Vice President JD Vance is not a fan of fact-based journalism.
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To be fair, that headline is slightly misleading because Vice President JD Vance does know how journalism works, he just does not like it.
The newly minted VP took issue with a story first reported by NBC News that casts an unfavorable light on Donald Trump’s pick to become secretary of defense, Fox News personality and self-avowed “warfighter” Pete Hegseth.
The story states that the Senate Armed Services Committee had received an affidavit from Danielle Diettrich Hegseth, the former sister-in-law of Hegseth’s second wife, Samantha Hegseth (there are a lot of Hegseths in this story, so to clear up any confusion, Danielle Diettrich Hegseth was married to the nominee’s brother at the same time Samantha was married to Pete).
The affidavit states that Samantha Hegseth feared for her safety as a result of Pete Hegseth’s volatile and threatening conduct. It also describes the nominee’s excessive drinking.
According to the document, things got so bad that Samantha Hegseth had come up with a safe word she could use to get away from her husband if she felt that she was in danger.
However, the affidavit also states that, while Danielle Hegseth had seen the nominee being highly intoxicated on various occasions, she did not personally witness physical abuse by him.
So, what did JD Vance have an issue with? Was he troubled by this new information, which seems to align with prior reports of Hegseth’s abuse of alcohol and conduct toward women?
That would be understandable. Not every nominee is forthcoming about skeletons in their closet, and intimate partner violence is more common among members of the armed forces and veterans, especially those who drink like Hegseth did.
But Vance wasn’t troubled by potentially putting this man in charge of the Pentagon, nearly 3 million people, and a budget of close to $1 trillion.
Instead, he was upset about the story coming to light in the first place.
“This is a story about Hegseth’s ex-wife, who herself said the story is a lie. ‘Journalism’ like this is a disgrace and is why the corporate media has lost its relevance,” he tweeted on Tuesday.
“How do you run that story with a straight face?” he asked in a follow-up tweet that included this screenshot.
How do you run that story with a straight face? pic.twitter.com/58DkgSTWlF
— JD Vance (@JDVance) January 21, 2025
First of all, the story is not a “lie” since it is about the allegations detailed in a signed affidavit concerning a man nominated to be placed in one of the most important positions in the US government (and sixth in the presidential line of succession).
That is relevant information to report on (although, apparently not relevant information to consider for the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who already dismissed the affidavit without having read it).
In addition, as evidenced by the screenshot, the story details Samantha Hegseth’s response. That’s how journalism works: You start out with a source, in this case a sworn statement, then you follow up with people mentioned in it and include what they have to say.
In this case, that includes Pete Hegseth’s lawyer stating that Danielle Hegseth is an “anti-Trump, far-left Democrat” with “an axe to grind against the entire Hegseth family.”
And then you present all of that information to your audience and let your readers/viewers make up their own minds as to what happened.
That being said, it makes sense that Vance has a problem with this approach since Republicans and their media allies prefer to just tell their supporters what to think (and, more importantly, how to feel about it).
He even said so last year, when he and Trump kept talking about Haitian immigrants eating pets in Ohio long after that claim was debunked.
At the time, Vance stated that “if I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
In his Navigating the Insanity columns, Klaus Marre provides the kind of hard-hitting, thought-provoking, and often humorous analysis you won’t find anywhere else.
