Erik Wemple, among others, points out that the CNN piece (still up on CNN website at this writing, without correction or clarification) , and teed up in reporting by Anderson Cooper and Kate Boduan without further amplification, features a group of activist Republican women. And that CNN had previously used these same women in 2016 in a similar role.
After CNN's misleading identification of these women was exposed, as Wemple reports,
"CNN host Ana Cabrera on Wednesday afternoon characterized 'several' of the women as being 'affiliated with groups that support President Trump.' The purpose, said Cabrera was "to see if any of them have changed their minds.'"
So we are back on the diner circuit rationale employed by NYT, CNN and other mainstream political outlets. After the surprise victory by Trump in 2016, the presumption was that all those white Trump voters would come around soon. So each Trump outrage for months was followed like dusk follows day by a team of reporters visiting diners to see if they changed their minds about Trump. Which they never did - because the premise that any rational person would now be outraged by Trump was no better than the idea that any rational person on November 8, 2016 would be outraged by Trump.
This episode reminds me of an incident one year ago. S.E. Cupp, the conservative pundit, in a guest piece in the NYT with the straw man (straw woman?) title "No, Not All Women Are Democrats", wrote the following:
"Salena Zito, co-author of the new book “The Great Revolt: Inside the Populist Coalition Reshaping American Politics,” recently surveyed 2,000 Trump voters in the rust belt. They are the kind of voters, she says, that experts overlooked in 2016 and still don’t get today.
One of them is Amy Maurer, a 43-year-old well-educated suburban mom in Kenosha, Wis, who is on the executive board of the Republican Party of Kenosha County. The Clinton campaign aimed ads at Republicans— even women like Ms. Maurer — keying in on Mr. Trump’s misogynistic remarks.
“It’s not my favorite thing,” she said when I asked her about the way Mr. Trump has talked about women. “It’s kind of like what I told my mother-in-law when she complained that her heart surgeon wasn’t very friendly: If he’s good at what he does, who cares? He’s not there to be your best friend.”'
Except she did not write exactly those words. The article awkwardly suggests that Zito surveyed a large group of Trump voters, but then quotes a Republican woman activist in order to provide some insight on the thinking of representative Republican women voters. So what gives. Well, the original piece omitted significant information about Amy Maurer:
"An earlier version of this article omitted a relevant detail about Amy Maurer, a Wisconsinite who voted for Donald Trump in 2016. Ms. Maurer is a Republican Party official in Kenosha County; that information should have been included with her comments."
Actually, no. That makes no sense. Ms. Maurer should not have been quoted. A Republican woman who is not a party activist should have been quoted, if we are trying to sample the crowd of 2,000 fairly.
So why is it so difficult to find Republican Party women who are not activists? It's not.
My best guess is that the two mainstream new organizations who invariably bend over backwards the most to assure conservatives that they are truly objective - CNN and NYT - prefer to give as much control to Republicans when they "balance" their presumably "biased" political articles with pieces about Republican voters. And when they enlist Republicans in that cause, people like SE Cupp, and whoever puts together these "focus groups" for CNN, they are yielding editorial ground to a class of people - Republican political operatives - who seize every opportunity to distort the facts and avoid disclosure, in order to craft their favored narrative.
For the "facts don't matter" crowd, disclosures don't matter either, especially in these two cases where disclosure would render the pieces useless as a gauge of representative Republican women.
