A leftist newspaper was called out Tuesday for its absurd personal attack on rising GOP star Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY.
After facing backlash, Albany’s Times Union appeared to have taken down a blog post that derisively referred to the conservative congresswoman as “childless.”
When first elected in 2014, Stefanik was the youngest woman ever elected to Congress at the time.
Her stock rose even higher when she emerged as a sharp and unapologetic ally of President Donald Trump during the 2019 impeachment hearings before the House Intelligence Committee, and later with a speech at the Republican National Convention.
But her Trump support also made her a popular target for leftist-media assassins like the Times Union. Although Stefanik’s district does not contain any parts of Albany, it does cover a vast swath of the New York’s GOP-friendly upstate area.
The paper’s constant smears of her politics and job performance notwithstanding, Stefanik said the snipe at her family life in a post titled “Storytime with Elise Stefanik” by bloggers Lale Davidson and Peter Marino had pushed past the boundaries of propriety.
“As a young married couple, we have developed a thick skin over many years as we have become accustomed to repeated sexist smears in media coverage,” Stefanik wrote in a joint statement with husband Matt Manda.
“However, the Times Union’s decision to publish an article that mocked us as ‘childless’ is a new low and is truly heinous and wildly inappropriate,” they said. “This shameful statement is not only inherently sexist, but also hateful, abusive, and heartless.”
They called to task the paper’s decision-makers for having “let the paper’s standards sink so low that they have chosen to embrace sexist scum and content under the masthead.”
The statement also called for a complete retraction and public apology.
“Like millions of families, we hope and pray that we will be blessed by becoming parents,” the couple concluded.
A rough search of the paper’s content on Wednesday did not appear to signal any retraction or acknowledgement of the controversy, although the paper had removed the original article.
“This site has been archived or suspended,” said the error notice from Wordpress.
