The latest Washington Week with The Atlantic roundtable on PBS on Friday featured not only criticism but cynicism regarding the Democratic Party’s slimy embrace of Graham Platner, the disgraced former U.S. Senate candidate for Maine, credibly accused of sexual assault. Yet the journalist panel remained high on Democratic prospects for the Senate, even in Maine.
Moderator Jeffrey Goldberg: “This is very much an I-told-you-so kind of week for many people in domestic and international politics. On the domestic side, a lot of people have been telling the Democratic Party, maybe you shouldn't pin your Senate hopes on a guy with a Nazi tattoo. It wasn't the Nazi tattoo that did in Graham Platner, of course. It was a rape allegation that caused the left wing of the party to finally give up on their beloved putative oysterman….
PBS’s overall coverage of Platner’s rise and fall mostly spared viewers the “oysterman” schtick. However, the network evening news shows and the New York Times certainly feasted on Platner’s phony populism.
As a bonus, Goldberg even played some brief gotcha games with liberal politicians for a change.
Goldberg: Peter, I want you to watch Senators Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders talk about Platner before the rape allegation surfaced.
Clips followed of Warren saying "that's my kind of man" and Sanders gushing that Platner was "rather a brilliant guy."
New York Times White House correspondent Peter Baker paused his Republican-bashing long enough to point out the obvious.
Peter Baker: I think there's a willingness to suspend disbelief about people from your own party that you wouldn't have for people in the other party, right? In other words, they would never have accepted a Republican candidate who had a Nazi tattoo...."
A confession by Susan Glasser [Baker’s wife] to feeling personally “optimistic” dovetailed suspiciously with the sense of Democrats having dodged a bullet and given themselves a better chance.
New Yorker journo Susan Glasser finds bright side for Dems in Maine: I'm not usually...the person who's like, let's be all optimistic and upbeat here.... However, it did come before this July 13th deadline for them to get a new candidate who might have a better chance to win." pic.twitter.com/XLl1pYGSOr
— Clay Waters 🇮🇱 (@claywaters44) July 12, 2026
Susan Glasser, The New Yorker: Now, the flip side is, and I`m not usually, as you know, Jeff, the person who`s like, oh, let`s be all optimistic and upbeat here. But from the point of view of Democrats, this was a pretty divisive, damaging, I-told-you-so week. However, it did come before this July 13th deadline for them to get a new candidate who might have a better chance to win….
Puck’s Leigh Ann Caldwell was equally optimistic when Goldberg asked if the Democrats could pick up four U.S. Senate seats and win control.
Leigh Ann Caldwell: Well, actually Washington Democrats think that now that Graham Platner is out of the race, they actually think they have a better chance of beating Susan Collins.
Goldberg at least raised a rhetorical eyebrow to the pro-Democratic cheer.
Goldberg: Is that what they think, or is that what they say?
Caldwell: ….so they are thrilled that this is happening before this deadline so that they at least have an opportunity to try to get someone on the ballot to beat Susan Collins….
Later Goldberg admitted Platner “wasn't actually that much of an oysterman….he was a hobby oysterman.”
Alex Harris of The Atlantic made a strange confession, referring to the Platner "oysterman" myth as “like the little half-truths, right, that they can sort of get away with that an average viewer wouldn't see, but us, you know, kind of paying attention to it pretty often do.”
So is the media who patronized the phony progressive “oysterman,” without revealing the myth-making behind the image, also guilty of telling “half-truths"? And how is that "average viewer" Harris derides going to know that the "oysterman" was only a "half-truth" if the elitist media refuse to inform them?
