Press Critique: Times Turns Focus to Senator’s Wife
Paper’s Story Makes Her Sound Like the Master Mind
The New York Times piece on the Menendez indictment is pretty damning.
The details of the Menendez indictment are shocking for the scope of the corruption they describe, which I’ll comment on tomorrow in a longer essay. The story that ran today bears some comment, it raises questions about the Times’ approach. Consider the second paragraph, which introduces Menendez’s wife, the former Nadine Arslanian.
Ms. Arslanian, who would eventually marry Mr. Menendez, quickly introduced him to one of her longtime friends: Wael Hana, an Egyptian American businessman in New Jersey. The future Ms. Menendez was eager to connect her influential new boyfriend with Mr. Hana’s high-level connections in the Egyptian government.
The focus here is on Arslanian, and much of the story follows this pattern, presenting her as driving force of what is accused.
Ms. Menendez, 56, often pestered her associates for more bribe payments, prosecutors said, and did not hesitate to peacock her husband’s influence, once sending a news article to Mr. Hana about $2.5 billion of military sales to Egypt and writing, “Bob had to sign off on this.” The business associates around Mr. Hana seemed to find more and more ways to extract what they needed from Mr. Menendez, as long as they could deliver the cash.
Arslanian — Ms. Menendez — appears central to the narrative, but it was the senator was the one entrusted by the public, the one on whom we should focus.