2019 And nobody knew what the hell that might mean.\u201d<\/p>\n

All the same, as Cochran struggled, White managed around the edges. \u201cHe was an older guy,\u201d White said. \u201cHe’d have good days and bad days, and there were days maybe that I would decide today is not the day we need to talk about this issue.\u201d In Cochran\u2019s case, he said, the senator was planning to resign but the timing was complicated by a budget process. \u201cIf you’ve got a member that is facing those types of issues, and you can tell that they’re working their way out, then that deserves some grace,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you got a member that has no business being there and they’re clutching onto it like the Pope, then maybe that’s worthy of a discussion.\u201d<\/p>\n

To their credit, Wu and Kapur both reported the interactions with Norton as they happened, and reported the office\u2019s statements to the contrary. It was an easy call, they both told me: The question at issue \u2014 would Norton run again? \u2014 was personal and ultimately can only be answered by her. It\u2019s not the same as flubbing details of a 1,000-page bill.<\/p>\n

Ed Wasserman, the former dean of the University of California\u2019s graduate school of journalism and a longtime writer about media ethics, thinks the journalistic hand-wringing about how to describe cringey moments may actually make it harder to enlighten the public: \u201cOne of the problems is that reporters routinely handle incoherence and inconsistency by ignoring it, so a decision to convey it to readers as significant already rests on a belief that there’s some underlying dysfunction,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Wasserman said the principled position ought to be that lawmakers\u2019 moments of confusion are news, period. Cleaning it up \u201cis not really an option,\u201d Wasserman said. \u201cThis is clearly performance related. And their job performance is your job to report on.\u201d<\/p>\n

The challenge is that it\u2019s also<\/i> a reporter\u2019s job to cover the day\u2019s debate about a bill or a nomination. Inserting incoherent comments from a lawmaker can confuse most readers \u2014 even if it enlightens a subset of folks interested in that particular lawmaker\u2019s state of mind. \u201cIt’s weird that in the Capitol, people know which lawmakers you can’t really talk to substantively, and avoid them,\u201d said Karni. \u201cWhen you’re not<\/i> reporting on the age issue, which I have reported a lot on, I think it’s important to just know who is not able to participate like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

By way of example, she cites yet another kerfuffle over yet another Norton comment: In April, the lawmaker told a reporter<\/a> that she might try to become the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee. The news kicked off a round of Democratic agita about aging leadership clinging to power. Hours later, her office put out a statement from Norton taking herself out of contention. The incident may have said something about Norton, but it didn\u2019t really help the (probably larger) number of people who just want to be up to date about the committee’s future.<\/p>\n

\u201cIs this productive? Is this fair? She’s clearly not running for Oversight. So having her say that, it created a dumb news cycle with this kind of faux outrage,\u201d Karni said. \u201cYou could say, \u2018Are you thinking about running for president?\u2019 And she might say, \u2018I’m thinking about it.\u2019 So what are we doing when we’re asking that question?\u201d<\/p>\n

It makes for a weird status quo: One set of lawmakers who can be grilled about legislative issues, another who are considered out to lunch, everyone keeping secret mental lists of who\u2019s who, and no one feeling able to publish them because, after all, who can really prove what\u2019s going on in someone\u2019s head?<\/p>\n

\u201cThe conundrum is you\u2019re not going to be able to reach that judgment without applying certain standards that you\u2019re not necessarily able to reach because you\u2019re not a psychiatrist or you don\u2019t really know them,\u201d Wasserman said. \u201cBut at the same time, you know enough. You see what\u2019s an indication that they\u2019re not enough in command of the intellectual challenges of the job. \u2026 You have no reason to apologize for that. It\u2019s your job.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few weeks ago, my Blue Light News colleague Nicholas Wu and NBC\u2019s Sahil Kapur ran into D.C. Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton in the Capitol. Like good congressional reporters, they jumped at the opportunity to pepper a lawmaker about the news of the day. In this case, one question concerned Norton herself, a civil rights […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-congress"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11051\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluelightnews.com\/category\/politics\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}