THE LEAD: Gus Walz, the teenage son of Democratic VP candidate Tim Walz, went viral during the DNC last week for his unabashed love of his father. Gus, who has a nonverbal learning disorder as well as anxiety and ADHD, yelled, “That’s my dad,” before he broke down crying during his father’s speech.
It was a sweet, touching moment of humanity that only took about six seconds for people to start ridiculing online:
Mike Crispi, a Trump supporter and podcaster from New Jersey, mocked Walz’s “stupid crying son” on X and added, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.”
Alec Lace, a Trump supporter who hosts a podcast about fatherhood, took his own swipe at the teenager: “Get that kid a tampon already,” he wrote, an apparent reference to a Minnesota state law that Walz signed as governor in that required schools to provide free menstrual supplies to students.
The professional media operatives also decided to get into the act:
Both Coulter and Weber issued apologies of a sort, with Coulter saying she took her post down once someone told her Tim was “austistc” and Weber noting he “didn’t realize the kid was disabled.”
(SIDE NOTE: It’s unclear exactly how serious to take an apology from anyone who a) doesn’t take the time to spell the apology appropriately, b) takes a shot at a kid and only feels bad when the kid turned out to be “disabled,” or c) uses the term “disabled” rather than learn about the condition the kid he has is mocking.)
A QUICK HISTORY OF RECENT POLITICAL KIDS AND MEDIA: Kids whose parents decide to make a run for the highest office of the land don’t always get the best treatment in the media. I remember a teenage Chelsea Clinton taking a lot of guff in news reports for her “frizzy hair” and “awkwardness.”
The late-night TV crowd got into it as well, with various skits:
An SNL cold opening that featured “Wayne’s World” once took a shot at her that was so bad, NBC edited it out of all the reruns. (Strangely enough, they didn’t edit out the “schwing” the guys gave to the Gore daughters, who ranged in age from 13 to 19 around that time…)
The Bush twins were in their teens when George W. Bush was elected the first time, with Jenna’s “minor in possession” charge becoming fodder for the news reports and tabloids. (SNL mocked the twins as well, but this time had the dignity to wait until Bush was re-elected, putting them in their early 20s.)
Conservative radio host Glenn Beck took potshots at then 11-year-old Malia Obama, as part of a 2010 diatribe about the BP Oil Spill in the gulf, a move he later apologized for making.
The Obama girls had the misfortune of being in the White House right around the time social media was becoming a thing, so their lives were not just the target of regularly stupid people using traditional media outlets, but also extra stupid ones Facebook and Twitter. In 2014, GOP staffer Elizabeth Lauten resigned after she raked the girls across the coals in a Facebook rant for needing to have “a little class.”
While Donald Trump was in the White House, teenage Barron Trump actually fared fairly well in regard to the media’s mockery machine. Most mainstream outlets considered him to be off limits, and SNL actually suspended Katie Rich for a tasteless Tweet about Barron in 2017.
DOCTOR OF PAPER HOT TAKE: I’m not sure what was worse: Picking on Gus Walz for showing human emotions toward his father or basically saying it would have been fine to mock a 17-year-old kid if he hadn’t had a neurodivergent condition. Both are deplorable, but one seems like it should put you at the gates of hell, while the other seems more like a VIP ticket to hell’s champagne room.
The underage children of political folks really have no agency, as they aren’t the ones who decided to run for office and put themselves in the public eye. When they are adults, they can choose to become more or less part of the public discussion.
Tiffany Trump was more in the background of her father’s political efforts while Don Jr., Eric and Ivanka Trump were part of the Trump political machine. Barron, now that he is 18, chose to be political delegate for Florida at the RNC, which does put him out there for public “discussion.” However, I still go back to the fact that he’s 18 and there should be at least a few guardrails people should consider in “discussing” him.
There aren’t too many hard-and-fast rules about who should or shouldn’t be put in the media spotlight and who shouldn’t but let’s consider a few points:
- AGE: People we consider to be kids (under 18) should usually be off limits to mockery and punditry. Media professionals often take care to really avoid harming kids or generally putting them through the ringer even if they are tangentially related to a media story. The younger they are, the more protected they tend to be. (We also tend to protect the very old in society for similar reasons. What makes you “very old” is in the eye of the beholder, but it is something we think about.) I tend to broaden the age range for “being a kid” a bit, with the idea that nobody is their best version of themselves between 18 and 22.
- LEGAL ISSUES: Crimes open the door to more things being discussed in the media than do other forms of public participation. Thus, if Political Candidate A’s 17-year-old son skipped a class to play the latest version of Madden, leave the kid alone. If the kid crashed a car while driving drunk, started a public fight at a Starbucks or shot someone, that’s getting covered. The degree of the incident, coupled with the age of the participants operate on a sliding scale of debate among journalists as to what to say about whatever the kid has done.
- COGNITIVE ABILITY AND CULTURAL SOPHISTICATION: Protecting people who are unable to protect themselves is at the core of everything from the SPJ code of ethics to the IRB research dictates. People with cognitive limitations of all varieties should be treated with extreme care when it comes to media coverage. I often extend this to the concept of cultural sophistication as well, given that there’s a huge difference between an 18-year-old kid (yeah, I said kid) who grew up in the spotlight and has been on TV more times than Lester Holt and the 18-year-old kid who grew up in a town of 400 people and never met anyone who wasn’t from that town. How each of those people is able to handle questions from a reporter clearly varies.
- SITUATIONAL AWARENESS: It’s always good to put your brain into gear before engaging your reporting, which means thinking about the situation you are delving into before deciding what is or isn’t OK to ask a kid. I have never fully understood how we manage to tell everyone in a newsroom to be careful not to create problems for minors in our coverage, but for some reason, everyone is totally fine cramming a microphone into a random teen’s face after they survive a school shooting.
DISCUSSION STARTER: What do you think about the media coverage of Gus Walz and the other political “kids” in recent memory? What is or isn’t fair? What should or shouldn’t be out of bounds? What experiences have you had in your life makes you set those kinds of standards?