Watch those texts! Smartphones emerging as a new way for public figures to get into hot water

NEW YORK (AP) — Some politicians carry threats to their livelihood in the palms of their hands.

News stories in recent weeks about offensive or ill-advised text messages have blown up the careers of several young Republicans in a chat group, led a nominee for a White House job to drop out, threatened the campaign of a Democrat running for Virginia attorney general and embarrassed a federal prosecutor.

Memories are still fresh of this spring’s inadvertent inclusion of a journalist on a Signal chain where Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and other leaders discussed military strikes, possibly the second Trump administration’s most embarrassing moment.

For journalists, it’s something else entirely. Bad smartphone behavior is fertile ground for reporters seeking insight into people who look to lead us — and presents a challenge to nail down stories when “that’s fake” looms as a default defense.

An unfiltered look into how public people express themselves in private

Paul Ingrassia, who was President Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Office of Special Counsel, withdrew his name from consideration Tuesday. His Senate support had crumbled following Politico’s Oct. 20 report that Ingrassia said in a text chain that he had a “Nazi streak” and believed the federal holiday honoring the birth of Martin Luther King Jr. should be tossed into hell.

Less than a week earlier, Politico exposed a Telegram chat group with leaders of youthful Republican groups across the country involved in casually racist and violent talk. So far, the outlet says seven people have lost jobs due to the story.

“Part of the reason this is such an important line of coverage for Politico right now is it gives readers as close to an unfiltered look at the way powerful people think and express themselves in private as they’re going to get,” said Alex Burns, its senior executive editor.

He described texts as one of the few remaining frontiers of inadvertent authenticity. They recall past moments of infamy, like when President Richard Nixon made the ill-advised decision to tape his White House conversations, transcripts of which brought the phrase “expletive deleted” into the American lexicon.

There are countless cringeworthy moments caught on “hot” microphones, such as during the Cold War with the Soviet Union, when President Ronald Reagan joked before a 1984 radio address that “we begin bombing in five minutes.” Most public figures now know that virtually everyone around them carries a video camera-equipped smartphone.

Some of the recently-unearthed text messages — Black people called monkeys or “watermelon people,” images of gas chambers or urinating on the graves of opponents — are stunning and dark. You can’t help but wonder: what were they thinking? Were they thinking?

Probably not, in part because texting is such a ubiquitous, low-friction form of communication in today’s world, said Cal Newton, professor of computer science at Georgetown University. Guards that people have up when talking with other people — be reasonable, civil, careful — are often missing.

Some parts of our brain “don’t recognize text on a glowing piece of glass as ‘I’m in a conversation with other people,’” Newton said. Bad impulses, and the tendency to amplify or exaggerate, slip out because they can’t see reactions.

Still, it’s not like people don’t understand, on some level, that they’re communicating on a medium where conversations can be saved on screen shots. There were nervous warning signs in some of the chats: “If we ever had a leak of this chat we would be cooked,” one young Republican said.

It reminds Sarah Kreps, a Cornell University professor who teaches about the intersection of politics and technology, of politicians whose careers are ruined by affairs. Everyone sees the cautionary tales, but it doesn’t stop the behavior.

“There’s this overconfidence — ‘it can’t happen to me. It happens to other people and it won’t bring me down,’” Kreps said.

A high bar for newsworthiness in private conversations

Beyond texts, Burns said Politico is in the market for other insightful open source reporting, such as audio, video or behind-the-scenes memos. He would not say whether the Ingrassia texts came as direct result of how Politico handled its previous story, but he believes his outlet has proven it has handled these stories responsibly.

There’s a high bar of newsworthiness for reporting on private communications, he said.

“We’re not throwing stuff out there that’s merely embarrassing or vulgar,” Burns said. “There’s a specific reason why this material is newsworthy and we’re explaining in the stories why we think it is more than people just blowing off steam in private.”

While the Politico stories immediately impacted careers, voters will ultimately decide the impact of the National Review’s Oct. 3 story on Jay Jones, the Virginia attorney general candidate. In 2022 texts to a former colleague, Jones said former Virginia Republican House Speaker Todd Gilbert should get “two bullets to head.” He described Gilbert’s children dying in the arms of their mother.

Jones has apologized for the texts and not disputed their accuracy.

In a statement to Politico for its story, Ingrassia attorney Edward Andrew Paltzik said he did not concede the authenticity of the “purported” messages. “In this age of AI, authentication of allegedly leaked messages, which could be outright falsehoods, doctored, or manipulated, or lacking critical context, is extremely difficult,” he said.

Telling the public why they should believe reports

The ability now to concoct something that sounds real, coupled with public mistrust in the media, compels news organizations to tell readers as much as possible about how the material was verified without breaking agreements to confidential sources.

In its story about the January 2024 chat that Ingrassia was involved in, Politico said it interviewed two other participants. It explained why the sources were granted anonymity and had the person who showed reporters the entire chain say why they came forward. The second person verified Ingrassia’s phone number.

For a story in Lawfare this week about how Lindsey Halligan, the Virginia prosecutor behind the case against New York Attorney General Letitia James, messaged reporter Anna Bower on Signal to complain about some of her reporting, Bower detailed how she made sure it was really her. Bower had assumed it was a hoax; it’s rare for a U.S. attorney in a high-profile case to contact a journalist.

She had met Halligan one time years before, and asked the texter to say when that meeting was and who she was with. After the person answered correctly, Bower checked through another source to see if the phone number the messages came from was indeed Halligan’s.

Halligan later complained that their text conversation was off the record. Bower explained the rules of journalism to readers: A source must assume that a conversation with a reporter is on the record unless there’s an explicit agreement otherwise ahead of time — and this wasn’t done.

The Atlantic editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, wrote at length about how he handled being added to the Signal text chain about military operations. He, too, initially thought it was a hoax. He removed himself from the chat group when he became convinced it was real, then received confirmation from the National Security Council.

Said Burns: “The burden is always on us to show the reader why we are completely convinced the material is authentic.”

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David Bauder writes about the intersection of media and entertainment for the AP. Follow him at http://x.com/dbauder and https://bsky.app/profile/dbauder.bsky.social