Don’t Patronize Fetterman

Earlier this week, John Fetterman sat down with NBC News for one of the defining television segments of the year. “Unlike any political interview I’ve ever done,” Dasha Burns, the NBC reporter who met with him, tweeted. Fetterman, the Democratic nominee for Senate in Pennsylvania, suffered a stroke in May. During this, his first on-camera interview since then, he relied on closed-captioning to process Burns’s questions. “I sometimes will hear things in a way that’s not perfectly clear,” he told her. “So I use captioning, so I’m able to see what you’re saying.”

When introducing her clip on , Burns told viewers that Fetterman seemed, Burns went a little further, telling the host Savannah Guthrie, “Without captioning, it seemed it was difficult for Fetterman to understand our conversation.” When Guthrie pressed her on that specific observation, Burns backpedaled. “Stroke experts do say that this does not mean he has any cognitive impairment,” she said. She noted that he didn’t appear to have trouble understanding her questions with the assistance of captions.