Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala.,, speaks during a news conference on the border, Feb. 15, 2023, on Capitol Hill in Washington. (AP Photo/Mariam Zuhaib, File)

All it took was a seven-minute video by an independent journalist to uncover the big lie at the center of Katie Britt’s State of the Union response. One journalist. On TikTok. Not legions of reporters and researchers working for legacy media outlets like The New York Times or NBC News.

Jonathan Katz thought something sounded a little fishy in Britt’s speech so he did what all good journalists should do: He started to dig around. Less than 24 hours after the Alabama senator’s speech, Katz posted a fact checking video to TikTok that gutted the core of an already widely panned speech. Not only that, but it also raised important questions about why the rest of the media seemed to take Britt’s claims at face value.

Journalism is supposed to be about seeking truth and reporting it without fear or favor. The best journalists are curious and relentless about asking questions to get to the heart of something. Do they no longer teach this stuff in journalism schools? Because very few journalists had any questions about the Britt speech.

The initial coverage (not to be confused with the outpouring on social media) failed to even mention her odd, scary presentation, where she used a dramatic whisper voice to make halting statements from her kitchen. It’s almost like the reporters didn’t watch the speech but instead relied on a transcript to do the reporting.

This ABC News speech follow-up story, under the headline “’Nightmare’: Sen. Katie Britt paints bleak picture of America in Republican response to Biden,” is nothing but stenography. It’s paragraph after paragraph of quotes from the speech with zero fact checking and zero critical engagement. It is, unfortunately, an excellent example of the mainstream coverage of Sen Britt’s bizarre and, we now know, dishonest, speech.

It took another 12 hours — and a lot of prodding from social media — before the media began covering the odd Britt presentation in earnest. Kyle Whitmire at AL.com in Britt’s home state had one of the better efforts. He wrote:

“There’s nothing I can quote from Britt’s speech that can convey the strangeness of it — the mismatched emotions, the smiles in the wrong places, the jaw clenched when it shouldn’t have been — just the indescribable weirdness. It was something that had to be seen, but even then, couldn’t be understood — like postmodernism, avant-garde performance art or an involuntary behavioral science experiment.”

Of course, the bizarre Britt speech has now not gotten tons of media coverage and a send up by actor Scarlett Johansson on “Saturday Night Live.” Funny as that was, journalists should be ashamed that the SNL skit actually had more fact checking in it than most of the news stories about Britt’s speech. PolitiFact was the only news outlet that did an entire piece dedicated to fact checking Britt’s remarks. It looked at four statements about immigration, but notably not the one at the heart of her speech where she says:

“When I first took office, I did something different. I traveled to the Del Rio sector of Texas, where I spoke to a woman who shared her story with me. She had been sex trafficked by the cartels starting at age 12. She told me not just that she was raped every day, but how many times a day she was raped. The cartels put her on a mattress in a shoebox of a room, and they sent men through that door, over and over again, for hours and hours on end. We wouldn’t be OK with this happening in a third-world country. This is the United States of America, and it’s past time we start acting like it.”

Every journalist in America seems to have let that curious anecdote fly without bothering to fact check. But not Jonathan Katz. He knew immediately that something didn’t ring true. In the video that has now been shared over 23K times, Katz offers a lesson in journalism that mainstream reporters and editors simply must learn if they are going to cover this election cycle. Loot at the questions he asked:

  • Who was this woman?
  • How did she (Britt) meet her?
  • How did she (Britt) get her to tell her this story?
  • What’s the timeline?
  • How much of this happened on the border?
  • What country did it happen in?
  • Did it happen before Joe Biden was president?

Katz says it was pretty easy to figure out that Britt’s story didn’t add up. He just started Googling about Britt after she made the trafficking comment:

“…that part [of Britt’s remarks] really stuck out to me. I was like, This is a thing I can probably fairly quickly figure out, what she’s talking about. I didn’t realize how fast it would be. I thought, I’ll bookmark this, and then maybe I’ll look into it tomorrow. And then, while she was still doing the speech, I was just Googling and I figured it out.”

It turns out that Katz is not just some internet dude; he’s a long-time reporter who spent eight years as the Haiti bureau chief for the Associated Press and covered immigration, including in the region where Britt says this incident occurred. Working alone, he was able to quickly pull together photos and other information that proved Britt was, at best, misleading about a Biden connection to the sex trafficking or, at worst, lying to help her preferred candidate, Donald Trump.

If one journalist working alone can do this, we have to wonder why The New York Times, NBC News and nearly all the other mainstream news organizations the country relies upon could not. As I wrote previously, whatever the answer is, the result is indistinguishable from actual bias.

Jennifer Schulze is a former Chicago journalist who talks media every month on WCPT 820AM on “Live, Local & Progressive with Joan Esposito” with former Chicago Tribune editor Mark Jacob. You can follow her on Threads @jenniferschulzechi or Twitter/X @NewsJennifer.