By Will Upton
For over a week, Washington, D.C., was abuzz with rumors of a big story coming from the New York Times about Democrat Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner — himself once a fixture for many young political staffers in the capital while serving as a bartender at the Tune Inn.
Although you likely won’t read about it on social media, the Times story mentions serious allegations against Platner: that he physically abused an ex-girlfriend — including grabbing her shoulders so hard that he left bruises and twisting her arm behind her back, shoving her into a room, and locking her in there overnight. Another ex-girlfriend shared that she cut off contact with Platner after a drunken episode that was apparently too disturbing to retell.
But these allegations are buried under mountains of campaign flack bullshit and then packaged as “intimidating” and “unsettling.” Normal people have another phrase for it: domestic abuse.
That characterization is by design.
Let me be clear: the New York Times story was not journalism. It was a soft catch-and-kill operation. It was a favor to Platner’s campaign, a disservice to readers, and an insult to the women who say they were hurt by him. (RELATED: Nazi-Tattooed Senate Candidate Accused Of Physically Abusing Ex-Girlfriend)
One of those victims, Lyndsey Fifield, is my friend.
Before my journey back into journalism, I spent a long stint working in political communications and public relations. I know how to arrange a catch and kill, and more importantly, I know how to set up a soft catch and kill when a more definitive end cannot be arranged.
The term ‘catch and kill‘ refers to a shady practice where a public relations firm or consultant works with a friendly news outlet that was pitched or ‘stumbled’ upon a negative story about a client to effectively ‘catch’ and then ‘kill’ the story — or delay it until it no longer has impact.
A ‘soft catch and kill’ works similarly, though it mostly involves the publication still running the story in a timely manner, but the details are softened or buried deep in the narrative to soften the bite. The outlet can claim it did its job, but they’ve given the target just enough wiggle room to survive.
The Times’s goal here was not to fairly give hearing to allegations against Platner; it was to play Fifield for a sucker, give her story just enough air that the Democrat Party’s cretin media and consultant class could zero in on it and crush it. (RELATED: Top Graham Platner Adviser Threatened To Defame Female Staffer Over Sexting Scandal)
And it becomes very, very obvious with a careful read of the story and the response.
The Times’s supposed vaunted exposé on Platner buries its lede 22-paragraphs in to the piece. By the time readers got to the allegations that should have opened the article, they had already been marched through campaign spin, euphemistic mush, and ex-girlfriend character witness.
In fact, for the first third of the New York Times expose, they focused on women provided to the newspaper by the Platner campaign — who, of course, sang the degenerate former bartender’s praises. And frankly, that is all many readers will come away with, because that is about as far as their attention span lets them get into the narrative. Which is, again, the point.
Prior to publication, I’m told that the Times spoke to two women who had credibly accused Platner of sexual assault. This detail was revealed to Fifield — likely in an effort to encourage her to divulge more of her story. Those women’s allegations never made it into the story. They were effectively ‘killed’ by the Times’s editors and by Platner’s attorneys, I’m told.
The Platner campaign was originally only given two hours to respond, but that stretched into 24 hours — I’m told at the behest of the New York Times’s editors. This is beyond malpractice, especially when the interview subjects are told otherwise.
The goal was to create enough doubt and ambiguity regarding Platner’s disgusting behavior to let my friend, Lyndsey Fifield, be smeared by Democrat Party operatives like Emma Vigeland and partisan media hacks like Krystal Ball.
And that’s exactly what they did.
“NYT published uncorroborated accusations against @grahamformaine of ‘unsettling’ and ‘toxic’ behavior that came from a Heritage staffer who previously worked for a conservative org that backs Collins,” Ball wrote in a post on X late Thursday.
My private thoughts about Ball aside, the known partisan media personality is performing — albeit likely unwittingly — her role in the catch and kill impeccably.
For Vigeland’s part, she takes the dubious line of attack, declaring, “So, unless there’s something else coming, the big NYT exposé is that Platner was a bad boyfriend to some women but also a good boyfriend to other women?”
Even more telling, and perhaps a tip of the hat to the nature of this soft catch and kill, is the fact that numerous Democrat aligned influencers and operatives were essentially flooding the zone on social media in the hours before the story was published. Somehow, they knew that one of the women was an activist in the conservative movement — a detail that surmisably came from the New York Times or from the Platner campaign, or both, ahead of publication. Others appear to have known details that were cut from the story.
I can see the fingerprints of a soft catch and kill all over the New York Times’s report on Platner. As I said, I’ve arranged both hard and soft catch and kills in the past as a public relations hack. Make no mistake, this is what we’re seeing play out here, and the reporters and editors at the Times should be ashamed.
