If there’s one thing the Right ought to have taken away from Russiagate and the Trump presidency, it’s that thinly and anonymously sourced “bombshell” reports about politicians cannot be trusted. But, apparently, not everyone in conservative media got the memo.
On Tuesday, the nationalist-conservative website American Greatness published an article making the shocking claim that South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, a Republican, is having an extramarital affair with former Trump aide Corey Lewandowski.
“Multiple sources have informed American Greatness that South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem is having an extramarital affair with adviser Corey Lewandowski, who previously served as a campaign manager for Donald Trump,” author Pedro Gonzalez writes. “The alleged fling reportedly has continued for months, sources say.”
Naturally, I was eager to know what sources and evidence substantiated this charge. Yet the article went on to provide almost zero additional information or evidence about this bombshell allegation. Not a single source is named or on the record.
Anonymous sources and zero evidence behind this claim. Literally just “a few unnamed people say so.” I remember when conservatives were horrified and outraged by this kind of shoddy reporting. https://t.co/PUIwdhy1GI
— Brad Polumbo 🇺🇸⚽️ 🏳️🌈 (@brad_polumbo) September 29, 2021
The author’s only real attempt to substantiate his charge is the following quote:
This isn’t just anonymous gossip — it’s secondhand anonymous gossip. Some unknown individual is saying that other people are saying Noem is having an affair. Is that what passes for well-sourced reporting at American Greatness?
One doesn’t need to wonder how the publication would have responded to similar stories devoid of any evidence or named sources that attacked Donald Trump — its writers vocally bashed the media’s coverage of the former president too many times to count. (Sometimes rightly!) Yet now, Gonzalez and company are embracing the worst of the Left’s tactics to take down a Republican politician they view as insufficiently populist and socially conservative.
Gonzalez makes no attempt to hide the fact that his real beef with Noem lies in political differences. Most of the article is focused on supposedly flawed positions the governor has taken on issues such as transgender people’s participation in sports and her refusal, in accordance with her small-government principles, to prohibit private businesses from requiring vaccinations.
Now, these issues and others are absolutely fair game. But they should not be used as motivation for unsubstantiated personal attacks or conflated with a story about alleged adultery.
Gonzalez also raises other ethical concerns about Noem’s relationship with lobbyists and interactions with government officials. Again, we can have separate conversations about each of these charges and see if there’s merit to them. Yet it’s absolutely disgraceful to accuse a married elected official and mother of three of adultery publicly with zero evidence.
Now, we can’t definitively sit here and say that the alleged affair never happened. But, to date, we have literally no reason to believe that it did. Noem, like anyone, deserves the benefit of the doubt until any actual evidence of wrongdoing emerges, or at least until one person is even willing to put their name next to an accusation.
Politicians invite public scrutiny of their policy positions, public statements, and overall governance. They do not deserve tabloid-style speculation about alleged personal immorality that has no substantive basis. Moreover, people cannot simultaneously claim with any credibility that salacious anonymous rumors about Trump were wrong while spreading similar, if not even less substantiated, rumors about the politicians they dislike.
Whether one agrees with Noem’s controversial policy stances is entirely beside the point. When conservative media outlets such as American Greatness stoop to ethically depraved gossip reporting that would make even the worst hack journalists in liberal media blush, they become everything they claim to hate — and then some.
Brad Polumbo (@Brad_Polumbo) is a libertarian-conservative journalist and a Washington Examiner contributor. Subscribe to his YouTube channel or email him at [email protected].
