Googling reveals that Hunter deButts is a real name borne by real people, astonishing as that sounds. Moreover, one of them evidently served in the Great War (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8509128/william-hunter-debutts). He married a descendant of Robert E. Lee, but she was not Woodrow Wilson's sister.
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I never subscribed to Esquire, but back in the day routinely picked up (full price!) issues at Chicago’s Union Station on my way home to the burbs. They always contained worthwhile articles, plus the annual Dubious Achievement Awards (possibly related to Flaming Feculence Awards?) were classic. I’m digressing here, but it’s impossible to forget the February 2001 cover with Monica Bellucci dressed in nothing but Iranian caviar.
As to The View, I’m still searching for proof anything worthwhile has ever been sourced from that media entity.
I used to tear out the Dubious Achievement Awards each year. At some point, I had perhaps 20 years worth of them in a folder. They were a great window into whatever the ephemeral stories of each year were ... and the captions were spectacular. I read that they kept a big box into which staffers could drop weird news stories throughout the year. Then, they'd all get high and drunk, read the stories one-by-one and think of captions en masse.
Another fine, thought-provoking column. Journalism has a dozen ways to say "we stand by our reporter's story." Which is really just a way to say "our editors were asleep on this one, and we trusted the reputation of the writer. Oops!" There was a time when consumers of news stories trusted the stories because they trusted the editors and fact-checkers. Legacy media outlets insist we continue to trust their stories, but they are proving themselves to be ever less trustworthy. Esquire might be close to trustworthy, but The View not so much. In this case, both have failed the test. Thank you for nailing them, Prof. Graboyes.
Yes it did! And some of the others were even worse. Clearly looked like officers of the Kaiser. I requested the pictures multiple times and finally said, "This one's good enough. I have other things to do."
And thanks to another commenter, I've learned that there is actually a real-life, four- or five-generation line of people named Hunter DeButts here in Virginia. The first one married Robert E. Lee's granddaughter. So far as I can tell, no connections to Woodrow Wilson, no pardons. Makes me wonder why ChatGPT borrowed that particular family's name for its hallucinatory disinformation.
Thank you, Robert for taking the time and having the fortitude to read what Pierce wrote. I have long since given up him and Esquire for my own piece of mind. And several years ago, I carefully hurled the NYT into that trash bin. The latter for its commissions and omissions and my own inability to resist reading the absurd comments by its Westside NYC liberal progressives to the articles.
I knew modern journalism was headed for trouble when Al Gore taught a course at Columbia "off the record" in 2001. And let's not forget the notorious incidents of years past where stories were just made up, they didn't need AI. Jayson Blair being one example.
At the time of the Jayson Blair scandal, Howell Raines commented "The really scary part is that none of the people we printed lies about bothered to call and demand a correction. They just figured that's how newspapers operate so they didn't call. That's scary and that is not a problem with the New York Times. It's a problem with our profession."
The most notorious journalistic failure was Sabrina Rubin Erdely's notorious "A Rape on Campus" in Rolling Stone. Took the word of one unhinged young woman, failed to do even basic due diligence, editors rubber-stamped it, and up-ended the lives of dozens of innocent students. The University of Virginia was in turmoil for months, thanks to its adminsitrations decision to buy the story and run with it. That was back in 2014. Go to her Twitter/X page--which is still up, as forlorn and unattended as the Marie Celeste. The final tweets, from 2014, are Erdely fist-pumping the fact that the Washington Post and other outfits were lionizing her article. Then ... a decade of ghostly silence.
Another wonderful read, delivered with skill. If I had your skill at AI art, I would picture you as a matador driving a quill pen through the back of the charging, frothing bull that Mr. Pierce seems to be.
Here in Virginia, the gentry often go by their middle names--sometimes with the first initial in tow. That seems to be the case with some of the line of William Hunters of the DeButts family. Often, they alternate over the generations. Faulkner wrote extensively about these naming traditions in Mississippi.
We are clearly reaching the point of total disillusionment amidst the vast majority of the public. It’s not only that neither of these writers (hard to call them journalists) accepted their errors with adult-like responsibility; it’s that it’s now likely that tens or hundreds of thousands of people will have seen their initial posts only, and go on to repeat their errors as if true. And if corrected, they, too, will resist the truth. It’s almost as if these “mistakes” know what they are doing — planting untruths almost “virus-like” in the minds of millions.
The test will be if Pierce and Navarro are canned for their carelessness. I know which way I will bet.
As for Neil Bush, he seems to be a less greedy, less drug addled version of Hunter. His career has been one long series of knocking down things, then asking "Excuse, me, can you direct me to the nearest China shop?"
You have a positive genius for the telling tidbit, in this case Lt. Kije. And I alsoloved/was horrified by the account of the court martial of Major deButts.
“As for Neil Bush, he seems to be a less greedy, less drug addled version of Hunter.”
Sorry, while I’m not one who is a huge fan of the Bushes, Hunter was the high-living bagman for the Biden crime family shaking down foreign governments for 10s of millions of dollars for access to the U.S. government.
WTF even *remotely* comparable did Neil Bush ever do?
Ha, a routine reminder and indictment of what mainstream journalism is today.
Call me shameless but I'm not all that bothered by the breaking of rules here. If we were Joe, we'd probably do the same thing, as much as sitting outside the situation I can hand-wring about the sanctity of rules.
Context as to why Hunter was charged in the first place is important. That context is that Joe is the punching-bag for conservatives, and seemingly now Democrats too, who want to buck-pass their failure to understand the electorate and lose the election onto Joe.
I'm quite ignorant of the whole Hunter Biden episode, so take my thoughts as you will. But, if the charges are as minor as they seem; lying about sobriety when buying a gun, tax evasion, etc., basically things routinely done by millions of Americans every year (albeit that's my guess), or otherwise not prosecuted for 90% of people, it's a political application of the justice system.
Does that excuse Hunter's wrongdoing? No. Does it affect the 'rightness' of Joe pardoning his son? Of course - context matters.
And if it's true the guy has struggled with addiction and is now finally on a better path, would you then let your only son spend years of life in prison when you yourself had the power to void that result? Moreover, after an overturned plea deal(?) that would have let him walk anyways?
Political justice, political pardon. Seems about fair to me. Thoughts?
Very well. You are shameless. You ignore the 14,200 other Americans who were charged with firearm-related crimes in 2020 alone but did not get pardons because they aren't the President's son. Maybe you're prepared to approve this double standard of justice but people who went to prison for the same crimes as Hunter Biden's can scarcely afford to.
“I'm quite ignorant of the whole Hunter Biden episode”
This fact alone is a major indictment of of the mainstream left-biased media, and a lesser indictment of yourself.
If you were interested, you easily could have - and still could - go look up the details of the Biden family crime syndicate, with Joe “the big guy” at the top had to be “kicked up 10% to” and where 10s of millions of dollars from foreign governments and interests went to more than a dozen Biden family crime syndicate members, including grandchildren, laundered through multiple levels of accounts, as the price for access to Joe.
THAT is why the Hunter laptop story is/was important. It’s not just about what Biden’s idiot drug-addled son did; it’s about how Joe Biden profited from selling access to our government, and how he benefited financially from having the Ukrainian prosecutor fired (particularly ironic that Trump was impeached by the Dem House for looking into that very issue).
Do your homework if you are going to comment.
Even if consuming only the biased MSM makes that difficult to do.
Characterizing Joe Biden as a head of a “crime syndicate” is loaded. A big part of getting to the truth is on the consumer-end (how do we process information), as much as it’s about the information out there (distributor-end).
Go look up the facts about all of the money that has gone to various members of Biden’s family before suggesting that my use of the phrase “crime syndicate” is “loaded”. Go search, e.g. Ted Cruz’ podcasts have covered this in depth, and see for yourself. Most of the info came out during Congressional hearings.
The MSM does not merely have “blindspots”. It is overtly now (where prior to Trump it was covertly, and to a much lesser degree) blatantly biased for Dems, against the GOP. It doesn’t report on news that hurts Dems, or dismisses it as unproven unless it is 100% proven (and sometimes not even then), where it trump-ets anything anti-GOP, even where no hard evidence exists.
“crime syndicate” is “loaded” regardless of the facts. Some terminology is more emotionally charged/loaded than others.
The issue is not all that interesting to me, I think Americans probably have a lot more pressing issues to think about and work together on than this.
That's also because one should always be wary of partisan's (definition: https://itsjakestake.substack.com/p/theres-hope-for-us-you-yet) 'facts'. That's not to say they are not facts, but corroborating and doing due diligence on claims made by partisans, let alone overtly opposed figures like Cruz (he has clear biases/incentives to blast Biden), is a investment of time and effort, usually fruitless, that could be put to better use elsewhere.
It would be the same if Hunter Biden came out with his own 'facts' - I'd be similarly wary, as should everyone.
Got it, Mr. “Context as to why Hunter was charged in the first place is important. That context is that Joe is the punching-bag for conservatives…”
Let’s make sure not to let actual facts get in the way of our narrative.
And to cast aspersions on the incentives of those who report the truth, while minimizing the “blindspots” of the left-biased we agree with, so that we don’t have to address those pesky facts.
🙄
I cited Cruz as someone who put the information out PRECISELY. BECAUSE. THE. OVERTLY-BIASED. MSM. REFUSED. TO. DO. SO.
Can you imagine for even a millisecond if the story had been about Trump and his family, with even 3% of the actual evidence, that the MSM wouldn’t have been on it nonstop?
Rationalization really is the second strongest human drive, it seems.
The one thing I will give you credit for is reading *this* Substack in the first place, given your fairly vigorous “let’s all Moveon.org” defense of the MSM status quo.
Of key importance is that the father and his press chief said over and over and over again that he would not pardon his son. And hundreds of times--thousands most likely--the press cited the single datum as the one-stop-shopping proof-positive of Biden's moral superiority over Trump. Add to it that "No one is above the law. NO ONE!" has been the endlessly repeated mantra. Nor was there anything minor about the charges.
Googling reveals that Hunter deButts is a real name borne by real people, astonishing as that sounds. Moreover, one of them evidently served in the Great War (https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8509128/william-hunter-debutts). He married a descendant of Robert E. Lee, but she was not Woodrow Wilson's sister.
Wow!
Hunter DeButts! At least it wasn’t Captain Tuttle.
Thanks for a good laugh, Prof!
That's my job!
Oh, how the mighty have fallen. I never subscribed to Esquire, but back in the day routinely picked up (full price!) issues at Chicago’s Union Station on my way home to the burbs. They always contained worthwhile articles, plus the annual Dubious Achievement Awards (possibly related to Flaming Feculence Awards?) were classic. I’m digressing here, but it’s impossible to forget the February 2001 cover with Monica Bellucci dressed in nothing but Iranian caviar.
As to The View, I’m still searching for proof anything worthwhile has ever been sourced from that media entity.
I used to tear out the Dubious Achievement Awards each year. At some point, I had perhaps 20 years worth of them in a folder. They were a great window into whatever the ephemeral stories of each year were ... and the captions were spectacular. I read that they kept a big box into which staffers could drop weird news stories throughout the year. Then, they'd all get high and drunk, read the stories one-by-one and think of captions en masse.
Love your story here! I can picture it.
Apparently that is now how much of legacy media receives, reviews, edits and publishes.
:)
Another fine, thought-provoking column. Journalism has a dozen ways to say "we stand by our reporter's story." Which is really just a way to say "our editors were asleep on this one, and we trusted the reputation of the writer. Oops!" There was a time when consumers of news stories trusted the stories because they trusted the editors and fact-checkers. Legacy media outlets insist we continue to trust their stories, but they are proving themselves to be ever less trustworthy. Esquire might be close to trustworthy, but The View not so much. In this case, both have failed the test. Thank you for nailing them, Prof. Graboyes.
Fascinating, Bob. It is comforting to know that real journalists like you have our backs. 😊
Working on it!
The AI image of Major deButts made him look more like an Austro-Hungarian officer than an officer of the United States......
Yes it did! And some of the others were even worse. Clearly looked like officers of the Kaiser. I requested the pictures multiple times and finally said, "This one's good enough. I have other things to do."
Priceless. We should free Hunter DeButts - reparations for his ordeal. It’s Dreyfus all over again … 😬
And thanks to another commenter, I've learned that there is actually a real-life, four- or five-generation line of people named Hunter DeButts here in Virginia. The first one married Robert E. Lee's granddaughter. So far as I can tell, no connections to Woodrow Wilson, no pardons. Makes me wonder why ChatGPT borrowed that particular family's name for its hallucinatory disinformation.
There is much that I wonder about concerning ChatGPT, and its ilk.
Thank you, Robert for taking the time and having the fortitude to read what Pierce wrote. I have long since given up him and Esquire for my own piece of mind. And several years ago, I carefully hurled the NYT into that trash bin. The latter for its commissions and omissions and my own inability to resist reading the absurd comments by its Westside NYC liberal progressives to the articles.
Somebody's gotta do it. :)
I knew modern journalism was headed for trouble when Al Gore taught a course at Columbia "off the record" in 2001. And let's not forget the notorious incidents of years past where stories were just made up, they didn't need AI. Jayson Blair being one example.
At the time of the Jayson Blair scandal, Howell Raines commented "The really scary part is that none of the people we printed lies about bothered to call and demand a correction. They just figured that's how newspapers operate so they didn't call. That's scary and that is not a problem with the New York Times. It's a problem with our profession."
Yup.
The most notorious journalistic failure was Sabrina Rubin Erdely's notorious "A Rape on Campus" in Rolling Stone. Took the word of one unhinged young woman, failed to do even basic due diligence, editors rubber-stamped it, and up-ended the lives of dozens of innocent students. The University of Virginia was in turmoil for months, thanks to its adminsitrations decision to buy the story and run with it. That was back in 2014. Go to her Twitter/X page--which is still up, as forlorn and unattended as the Marie Celeste. The final tweets, from 2014, are Erdely fist-pumping the fact that the Washington Post and other outfits were lionizing her article. Then ... a decade of ghostly silence.
Another wonderful read, delivered with skill. If I had your skill at AI art, I would picture you as a matador driving a quill pen through the back of the charging, frothing bull that Mr. Pierce seems to be.
¡Olé!
With a name like deButts, any rational person would dig into it just a bit.
Navarro, on the other hand ...
She was not alerted by the coincidence of first names, either.
Another commenter sent me to this link. :) https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/8509128/william-hunter-debutts
Husband of Robert E. Lee's granddaughter.
Oh! William deButts! Why didn’t you say so?
Here in Virginia, the gentry often go by their middle names--sometimes with the first initial in tow. That seems to be the case with some of the line of William Hunters of the DeButts family. Often, they alternate over the generations. Faulkner wrote extensively about these naming traditions in Mississippi.
Add this tidbit to findagrave"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_D._deButts
All the same family. Another was president of Southern Railway. AN impressive lot, apparently.
As I have sort-of quoted before, "It's not the things I don't know that bother me. It's the things I know for certain that just ain't so."
And of course, the mistakes (or lies, as I prefer to call them) will live on forever on social media.
Great article, by the way.
Thanks!
We are clearly reaching the point of total disillusionment amidst the vast majority of the public. It’s not only that neither of these writers (hard to call them journalists) accepted their errors with adult-like responsibility; it’s that it’s now likely that tens or hundreds of thousands of people will have seen their initial posts only, and go on to repeat their errors as if true. And if corrected, they, too, will resist the truth. It’s almost as if these “mistakes” know what they are doing — planting untruths almost “virus-like” in the minds of millions.
In fairness, Navarro is not a writer; she’s just a talking head on The View.
The Esquire debacle is far, far worse.
It’s just that deButts is so… bleeping… funny.
The test will be if Pierce and Navarro are canned for their carelessness. I know which way I will bet.
As for Neil Bush, he seems to be a less greedy, less drug addled version of Hunter. His career has been one long series of knocking down things, then asking "Excuse, me, can you direct me to the nearest China shop?"
You have a positive genius for the telling tidbit, in this case Lt. Kije. And I alsoloved/was horrified by the account of the court martial of Major deButts.
“As for Neil Bush, he seems to be a less greedy, less drug addled version of Hunter.”
Sorry, while I’m not one who is a huge fan of the Bushes, Hunter was the high-living bagman for the Biden crime family shaking down foreign governments for 10s of millions of dollars for access to the U.S. government.
WTF even *remotely* comparable did Neil Bush ever do?
It’s sad really that your enlightening article should strike few readers as shocking. Great article. Thank you so much for your excellent work.
And thank you!
Ha, a routine reminder and indictment of what mainstream journalism is today.
Call me shameless but I'm not all that bothered by the breaking of rules here. If we were Joe, we'd probably do the same thing, as much as sitting outside the situation I can hand-wring about the sanctity of rules.
Context as to why Hunter was charged in the first place is important. That context is that Joe is the punching-bag for conservatives, and seemingly now Democrats too, who want to buck-pass their failure to understand the electorate and lose the election onto Joe.
I'm quite ignorant of the whole Hunter Biden episode, so take my thoughts as you will. But, if the charges are as minor as they seem; lying about sobriety when buying a gun, tax evasion, etc., basically things routinely done by millions of Americans every year (albeit that's my guess), or otherwise not prosecuted for 90% of people, it's a political application of the justice system.
Does that excuse Hunter's wrongdoing? No. Does it affect the 'rightness' of Joe pardoning his son? Of course - context matters.
And if it's true the guy has struggled with addiction and is now finally on a better path, would you then let your only son spend years of life in prison when you yourself had the power to void that result? Moreover, after an overturned plea deal(?) that would have let him walk anyways?
Political justice, political pardon. Seems about fair to me. Thoughts?
Very well. You are shameless. You ignore the 14,200 other Americans who were charged with firearm-related crimes in 2020 alone but did not get pardons because they aren't the President's son. Maybe you're prepared to approve this double standard of justice but people who went to prison for the same crimes as Hunter Biden's can scarcely afford to.
“I'm quite ignorant of the whole Hunter Biden episode”
This fact alone is a major indictment of of the mainstream left-biased media, and a lesser indictment of yourself.
If you were interested, you easily could have - and still could - go look up the details of the Biden family crime syndicate, with Joe “the big guy” at the top had to be “kicked up 10% to” and where 10s of millions of dollars from foreign governments and interests went to more than a dozen Biden family crime syndicate members, including grandchildren, laundered through multiple levels of accounts, as the price for access to Joe.
THAT is why the Hunter laptop story is/was important. It’s not just about what Biden’s idiot drug-addled son did; it’s about how Joe Biden profited from selling access to our government, and how he benefited financially from having the Ukrainian prosecutor fired (particularly ironic that Trump was impeached by the Dem House for looking into that very issue).
Do your homework if you are going to comment.
Even if consuming only the biased MSM makes that difficult to do.
Every media has bias, it’s not just MSM (recent post on this: https://jessesingal.substack.com/p/congratulations-on-your-independent, not that I agree with it at all). Each has blindspots, as you rightly point out.
Characterizing Joe Biden as a head of a “crime syndicate” is loaded. A big part of getting to the truth is on the consumer-end (how do we process information), as much as it’s about the information out there (distributor-end).
Go look up the facts about all of the money that has gone to various members of Biden’s family before suggesting that my use of the phrase “crime syndicate” is “loaded”. Go search, e.g. Ted Cruz’ podcasts have covered this in depth, and see for yourself. Most of the info came out during Congressional hearings.
The MSM does not merely have “blindspots”. It is overtly now (where prior to Trump it was covertly, and to a much lesser degree) blatantly biased for Dems, against the GOP. It doesn’t report on news that hurts Dems, or dismisses it as unproven unless it is 100% proven (and sometimes not even then), where it trump-ets anything anti-GOP, even where no hard evidence exists.
“crime syndicate” is “loaded” regardless of the facts. Some terminology is more emotionally charged/loaded than others.
The issue is not all that interesting to me, I think Americans probably have a lot more pressing issues to think about and work together on than this.
That's also because one should always be wary of partisan's (definition: https://itsjakestake.substack.com/p/theres-hope-for-us-you-yet) 'facts'. That's not to say they are not facts, but corroborating and doing due diligence on claims made by partisans, let alone overtly opposed figures like Cruz (he has clear biases/incentives to blast Biden), is a investment of time and effort, usually fruitless, that could be put to better use elsewhere.
It would be the same if Hunter Biden came out with his own 'facts' - I'd be similarly wary, as should everyone.
“The issue is not all that interesting to me…”
Got it, Mr. “Context as to why Hunter was charged in the first place is important. That context is that Joe is the punching-bag for conservatives…”
Let’s make sure not to let actual facts get in the way of our narrative.
And to cast aspersions on the incentives of those who report the truth, while minimizing the “blindspots” of the left-biased we agree with, so that we don’t have to address those pesky facts.
🙄
I cited Cruz as someone who put the information out PRECISELY. BECAUSE. THE. OVERTLY-BIASED. MSM. REFUSED. TO. DO. SO.
Can you imagine for even a millisecond if the story had been about Trump and his family, with even 3% of the actual evidence, that the MSM wouldn’t have been on it nonstop?
Rationalization really is the second strongest human drive, it seems.
The one thing I will give you credit for is reading *this* Substack in the first place, given your fairly vigorous “let’s all Moveon.org” defense of the MSM status quo.
you're way too heated for me to have productive discussion with, but so are most people, and most conversations online, so that's not an indictment.
I never defended MSM. If you even looked at my profile you would see nuance.
I'm not asking people to move on from anything, but I will now move on from this. Have a blessed day.
Of key importance is that the father and his press chief said over and over and over again that he would not pardon his son. And hundreds of times--thousands most likely--the press cited the single datum as the one-stop-shopping proof-positive of Biden's moral superiority over Trump. Add to it that "No one is above the law. NO ONE!" has been the endlessly repeated mantra. Nor was there anything minor about the charges.
Yes it was terrible PR and of course the initial moral play was used by partisans to their own benefit.
Well yep, certainly one can disagree on the severity of the charges. I read a great article on the psychology of the decision. Here it is: https://smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net/p/blood-is-thicker-63b