The New York Times’ Platner Vendetta

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Be forewarned. This is a more strident, polemical piece than the ones I am accustomed to writing or you may be accustomed to reading from me. But there are two reasons for that edge — the first of which is that those of us who still believe in this country have to stop the legacy press from blackening Graham Platner and letting Republicans (and Donald Trump) hold onto the Senate and shred our democracy and morality. This isn’t a time for tiptoes.

But there is another reason for my stridency that goes to the very dynamics of our political process. The establishment — the media, business, and political establishments in concert — have their rules and predilections and, almost without noticing, we let them impose those rules and predilections on us — on our culture, our society, our values, and, of course, on our politics.

Whatever one thinks of Graham Platner, his case is a glaring object lesson in how this works. He breaks the rules, by which I mean the political rules; therefore, he must be broken. 

And given the immense power of the legacy press and its masters, there is little we can do about it — even if we are made aware of it, which isn’t often. They tell us only what they want us to know. Under these circumstances, resistance is very hard.

To get the politics out of the way, yes, I am supporting Graham Platner, despite his imperfections, because I believe the midterms are an existential election for the survival of the nation. But the Platner story isn’t really just the story of a man who erred and now is being punished by a self-congratulatory, performatively responsible media. It is also a story of what the media have done, and continue to do, to exert control, ganging up as they so often do without regard for the larger consequences.

More nakedly, it is the story of a jaundiced, compromised press serving its own mission and pretending that it is serving ours. Or to put it yet another way, they are not selling information alone, however selectively; they are selling a narrative — their narrative. Platner isn’t the only victim here. We are.

Not the Times’ First Rodeo

The New York Times does hit jobs. It hit Hillary Clinton in 2016, amplifying the trivial-in-historical-context offense of using a private server for public business, and by doing so helping cost her the election. (How picayune that now seems.) It hit Joe Biden in 2024 with a relentless drumbeat of articles complaining about his age, his infirmity, and his cognitive deficits. While they were proven right, I have seen only a single news article in the Times on Trump’s naps during Cabinet meetings, and his mental incapacity has, to the best of my knowledge, been the subject of only two articles. (This isn’t even addressing the way it keeps sanewashing Trump.) It hit New York City mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani again and again and again as a grave threat to the very survival of New York.

And now it is hitting and hitting and hitting Graham Platner in what certainly seems to be a dedicated effort to derail his senatorial candidacy in Maine.

The Times’ smear campaign would likely have sunk Platner already in most places. But not yet in Maine. As a Mainer myself, I can tell you that we don’t take too kindly to establishment honchos telling us what to do.

To put it mildly, the Times doesn’t like Platner. (Neither does the rest of the legacy media.) 

I suspect they don’t like his affect — the working-man presentation and gruff demeanor that is so at odds with the Times’ own Ivy League button-down politesse. I suspect that they really don’t like his anti-establishment message, since the Times is the very epitome of the media establishment; nor the left-wing fervor of that message, since the Times is also the chief proponent of the idea that the Democratic Party must moderate. 

I suspect they hate the fact that Platner does not pledge blind support to Israel, since the Times is deeply devoted to Israel and to the idea that criticizing Israel’s campaign in Gaza is tantamount to antisemitism. They push that narrative almost daily.

And I suspect that the Times is exasperated beyond exasperation by the failure of their attacks so far to have the intended effect of either driving him out of the race or of making sure that the safe establishment candidate, Susan Collins, wins.

Maine Is a Long Way From New York

The Times’ smear campaign would likely have sunk Platner already in most places. But not yet in Maine. As a Mainer myself, I can tell you that we don’t take too kindly to establishment honchos telling us what to do. And I can tell you that a great deal of Platner’s appeal here is the very affect and the very message and the very fervor that so infuriate the legacy media. When Platner says he has our backs, he seems to mean it. And when we say we have his, we mean it too.

So far, Maine isn’t telling Platner to go to hell. I think they are telling the Times it can go to hell. And nobody, but nobody, really talks to the Times that way, save for Trump, which may be the greatest source of their umbrage.

Measure the Valleys, Measure the Hills

Platner is obviously no saint. With him, I think you have to take the bad with the good. The bad is that he spent four tours in Afghanistan and Iraq, an experience that clearly warped him in many ways. He assumed a warrior’s mentality. He was rough and mean and hard — the kind of man most liberals don’t know and that most wouldn’t like if they did. He admits his soul was tortured, but I believe it was also corrupted. He admits that his was a long road back, and we can appreciate that he may not be back all the way.

He is a damaged man. When he accused Collins of being the very personification of the oblivious legislators who sent him and his fellow service men and women to war, and she countered by saying that she wasn’t at fault because he volunteered, she was exhibiting the tone-deafness and callousness that drove Platner into politics. 

In some ways, in fact, this election will be a contest between the callousness Platner developed in war and that Collins developed sending people to war.

But the good of it is this: Platner was a fighter in war, and now he is a fighter in politics. 

Collins, like nearly all senators, has lived a cosseted life. Platner may not have grown up in dire poverty — one of the many “revelations” that the Times has thrown at him as a way of labeling him a phony — but no one can deny that his has been a difficult life, an agonizing life, a life of experiences that very few senators have lived. 

Which is all the more reason he may turn out to be a very good senator and perhaps even a necessary one. That is not phony. That is real. If the missteps are real, so is the pain.

OK, Let’s Compare Transgressions

And so is the pledge. The conservative commentator turned Never Trumper Charlie Sykes berated Platner this past week, like so many detractors have, as someone who has forfeited his right to serve in the Senate, though I have yet to hear anyone say that because of character defects he had forfeited his right to serve our country in battle. 

The argument is that Democrats have derided the character of Trump and Ken Paxton and Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel, and numerous other Republicans, and that it is rank hypocrisy for them to excuse Platner’s character. To support Platner is to compromise our own moral principles. At least, that is the media narrative.

That is wrong, I think, on two counts. First, whatever transgressions Platner has committed, they are not even near the same valence as the transgressions that those others have committed. Trump is a convicted felon — among many, many other things. His escapes from accountability are literally legendary. Paxton is a swindler, not bad at dodging the law himself. Hegseth and Patel, apart from major character issues, have destroyed two of America’s most important institutions. 

Platner’s sins are that he got a nasty tattoo, he said stupid things in the throes of alcoholic binges, he sexted women, and he was a bad boyfriend, maybe a very bad boyfriend. (As Maine State Auditor and Democratic House contender Matthew Dunlap put it, people have bad relationships.)

Meanwhile, I await the Times’ exposé on Susan Collins, who, as Rolling Stone has reported, received a hefty donation to her PAC from Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman just before voting to let Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” get to the floor (Schwarzman had a big financial stake in the bill), and has profited from her Senate votes but was able to hide those benefits because her stock portfolio was in the name of her husband — who was, by the way, a rich DC lobbyist. I await it, but I am not holding my breath. It is not part of the narrative.

And second, it is relevant that while those Republicans of dubious character are out there pushing family separation and deportation of immigrants, or the slashing of SNAP funds and Medicaid, or the despoiling of the environment, or the end of the NATO alliance, or tax cuts for billionaires, Platner is out there opposing each of these. 

The Republicans lack both character and decency. (I have always made a distinction between personal morality and public morality.) Whatever his character defects, Platner has consistently demonstrated his political decency.

It Took Indie Media to Ferret Out the Times’ Journalistic Malpractice

But there is something more nefarious in the Times’ Platner story than its clear antipathy to Platner, and that is what I want to get to: not how it advanced a negative narrative but how it advanced its narrative. 

The Times, in its reporting, hid things behind the coverage. It did not divulge that one of the two reporters it sicced on Platner, Katie Glueck, was, and presumably still is, an ardent supporter of Israel and was the co-president of Students for Israel as a student at Northwestern, where her group won an award from AIPAC, the powerful Israeli lobby. 

She is also, by one account, a dual citizen of the United States and Israel, where her parents live. This clear conflict of interest should certainly have disqualified her from writing about Platner. (She was also a reporter on the Mamdani beat and has written articles on one of the Democratic senatorial candidates in Michigan, Dr. Abdul El-Sayed, who is an AIPAC target.)

Nor, more importantly, did the Times report on the full backstory of Platner’s most vehement accuser, his onetime girlfriend Lyndsey Fifield. As former Huffington Post political editor Ryan Grim reported it on X, Fifield was no casual Republican operative, as the Times implies — “a Virginia conservative who has worked for right-leaning groups and Republican campaigns” — but rather, just as Platner described her, someone who had devoted her life to electing Republicans and who was deeply, deeply embedded in the right-wing movement.

Grim says that Fifield served seven years as the social media manager at the Heritage Foundation, which was the crucible for Project 2025, and that she presently identifies herself as a visiting fellow at the Independent Women’s Forum (IWF), which Grim calls a “prominent dark money group that is best known for helping usher Brett Kavanaugh on to the Supreme Court and giving Susan Collins the talking points she needed to make her decisive speech in his favor.”

That’s right. Fifield was involved in providing fodder for Collins’s speech on the Senate floor supporting Brett Kavanaugh after he was credibly accused of molesting a woman — not sexting but molesting. (There seems to be a double standard between Fifield’s attitude toward Platner and Kavanaugh.) Heather Higgins, the chairman of IWF, bragged that Collins said she would not have known what to say were it not for the help of IWF. “We’re watching TV,” Higgins said, “and we’re like, ‘That’s ours! That’s ours!’” 

Moreover, Fifield has described herself as wanting to “emulate the late conservative blogger Andrew Breitbart’s approach to online activism.” Well, she has. (Incidentally, she is strongly anti-Palestinian, which is relevant given Glueck’s background and Platner’s opposition to Israel.)

Odds are the Times is hoarding shoes to drop, one by one, even if they are likely to be flip-flops rather than boots.

But you won’t find that in any of the Times articles. Instead, you will find them describing a packed rally in Bar Harbor as “relatively sedate,” while the Portland Press Herald said the crowd “roared” when Platner appeared, and while NBC reported a “standing ovation.”

Odds are the Times is hoarding shoes to drop, one by one, even if they are likely to be flip-flops rather than boots. The Times will be tenacious. They will search for the most minor offenses and private matters. They will keep the story active. They will continue to be deceptive about their own conflicts of interest. And they will continue to twist the facts to fit their narrative and their mission if they need to. I also have no doubt that other media will follow the leader. Again, this is how it works in an era when the legacy media are in cahoots with the larger establishment.

But for the sake of our democracy, it is Maine that matters now, not the Times or even Platner. And nothing the Times does can alter that.

Maine seems to be saying that the Times can go to hell. So should we all.

Neal Gabler is the recipient of two LA Times Book Prizes, USA Today’s biography of the year, Time Magazine’s book of the year, a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Shorenstein Fellowship from Harvard. His substack is Farewell, America.