Did you read the online Vanity Fair article about a few Memphis Country Club types who supposedly took a private jet to Washington, D.C., on January 6th, to help “stop the steal” and participate in that day’s fun-filled and riotous activities at the nation’s Capitol building?
The story, by Abigail Tracy, was called, A PRIVATE JET OF RICH TRUMPERS WANTED TO “STOP THE STEAL”— BUT THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO READ THIS. Not exactly a subtle headline, or even a good one, but it got circulated like the hot gossip it was, fueled by viral Memphis social media reposts and tweets.
The story was classic “helicopter journalism,” in which an out-of-town reporter touches down (in the land of the Delta blues, in this case), scrapes together a little history, (shaky) local geography, racial demographics, some socio-economic tropes pulled from helpful local academics, and uses them to underpin what is basically an anonymously sourced story about something possibly outrageous that may have happened.
(By Gary Bridgman)
What we do know — and VF reported accurately, via flight logs — is that a jet owned by wealthy Memphis businessman John Dobbs flew to D.C. and back on January 6th. A photo of Dobbs and a group of seven others posing beside that plane was posted for a brief time on an Instagram account of one of the alleged passengers under the tag @memphispatriots.
It quickly spread in certain circles. The presumption being that these eight Memphis bluebloods boarded the plane and flew to D.C. to participate in the insurrection promoted by former President Trump. Within a few days, the photo had been anonymously leaked to local media, including to me. I’m assuming other editors in town did the same thing I did: look to see if we could create an accurate, factual story around the photo. It proved a tough task. Nobody wanted to talk to us. One person did tell me the names of four of the people. She didn’t know the others. Calls to the individuals did not get a response.
So, we had a photo of eight people standing beside a plane. We had an identification of four of them. (A couple days later, we IDed two of the others; none returned calls.) The photo would indicate that these people were about to board the plane. Whether they did, we didn’t know. And if they did go to Washington, D.C., we had no way of knowing if they marched on the Capitol and assaulted cops or spent the day in the hotel bar. Presumably, if they were active participants, the FBI would come calling at some point.
But we didn’t have a story, just rumors and gossip, and media outlets that run unverified photos and unsourced gossip about the people in them often end up in court answering tough questions from libel lawyers.
Vanity Fair has deeper pockets, but they encountered the same stonewall. Then the VF reporter got very lucky. When she called Dobbs, he denied any knowledge of the incident, but he accidentally left his phone on for seven minutes after talking to Tracy, during which time he was heard to say: “Well, I told ’em, I said, I don’t know what you’re talking about. … You must be talking about my dad or something. … God, the last thing I want to do is talk to them.”
Busted. The magazine had enough verification that it felt it could run the story, such as it was: Some rich Memphis people probably flew to D.C. in a private jet on the day of the Capitol riots. Also, they participate in the annual Cotton Carnival, a putrid vestige of white male privilege and mock-royalty silliness for millionaires.
Tracy did get some good background quotes from local historian and professor Charles W. McKinney of Rhodes College (who expounded accurately upon the racial inequities in the city), and other academic types. But there were a lot of unnamed sources quoted and the usual pantheon of Memphis tropes used by drop-in reporters were trotted out: Sun Studio, B.B. King, Elvis Presley, Stax Records, Beale Street, Graceland, and the National Civil Rights Museum.
To which I guess we can now add: rich white guys who cosplay revolution, then fly home and don’t want to talk about it.