On October 18, Fox News published ZOA president Morton Klein’s charge, from an October 12 interview, that Democrats have not condemned Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib, Abdul El-Sayed and Zohran Mamdani. Its headline names none of them. The headline has no names in it. “Democrats” act, by failing, and the condemned are only ‘vicious Jew haters’, a phrase owned by an unnamed “Pro-Israel leader”. The first paragraph supplies the owner, Morton Klein; the third supplies the four people he means and says he spoke for himself. A reader who stops at the headline carries one man’s insult away as a party’s failure. That is the one line quoted as the whole: a single interview, a single phrase, made into the news. Set it beside Fox’s own video of the same interview, posted October 12: “Pro-Israel activist rebukes leftists”. Six days later the activist is a leader, the leftists are Democrats, the rebuke is a warning. The interview did not change; the subject grew. The habit the sentence rides is us and them: a few members of the other side stand for all of it. No Democratic official answers in the article. Omar and Tlaib do not answer at all; El-Sayed first appears in the 13th paragraph, Mamdani in the 17th. The tell is an insult in quotation marks at the top of a headline: the marks make it someone’s claim, the placement makes it the news. Every headline carrying this charge is Fox’s, the ZOA’s or a syndicated copy of Fox’s. It reached readers 16 days before the November 3 midterms, where El-Sayed is on Michigan’s Senate ballot. When it works, the gain goes to whoever runs against Democrats that day.
