When Headlines Fail: Trump’s Empty IVF Promise and the Woman Who Believed It | The Washington Post profiled a woman who lost her job to Project 2025 after voting for Trump because he promised free fertility treatments. The real failure here belongs to the press.
Posted by towngrizzlytown
8 Comments
Extract:
>Yesterday, [the ](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/27/fired-federal-worker-trump-voter/)[*Washington Post*](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/27/fired-federal-worker-trump-voter/)[ published](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/27/fired-federal-worker-trump-voter/) a story about Ryleigh Cooper, a 24-year-old Forest Service employee who voted for Donald Trump in part because he promised to make IVF treatments free — a campaign pledge he made last August. Now, she’s been fired due to the administration’s federal workforce purge (part of that Project 2025 plan Trump claimed wasn’t his), and her dream of starting a family through IVF seems further away than ever.
>The reaction online has largely centered on criticizing Cooper for believing such an obvious lie. But I’d argue that this kind of mockery misses a crucial point: our media ecosystem utterly failed her and millions of other Americans by dutifully reporting Trump’s campaign promises without the necessary context or scrutiny.
>Let’s look at how major outlets covered Trump’s IVF promise last summer:
>[image]
>Notice something? These headlines simply repeat what Trump said without any indication that the promise was dubious, unrealistic, or contradicted by his own party’s actions. While some of the articles eventually mentioned Republicans’ complicated relationship with IVF, the damage was already done in the headlines — which, as we know, is often all people read.
I mean I’m not sure what the press is gonna do when half the population doesn’t bother reading news 20% of the population gets all their news from social media, another 20% gets it from podcasts. That’s roughly 40% of the population that does not get traditional news media at all.
The press definitely deserves some blame, but I’m sorry, I can’t let voters like this off the hook.
You’re a citizen in a republic. Informing yourself about the people you’re voting for is your responsibility. If you don’t do it, you have to own the consequences. The media may have been muddled on the issue, but it’s obvious to anyone that does even the slightest bit of research on him both that Trump is a pathological liar and that electing him would result in what we’re seeing now with federal job cuts.
Obviously the media and the headlines suck. But this is a grown woman. She was an adult during half of Trump’s last term. She knows, or should have known, that he is a liar. She knows, or should have known, that he talks out of both sides of her mouth. She knows, or she should have known, that he is unfit for the job.
The media, and headlines, did not force her to be gullible and vote for trump. She wanted to believe his lies. She accepted it willingly, even knowing that he wasn’t truthful.
You cant blame the press. Theyre not great, but millions of people are dumb enough to believe anything. If the press says ‘Trump is lying’ these people will just drift into more free news that tells them what they wanted to believe already
https://preview.redd.it/zjydw6nt83me1.jpeg?width=481&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=bf7cf71e36eb9970c0f2e116354bbc1d428914b4
The voters get what they deserve, almost definitionally.
Por que no los dos?
You don’t need to convince me to hate on the media’s enablism, NYT is my worstie at this point.
But it’s hard to read this and not think that these people are just… dumb. In this particular example, you would think that, for something as important as starting a family and getting on IVF, she would have looked a bit deeper at the ‘policy’ claims and perhaps about the man making said claims?