Local woman cosplays as empathetic reporter
The result is unconvincing
Hello and thanks for reading.
First, a note to subscribers: You won’t see a post from me this Saturday. I’m traveling to attend the True/False documentary film festival this weekend, and while I’d hoped to write something and schedule it to send in advance, I’ve sadly run out of time. I hope you’ll forgive me! But even if you don’t, well, I hope you’ll continue to support and share this newsletter despite my inconsistent posing because — let’s be real here — you don’t have that many other opportunities to read local commentary that isn’t total garbage. Today’s post is good evidence of that.
I've thought of writing about the Star-Telegram’s rotting carcass of an opinion section several times since starting this newsletter and each time I decided it wasn’t worth my time. I try to make this an interesting and/or thoughtful and/or fun space, and there just aren’t any interesting, thoughtful or fun things to say about their columnists’ endless attempts to boost the failed presidential campaign of a spiteful synthetic man who eats pudding with his fingers.
Functionally, the Star-Telegram’s opinion section is very simple: With a few minor exceptions, it platforms a crowd of extremely boring and sometimes openly bigoted right-wing columnists whose entire credibility rests on the fact that their posts appear alongside the work of Star-Telegram reporters who do actual fucking journalism. It’s a parasitic relationship.
But last week a piece of garbage bobbed to the surface that was just too annoying for me to ignore. I need to tell you about this column from Nicole Russell, a propagandist for the Heritage Foundation’s Daily Signal who, despite her clear preference for villainizing trans people and covering the notoriously under-appreciated singer Taylor Swift (heard of her?), somehow ended up with a job that, in better days, might’ve gone to someone with an actual interest in local journalism. But I digress:
If you’re familiar with right-wing media’s usual hysterical coverage of immigration, Russell’s post might actually seem reasonable by comparison. She doesn’t openly fear-monger about migrants committing crimes or taking jobs from American citizens — common talking points that are entirely divorced from reality. She doesn’t call for a return to Trump’s family separation policy or stump for a border wall. Instead, she positions herself as a humane voice of sanity, an empathetic soul who understands the plight of disadvantaged migrants but feels so strongly about “law and order” that she just can’t help but support razor wire at the border — which isn’t inhumane, in case you were wondering, but rather a “commonsense measure.” (It’s nauseating to witness this performance from a person who has previously derided the possibility of “empathy and compassion” at the border.)
In other words, Russell’s column isn’t as bad as you think. But it’s bad enough.
What’s offensive about her writing is more subtle: It’s the pretense that she did any kind of rigorous reporting to produce this piece. The headline — “I went to the Texas-Mexico border” — is meant to suggest exactly that, implying that she put great effort into documenting a reality that she couldn’t capture by simply scrolling Twitter. We’re promised boots-on-the-ground insights gleaned from real journalistic labor.
Let’s be clear, though: Russell is an opinion blogger. She comments on events that other people have done the work of covering. That is her entire job. By saying this, I don’t mean disparage bloggers in general. Lost in Panther City is a blog; this is a badge I wear proudly. But I know the difference between commentary and actual reporting, and I also know Russell has mostly used her perch at the Star-Telegram to weigh-in on fake controversies like the green M&M’s boots. I would be extremely surprised if she has broken a single news story in her entire career, but I can say for certain that she hasn’t done so in Fort Worth.
This is why Russell’s 1,800-word column takes the form of journalism without any of the substance. She adopts a style that clearly aspires to a literary mode, throwing in details and little sensory observations, but because the writing rests on a foundation of nothing, it is hollow and vapid rather than weighty and meaningful. The first two paragraphs are a representative sample:
It’s hard to see at first, but as the winter sun sets on the border between Mexico and Texas, it becomes clear that five young people are floating on a black raft in the middle of the Rio Grande, underneath a port of entry in Eagle Pass, a prominent spot for legal and illegal crossings. A horse grazes on the sparse banks of Mexico behind them, unaware of their struggle. The migrants on the raft, ranging from approximately 17 to 25 years old, traverse the current in the cold water, taking them at least 50 yards downstream from where they began.
After several minutes of effort and chaos, they reach the banks of America, land of liberty and promise — but they still must step their soaked feet on the soil. This part of the Texas/Mexico border is heavily fortified with concertina and razor wire — the former isn’t as sharp as the latter — stacked on top of each other, intertwining like giant silver Slinkys and into a metal fence. But none of this is fun. Not for the young people, shaking and cold now, not for the Texas National Guard members who await them on dry ground— also about the same age, dedicated to the preservation of law and security — not for the rest of us watching the story unfold like a bittersweet film.
The sins against good prose pile up so quickly that it’s hard to keep track, starting with the clunky “it becomes clear” in the opening sentence and continuing right through the self-indulgent framing of this scene as “a bittersweet film.” More to the point, these two paragraphs, like the headline, are meant to convince you that Russell has done the work. They are proof she travelled to the border and really understood it. She saw a horse, and moreover she saw that horse so well, so astutely, that she can get inside its head and tell you exactly how unaware of the migrants it really was. She reported the shit out of that horse.
In reality, the entire column is based on a single ride-along she took with a spokesman from the Texas Department of Public Safety on a single day in February. That’s it. There is literally nothing else to distinguish it from a regular-ass blog post that summarizes recent news coverage. This spokesman is the only person she quotes directly (apart from some words she lifts from a Fox News interview with a federal official). She doesn’t talk to any Texas National Guard members or Border Patrol agents. There’s no attempt to interview the people of Eagle Pass, a city that’s been at the center of news from the border recently, or anyone else who might have something interesting to say. She doesn’t even interview anyone actually crossing the border.
She would definitely like you to think that she interviewed immigrants because that’s what a real journalist would do. We get this paragraph right at the end:
We asked why he and the children dared to swim across the Rio Grande, even with its strong current, rather than simply cross via the port of entry, he repeated that they had to cross there. Without fear of frigid waters, arrest or failure, and with only a gallon-size plastic bag of belongings to their names, he explained: They were on their way to New York to find a different life.
Why the sudden use of the royal “we?” It’s impossible to know for sure just from reading this column. It could be that Russell asked a question and her National Guard escort translated for her. But it’s equally likely that this was something a guard member asked and she simply transcribed. Either way, a single question lobbed at a shivering, exhausted man being arrested by soldiers does not, in my book, represent a genuine effort at bearing witness to someone’s suffering, which is precisely what this column pretends it is doing.
There are genuine barriers to doing good reporting on immigration into the U.S., including the well-documented secrecy of federal agencies and the ethical quagmire of interviewing vulnerable sources without also exploiting them. That’s why people who actually live in the borderlands are justifiably disgusted by parachute journalism practiced by careless reporters who don’t bother to learn basic facts about the region. But I can’t even insult this Star-Telegram column by calling it parachute journalism. To do so would be to give Russell’s writing too much credit.
Ask yourself: Would someone truly and sincerely dedicated to telling a rich, complex story about the humanity of people who gave up everything to try and get to America also include, in that same story, a photo that they clearly took without even bothering to get out of their car?
