The Washington Sun is the newly renamed and greatly expanded successor to NOTUS, chock-full of former Washington Post journalists committed to “shining a light” on the nation’s capital. “We’d rather light a big candle than keep on cursing the darkness,” the publication claims in its “About” section. As the Post reminded us for years: Democracy Dies in Darkness.
If the Sun’s profile of Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed by former Post reporter Robin Givhan is representative of its journalism, it’s poised to become just another dishonest media vehicle—the kind that saw the Post lose nearly one-third of its digital audience from the final year of President Trump’s first term through the initial months of the Biden presidency.
Here’s a truism about mainstream media dishonesty: whenever a legacy outlet frames a radical leftist or a favored insider using the word “complicated,” you are about to be taken on a trip through the narrative cleaners. “Complicated” is the corporate media’s euphemism of choice to minimize inconvenient truths about candidates with toxic baggage that is impossible to ignore, but that reporters are determined to excuse as much ado about nothing.
Givhan’s profile of El-Sayed is a textbook application of the playbook.
Rather than simply reporting on a U.S. Senate candidate behaving like an abrasive internet troll—calling political opponents “betas,” mocking a rival’s wife, and throwing out juvenile insults like “eyeliner JD Vance”—Givhan elevates El-Sayed’s antics into high-minded sociology.
She frames his gym flexes and bellicose posture as an intentional, noble counterweight to Donald Trump and JD Vance. El-Sayed, she argues, is “using his ability to pump significant amounts of iron to send the message that progressive politics shouldn’t be equated with weakness” and attempting to “reclaim the mantle of decency, morality, kindness and empathy on behalf of gym rats.”
Reclaim the mantle of decency, morality, kindness, and empathy?
El-Sayed crudely speculated on a live stream about the Vances’ sex life. “What do you think is going through Usha’s head when [JD Vance] talks?” El-Sayed asked. “She’s like, ‘Damn, I have to sleep with him.’” He then invoked her pregnancy: “I guess she’s pregnant so something is happening.”
Following the violent March attack on Temple Israel in suburban Detroit, El-Sayed tried to contextualize the assault on a Jewish house of worship by arguing that “hurt people hurt people” because the attacker had relatives killed overseas. El-Sayed went further, asking readers to “imagine if his family had never died” and referring to the war as having “drove this crazed attacker to violence against innocent people at a synagogue in Michigan.” The remarks sparked widespread outrage among Jewish voters, and months later El-Sayed apologized to the Michigan Democratic Party’s Jewish caucus, admitting that offering such “context” was a mistake.
When a candidate enjoys 24/7 media mop-up service, inflammatory rhetoric and disqualifying behavior are washed away as layered depth.
Givhan’s “complicated” laundering is hardly a one-off.
In July 2019, The Washington Post ran a sympathetic profile of Ilhan Omar that began with her recounting a courthouse tale to high school students. Omar claimed she witnessed a “sweet, old . . . African American lady” arrested and fined $80 for stealing a $2 loaf of bread to feed her “starving 5-year-old granddaughter,” prompting Omar to shout “Bulls—!” in open court.
Even the Post had to acknowledge Omar likely embellished the tale. Minneapolis officials confirmed that police are barred from arresting people for simple shoplifting unless there is a threat of violence. Shoplifters are typically sentenced to a three-hour diversion class. Omar admitted to the reporter that she may have flubbed the facts.
Buried inside the flattering profile were other clear examples of deception. Addressing a group of veterans, Omar claimed 45 percent of military families rely on food stamps to paint Republicans as heartless; the actual Pentagon figure was under 5 percent. When a paralyzed Gulf War veteran suggested that electing more combat veterans might produce a more cautious foreign policy, Omar dismissed him outright, asserting she had been around service members who say “the most horrendous things, who have complete disregard for life.”
On the day she was elected to the Minnesota legislature in 2016, Omar wrote a letter to a judge urging rehabilitation instead of prison time for a local man convicted of trying to join the Islamic State in Syria. At a subsequent legal-defense fundraiser for the convict, the Post documented his friends in the parking lot flashing the one-finger salute widely associated with ISIS. The piece also touched on Omar’s tax history, noting she and the father of her children filed joint returns in 2014 and 2015 while she was legally married to someone else.
Did the Post conclude that Omar was a serial fabulist who routinely slandered the country that granted her asylum? Hardly. Instead, the paper mused that “it can feel as if there are two Ilhan Omars,” quickly steering the narrative back to a soft-focus portrait of a trailblazer touring a local food pantry.
Months earlier, The New York Times ran an analysis framing Omar’s history of antisemitic remarks around the discomfort of party leadership rather than the gravity of her rhetoric. Invoking dual-loyalty slurs, venal Jewish money tropes (“all about the Benjamins”), and dismissing the 9/11 attacks as “some people did something” were not treated as disqualifying. Instead, the Times framed them as awkward friction points that made her “complicated to defend.”
The article elevated Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s grievance—“They put us in photos when they want to show our party is diverse . . . however, when we ask to be at the table . . . we are ignored”—to transform a controversy over bigotry into an indictment of party elders mistreating minority women. In the Times’ formulation, the institutional failure wasn’t Omar’s rhetoric; it was the failure of establishment Democrats to embrace her symbolic importance.
When corporate media evaluated Kamala Harris’s record ahead of the 2020 election, the Post applied the same rinse cycle, asserting she left a “complicated legacy on criminal justice.” Harris’s record as a prosecutor was not complicated. It was an appalling run of cynical opportunism, including her office’s prosecution of a mentally ill woman shot by police in San Francisco. The jury acquitted Teresa Sheehan of threatening a social worker and deadlocked 11–1 for acquittal on the charges of assaulting the police officers who shot her.
And, of course, the media has repeatedly referred to Bill Clinton’s legacy as “complicated.” It’s not complicated. He was a known philanderer, and he had documented ties to Jeffrey Epstein. ABC’s 2007 story described Clinton’s legacy as a mix of “peace, prosperity and Democratic victories” and “scandal, gridlock and ‘triangulation.’”
In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell observed that political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable. In modern legacy journalism, “complicated” is the supreme euphemism—an all-purpose detergent designed to launder a candidate’s ideological and behavioral liabilities into seemingly respectable intellectual depth.