O

ftentimes 
when 
Americans think about 
a 
person 
exemplifying 
patriotism, 
they 
conjure images of a 
courageous 
soldier 
defending 
American 
values and protecting 
her country against 
enemies, foreign and 
domestic. If you take 
that same framework 
of 
someone 
acting 
with 
courage 
even 
when 
at 
direct 
personal cost, it is 
evident that Christine Blasey Ford, 
a professor at Palo Alto University, 
demonstrates this courage and 
determination.
In July, Ford sent a letter to U.S. 
Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., who 
later passed it on to Sen. Dianne 
Feinstein, D-Calif., who sits on the 
Senate Judiciary Committee. In the 
letter, Ford describes being sexually 
assaulted by current Supreme 
Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh 
and his friend, Mark Judge. The 
assault included the two men 
shoving her into a bedroom, playing 
loud music with the intent to drown 
out her cries for help, repeatedly 
and violently groping her and 
drunkenly attempting to remove 
her clothing. Though the initial 
letter was anonymous, she has since 
allowed The Washington Post to 
publish her name in coordination 
with her allegations.
Since her story has become 
public, Ford has faced atrocious 
personal attacks and questions 
about the veracity of her claims, 
including an assertion by The Wall 
Street Journal that she might be 
misremembering 
the 
incident 
because she had discussed it in 
marriage counseling with her 
husband dating back to 2012. 
Many conservative politicians and 
pundits, including Fox News host 
Tucker Carlson, have asserted that 
she has come forward solely for 
political reasons and cited abortion 
as top among them. And on Friday, 
Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, the 
chairman of the Senate Judiciary 
Committee, released a letter of 
support for Brett Kavanaugh signed 
by 65 women who, according to 
Kavanaugh, knew him in high 
school (it is important to note that 

he attended an all-boys school). If 
Kavanaugh’s first line of defense 
is citing a group of women he did 
not assault to prove that 
he could not possibly 
have assaulted another 
woman, 
then 
surely 
his qualifications as a 
lawyer and a nominee 
to serve on the Supreme 
Court should be called 
into 
question. 
Either 
way, this letter was 
released with the cruel 
intent 
to 
undermine 
her allegations against 
Kavanaugh by painting him as the 
nice guy incapable of what Dr. Ford 
claims.

Despite these malicious attacks, 
Ford has offered to testify before the 
Senate Judiciary Committee, which 
is currently scheduled for Monday, 
Sept. 24. With the re-opening 
of the Senate hearings based on 
sexual 
misconduct 
allegations, 
Kavanaugh’s 
Supreme 
Court 
nomination has become parallel 
in mind to the hearings for Justice 
Clarence Thomas’s confirmation.
In the early 1990s, Clarence 
Thomas was nominated by then-
President George H.W. Bush for 
the Supreme Court of the United 
States. When the Senate Judiciary 
Committee 
hearings 
ended, 
Thomas’s nomination looked to be 
in a fine position for confirmation. 
However, 
an 
FBI 
interview 
leaked that contained allegations 
claiming Thomas had repeatedly 
sexually harassed Anita Hill, a 
lawyer who had worked with 
him. After the leak, the hearings 
were reopened and Hill was 
subjected to extraordinarily sexist 
questioning, including “Are you a 
scorned woman?” asked by then-

Sen. Howell Heflin, D-Ala. She 
endured vicious personal attacks by 
both the committee and the media, 
often shaded by misogyny and 
racism. Others threatened Hill’s 
life, attempted to get her fired and 
discredited her work as a lawyer.
The virulent treatment of Anita 
Hill by the all-male Senate Judiciary 
Committee, the media and a large 
part of the American people is 
enough evidence to explain why 
Ford might forgo making public 
something 
that 
is 
extremely 
personal, and that occurred over 
three decades ago. And for many 
survivors of sexual harassment, 
assault 
or 
rape, 
the 
cultural 
shame and deep trauma they have 
endured can silence them for years, 
decades or even lifetimes. Even 
after Ford’s name became public 
and she demonstrated evidence of 
the assault, many downplayed or 
repudiated the allegations against 
Kavanaugh outright.
When Kavanaugh was officially 
nominated to serve on the Supreme 
Court of the United States by 
President Donald Trump, Ford 
chose to defend her country from 
generations of extremely radical 
judicial decisions by a man she knew 
to have heinously committed sexual 
assault. She chose to speak out in 
the same world that destroyed Hill 
in the 1990s when she too stood up 
against her harasser, a world that 
also went on to confirm Thomas to 
the highest court of the land. Ford 
spoke up in a world where that same 
man, Thomas, continues to sit on 
the Supreme Court, despite clear 
evidence of wrongdoing.
Ford knows she lives in a 
country that would rather excuse 
the disgusting and violent behavior 
of powerful men by sweeping it 
under the rug or discouraging 
reporters 
from 
investigating 
credible allegations than deliver 
justice to their victim(s). She knows 
exactly what is at stake and did 
not silently sit back, even at great 
personal risk. Instead, she stood 
up and told the story of her sexual 
assault in hopes of stopping the 
destructive path of yet another 
powerful man. And for this, Ford is 
a true American patriot.

Opinion
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
4A — Friday, September 21, 2018

Emma Chang
Ben Charlson
Joel Danilewitz
Samantha Goldstein
Emily Huhman

Tara Jayaram
Jeremy Kaplan
Lucas Maiman
Magdalena Mihaylova
Ellery Rosenzweig
Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury
Alex Satola
Ali Safawi
Ashley Zhang
Sam Weinberger

DAYTON HARE
Managing Editor

420 Maynard St. 
Ann Arbor, MI 48109
 tothedaily@michigandaily.com

Edited and managed by students at the University of Michigan since 1890.

ALEXA ST. JOHN
Editor in Chief
 ANU ROY-CHAUDHURY AND 
ASHLEY ZHANG
Editorial Page Editors

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 
All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

KENDALL HECKER | COLUMN

Chasing mistakes
“S

tories live where things 
go wrong.”
I still remember 
writing this down in the Notes 
app on my phone, a 
hopeful mantra for and 
from myself, on the day 
I graduated from high 
school. I was in the car 
with my parents on the 
way home from dinner 
when 
my 
dad 
was 
prompted to retell one of 
his famous stories, which 
I had been hearing since 
I was a toddler, about 
him and his idiot college 
friends.
Let me be clear, my father is not 
an idiot, and neither are his friends. 
But when they were 20, they were 
prone to significant lapses in 
common sense, and when they get 
together now, they still revert back 
to that sophomoric state, losing 
several hundred collective IQ points 
along the way. Their shenanigans as 
young men are like folk tales in my 
family, and they seemed to promise 
that similar antics, adventures and 
flat-out blunders (made hilarious by 
hindsight) would fill my young adult 
years.
I was on the verge of leaving for 
a summer of travel and my freshman 
year of college not long after, so my 
parents were frequently prompted 
to break into reminiscence of 
their own time at school and as 
young adults, providing insights 
and advice along the way. I don’t 
remember which story my dad told 
that night in the car. Maybe it was 
about the time they scaled a wall 
to sneak into a castle in Salzburg, 
Austria, a “Mission Impossible” feat 
embarked upon simply to avoid the 
$6 cost of the ticket. Or it could have 
been the one about hiking down the 
Grand Canyon for spring break, in a 
surprise snowstorm, and realizing 
they all forgot to bring water (no 
worries, though, they each had a 
snake bite kit and a bottle of Wild 
Turkey). There was also the time 
they rented a houseboat on Lake 
Mead for the weekend, flew the Jolly 
Roger pirate flag and proceeded to 
pelt an unamused Coast Guard boat 
with water balloons from a giant 

slingshot.
Needless to say, my dad has a 
lot of stories. They generally involve 
poor judgment, alcohol and a series 
of 
miscalculations. 
Yet he survived and 
has been telling the 
tales for almost 40 
years. 
They 
still 
make 
him 
laugh 
every time.
I have never been 
one to make mistakes 
if I can help it. What 
does 
that 
even 
mean? I love order 
and 
preparation, 
completing 
assignments at least 24 hours 
early and making no undue noise 
in public spaces. In middle school 
and high school, I quickly earned 
the reputation of the “mom friend,” 
hanging around with a group of 
guys who, like my dad, scaled new 
heights of lovable stupidity. I made 
sure they didn’t get themselves 
killed doing things no common-
sense person should have to be told 
not to do (there is no situation in 
which you need to duct tape kitchen 
knives to your hands, and yet …).
In the car that night of 
graduation, I started thinking about 
my aversion to stupidity. Since I 
was little, I’ve always been praised 
for being responsible and mature. I 
got good grades in school and could 
carry on coherent conversations 
with my friends’ parents. I was the 
one left in charge when the adult 
left the room. I started to wonder if 
that was always such a good thing. 
Was I too controlling? Would I miss 
out on years worth of adventures 
because I was too caught up in 
potential 
consequences? 
Could 
I be missing out on something 
disastrous enough to still make me 
laugh 40 years from now?
I mentioned this to my dad, and 
he just sort of sighed. “Yeah,” he 
said, “You need to learn to be stupid 
sometimes.”
So, I wrote down the line 
that began this column as a little 
reminder to myself, that stories so 
often are grown in the places where 
things are calamitous or out of 
control, or not particularly smart. I 

set off on my summer of travel and 
hoped that I could heed my own 
advice and learn to chase idiocy.
Anyone that knows me knows 
I failed to do so. I am equally as 
organized and controlling as I was 
the day I graduated high school. But 
as I sat down to write this column, 
I started compiling in my head a 
list of my stories, the ones I tell so 
often that I begin to laugh on the 
front side of the punchline. There’s 
the time I skipped school for senior 
skip day with two friends, but was 
so stressed about missing classes 
that I was miserable and later wrote 
apology emails to all my teachers. Or 
when I went on a first date and the 
guy admitted to having imagined 
a whole future together after our 
hour-long chat (it was the first time 
we had ever met). Or the one when 
my friends and I were delayed five 
hours on a standing-room-only 
train from Edinburgh to Northern 
England, 
and 
everyone 
began 
looting shortbread and Cadbury 
chocolates from the snack cart. We 
spent all day standing between cars 
by the bathroom, laughing, joking 
and gorging on stolen snacks. It is 
one of my favorite memories from 
the trip.
None of my favorite stories were 
born solely from me letting my hair 
down and suppressing forethought. 
Stories so often live where plans 
are lacking, but luckily for people 
like me, you can’t plan life. You can, 
however, choose how you react to 
its randomness. As seriously as I 
may take myself in my day-to-day 
life, I have never been afraid to look 
back and laugh. You can choose 
to see something as a calamitous 
embarrassment or inconvenience, 
or 
it 
can 
be 
embroidered, 
embellished and refurbished to 
make your kids laugh 30 years from 
now, as long as you’re willing to be 
laughing at yourself too. There’s no 
need to chase mistakes when they 
will come rushing at you anyway, 
so you may as well be ready with a 
game, a group of friends and a bottle 
of Wild Turkey close at hand.

The patriotism of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford

Crossing the line

DAVID HAYSE | COLUMN

I

n a recent history course of 
mine, my professor told the 
class that, when reading 
any historian’s work, 
their narrative says 
just as much about the 
time they were living 
in as the period they 
were writing about. 
For example, Roman 
historian Livy, who 
lived from 59 B.C. 
to 17 A.D. and wrote 
about the centuries 
before, had certain 
biases that mutated 
his transcription of past events. 
Livy even says himself that 
he writes with the specific 
purpose of teaching certain 
moral lessons.
This pattern of transcribing 
and relaying “facts” in order 
to fit an agenda is not one that 
ended with Roman historians, 
but like much else, has been 
passed on to contemporary 
times. This is common among 
today’s historians, but more 
prevalent among journalists.
Journalists 
and 
news 
anchors 
are 
extraordinarily 
important people in today’s 
society. 
News 
anchors 
Bill 
O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Rachel 
Maddow 
and 
others 
are 
household names across the 
country, even for people who 
aren’t that attentive to the news. 
Have you ever stopped to think, 
“Who are these people? Are 
they trustworthy journalists 
or are they biased performers 
looking to gain viewers?” 
News anchors are part of 
the medium through which we 
get most of our information 
on the world, and their shows 
are 
growing 
more 
popular. 
Newspapers 
are 
losing 
readership 
while 
evening 
primetime 
shows 
are 
how 
57 percent of Americans get 
their news. Can we trust the 
front men and women of these 
programs and their staffs to 
credibly choose which stories 
are reported on, and how they 
are reported?
Let’s 
start 
with 
Sean 
Hannity of Fox News. Hannity 
has his own primetime show 
on Fox News in which he 
disseminates 
information 
that is purported to be fact. 
Recently, Sean Hannity lent his 
radio show to two of Donald 
Trump’s attorneys. He didn’t 
have them on as guests to 
answer tough questions about 
the 
potential 
investigations 
the president faces. He gave 
them his show. Rudy Giuliani 
and Jay Sekulow were allowed 
free reign over the program 
for three hours to spread their 
views unchecked and even take 
calls from listeners. This is an 
egregious dereliction of duty 
by a news anchor, to give away 
his show knowingly to allow 
a biased pair of partisans his 
national platform.
Trump’s 
now-former 
lawyer Michael Cohen also has 
proven issues with Hannity’s 
credibility 
and 
ability 
to 
be 
objective. 
Hannity 
was 
also a client of Cohen’s. This 
information was not brought 

forward 
willingly, 
but 
was 
“wrung 
from 
Mr 
Cohen’s 
lawyers by the judge’s order.” 
If Hannity wanted 
to be an impartial 
journalist and show 
a 
commitment 
to 
objective truth, then 
he would have come 
forward with this 
information, instead 
of downplaying its 
significance 
after 
it was revealed in a 
courtroom.
Hannity is not 
the only newsman, conservative 
or 
liberal, 
to 
have 
shown 
bias in both his personal and 
professional life. For example, 
Al Sharpton, whose past is 
strewn with connections to 
the Democratic Party and with 
personal 
controversies, 
has 
a 6:00 p.m. show on MSNBC 
called 
“PoliticsNation.” 
He 
also has a radio show called 
“Keepin’ It Real” and uses it 
along with his position with 
MSNBC to spread his ideology. 
Sharpton has worked in politics 
for decades and has had his 
fair share of controversies. 
The 
Tawana 
Brawley 
case, 
perhaps better known to our 
parents, is a stain on Sharpton’s 
reputation. A grand jury found 

that Brawley had lied and 
made false accusations of rape 
against 
several 
white 
men, 
including two police officers, 
but only after Sharpton had 
made slanderous remarks about 
both the police officers and 
the district attorney. These 
remarks resulted in Sharpton 
being found guilty and fined, 
and, according to some, sparked 
riots. In this case, Sharpton was 
made to put his money where 
his mouth was because he 
jumped on a situation to incite 
anger and gain publicity. He 
attempted to run for office on 
several occasions, but lost in the 
Democratic primary for mayor 
of New York, senator from New 
York and president of the United 
States. These issues, while not 
the only in Sharpton’s past, are 
clear markers of Sharpton’s 
ties to a political party in one 
case, and in the other, reckless 
behavior and slander.
Political bias in the media is 
not limited to Sean Hannity and 
Al Sharpton. Plenty of others 

across 
all 
networks 
spread 
their bias daily with the stories 
they choose to report and how 
they report them, with the 
guests they invite to the show, 
how they treat them and even 
seemingly simple choices such 
as the language they choose. 
Word choice might not seem 
important, and it is not always 
intentional, but it affects the 
tone of the speaker and reflects 
biases.
The point of this article is 
not to make you stop watching or 
reading news, but rather to ask 
that you do a little research into 
those you’ve trusted to research 
and report on the world for you. 
Whether it is Chris Cuomo, the 
host of CNN’s “Cuomo Prime 
Time,” 
whose 
brother 
and 
father are staunch Democratic 
politicians from New York, or 
Laura Ingraham, host of “The 
Ingraham Angle” on Fox News, 
who worked as a speechwriter 
for former President Ronald 
Reagan’s 
administration. 
Ingraham, who has made her 
political stances very clear, was 
encouraged 
by 
Republicans 
to run for Tim Kaine’s Senate 
seat in Virginia, and, most 
concerningly, endorsed Donald 
Trump 
at 
the 
Republican 
National Convention in 2016. I 
don’t mean to say that endorsing 
Donald Trump is an issue in of 
itself, but she set a dangerous 
precedent. “It was the first 
time in modern U.S. political 
history that a prominent media 
figure endorsed a nominee at 
his convention,” according to 
Newsweek writer Bill Powell.
“Congress shall make no law 
respecting an establishment of 
religion, or prohibiting the free 
exercise thereof; or abridging 
the freedom of speech, or of the 
press; or the right of the people 
peaceably to assemble, and to 
petition the government for a 
redress of grievances.”

The First Amendment and 
its supposed guarantee of a free 
and independent press have 
almost become irrelevant with 
the advent of more politicized 
news. The political ties between 
the news media and both the 
Democratic 
and 
Republican 
parties have made them neither 
free or independent. They have 
devolved 
into 
propagandists 
of 
two 
power-seeking 
organizations. This does not 
mean that you can’t watch the 
news or that you can’t trust 
anything you see. It does mean 
however that there is an implicit 
or explicit bias in everything 
you see, and in order to see the 
full picture of any issue, this 
must be recognized. Jack W. 
Germond, a political reporter 
for nearly 50 years, wrote in 
his book “Fat Man in a Middle 
Seat: Forty Years of Covering 
Politics”: 
“The 
rules 
were 
clear then. If you once crossed 
the line from journalism into 
partisan politics, you could not 
return. They were them and we 
were us.” 

David Hayse can be reached at 

dhayse@umich.edu.

The First 
Amendment 
and its supposed 
guarantee 
of a free and 
independent 
press have almost 
become irrelevant 
with the advent of 
more politicized 
news. 

MARISA WRIGHT | COLUMN

Ford has faced 
atrocious personal 
attacks and 
questions about 
the veracity of her 
claims

KENDALL 
HECKER

Kendall Hecker can be reached at 

kfhecker@umich.edu.

DAVID 
HAYSE

JOIN OUR EDITORIAL BOARD

Our Editorial Board meets Mondays and Wednesdays 7:15-8:45 PM at 
our newsroom at 420 Maynard Street. All are welcome to come discuss 
national, state and campus affairs.

MARISA 
WRIGHT

Marisa Wright can be reached at 

marisadw@umich.edu.

