Why the Media Whiffed on the Missing Congresswoman With Dementia

In 2023, a small website called The Dallas Express picked up a startling allegation: Texas Rep. Kay Granger, one of the most powerful GOP members of Congress, was struggling with dementia.

The publication “actually got a tip from a senior staffer in her office that she was having issues,” said Chris Putnam, the Express’ CEO. “They got the date and location for her visiting the Brain Institute and had a reporter there and got eyes on her. They didn't get a photograph of her.”

There wasn’t enough to go on. But the next year, the idea was still around, even though Granger had stepped down from chairing the Appropriations Committee and wasn’t running again. When the publication was unable to reach the Fort Worth Republican for a story, Putnam said, “I checked roll call, and I saw that she hadn’t cast a vote since early July.”

What followed, according to Putnam, was basic journalistic shoe-leather. He dispatched a reporter to Granger’s district office and found the place all but abandoned — something confirmed by a call to the property manager. “I started making some calls personally to some of the folks that I know in the area,” he said. “And sure enough, we were tipped off about where she was.”

The tip: For months, she’d been living in an assisted-living facility in Texas that also includes memory care. A reporter was sent to the facility. “We fully expected them to just basically escort him out,” Putnam said. “But no, they sent a representative out and they acknowledged it.”

The story broke inDecember, shortly before Granger’s long-planned retirement, and was confirmed several days later by Granger’s son, who acknowledged “dementia issues” in aDallas Morning Newsinterview. As the news ricocheted around the political world, a Texas website with an editorial staff of 10 was credited with a massive scoop — while the Capitol Hill press corps was pilloried for supposedly taking its eye off the ball.

Given that the U.S. Capitol is one of the few buildings in America where the reporting corps hasn’t been totally devastated, it was a confounding miss. Granger wasn’t a nobody. She’d been in office for over a quarter-century, and had been the top Republican on the Appropriations committee until last April. Her face was familiar both to her colleagues and the reporters who roam outside the House chamber. Curiosity might also have been triggered by the fact that she’d voluntarily stepped aside from a plum position that most members of Congress would have to have pried from their hands.

There were also at least some opportunities for journalists to find out what was happening. Granger may have been absent from votes, but she briefly returned to the Hill for a retirement salute to her last November, well into the period where her son acknowledged “dementia issues” and just a month before the Express story broke.

At the chummy event, speakers included House Speaker Mike Johnson and Majority Leader Steve Scalise, as well as Democrats Rosa DeLauro and Nita Lowey. Nobody mentioned anything awry when Granger, still an elected official, reappeared not for an important vote but for a laudatory send-off. During the tribute, Granger sat and looked on as her official portrait as a former Appropriations Committee chair was unveiled before a large audience of congressional colleagues and staffers.

Or, as reporters call them, “sources.”

And it’s not like the proximate issue was unknown. Between Joe Biden and Dianne Feinstein, the conversation about elderly and possibly impaired politicians was already roiling Washington, which ought to have pricked up people’s radar.

But even without the details of cognitive health — which are dicey to report on because even impaired people have good days, because political allies are often in denial, and because actual doctors won’t talk — it seemed odd: Just how did a 2,000-member strong press corps allow a well-known lawmaker to vanish from the scene for months? It’s the kind of omission that fuels the endemic distrust toward Washington and the news media.

In the movie version, the whole thing would play like a David-and-Goliath journalism story. While the entitled congressional press corps twiddles its thumbs in Washington, a plucky local news site bravely digs up an outrage that powerful insiders have kept from the public. Cue the Oscars!

In fact, the story of how the congressional media missed the story and the obscure hometown site broke the news is a bit more complicated than that. The Dallas Express is not exactly your central casting team of underdog hometown nobodies: It’s a website run by Putnam, a politically wired conservative who once ran a primary campaign against Granger from the right. For another thing, Hill reporters are nobody’s idea of lazy Beltway swells. It’s an impossibly competitive 24-hour battle for scoops without much time for thumb-twiddling.

Instead of a fable about idealistic outsiders beating entitled insiders, the story of this failure is also about what kind of outlets cover the Hill now, what kind have receded, and how this dynamic shapes the political conversation.

The basic change: Politics- or policy-centric outlets with a national focus have established major footholds. But there’s been a hollowing out of the hometown outlets who once sent reporters to Washington with orders to watchdog their local lawmaker, whether or not that lawmaker was a big shot.

“Our number used to be in the hundreds,” said Nick Grube, the Washington correspondent for Honolulu Civil Beat and the president of the Regional Reporters Association, which represents Beltway reporters for local outlets around the country. “Now we’re in the dozens.”

The decline has been going on for some time and is often discussed — like the simultaneous drop-off in reporters covering local governments — as a problem for American democracy. Which it is. But for dishy scandals in Washington, it also has created a capacity problem: With fewer reporters dedicated to tracking back-bench legislators or regional obsessions, the media has lost some of the first-alert mechanisms that would flag potential headline-grabbers.

Instead, the new normal has much more rigorous coverage of leadership — and a much easier opportunity for congressional small fries to go unnoticed. It’s not that no obscure misdemeanants can be caught by the current press setup: I’m pretty sure my bosses at POLITICO would have been very happy for me or any other colleague to have the scoop. But in a press corps without the local outlets that dedicate reporters to specific delegations, it’s all that much less likely.

Consider a story from earlier in Grube’s tenure as the only reporter in Washington focused on covering the Capitol’s two senators and two representatives from Hawaii. Coming off parental leave in 2022, Grube returned to work after a three-month absence. He immediately began walking the humble footpath of his four-lawmaker beat.

But in the office of Democratic Rep. Kai Kahele, things seemed off. “My first day back, I pop into every member’s office and saying, ‘Hello, I’m back.’ And his people start obfuscating.”

According to Grube’s reporting, Kahele hadn’t been in Washington for months. Subsequent stories about his whereabouts — he’d earned income from a part-time airline job and spent the months laying groundwork for a gubernatorial run — led to more reporting that ultimately prompted an ethics investigation, which concluded that he may have “misused official resources” for campaign purposes.

“The thing was, no one else cared about the story,” Grube told me. “But in Hawaii it mattered.” After his initial reporting, that changed, and the Kahele story was picked up in the national media. Yet without the unglamorous questions from a front-line beat reporter, the story would not have acquired enough details to be interesting beyond the Aloha State.

The story has some obvious similarities to the Granger story, and one big difference: Grube’s beat involves just four members. The paper in Granger’s native Fort Worth, by contrast, no longer has a full-time D.C. reporter. And the big outlet in nearby Dallas has shrunk its own presence precipitously. (Granger’s son, who had acknowledged her struggles following the initial reports, declined further comment when I reached out.)

“The Dallas Morning News, I would argue, probably would have noticed that and done a story about that a few years ago, before the bureau went down to one,” said Todd Gillman, who ran the bureau as its staff plummeted. When Gillman first arrived, he said, there were 11 journalists, and he knew his job was to cover the entire Texas contingent on the Hill, not just Dallas’ half of the metroplex region. “I got dinged on my annual review if I hadn’t mentioned every single member of the Texas delegation at least once over the course of a year,” Gillman told me. By the time he left, there was just one, with a job that involved not just Congress but also the White House and everything else happening around D.C. “You’re certainly not paying attention to everybody in the delegation.”

With that obligation gone, “individual members can do all sorts of stuff under the radar,” Gillman said. “Good, bad, venal, self-serving, extremist.” Gillman knows what he’s talking about: Today, he leads the Washington newsroom for Arizona State University’s Cronkite journalism school, whose student reporters, he said, are the only full-time journalists covering Washington for an Arizona outlet.

It’s confounding that a robust media contingent like the one that covers Congress can’t create a structure for paying attention to the relative nobodies among the 535 people who legislate for the United States. After all, according to the most recent congressional directories, more than 2,200 journalists have credentials to cover the Capitol.

But even in this relatively well-staffed environment, chasing down random individual members, or obsessing over the priorities of far-flung constituents, doesn’t line up with the business needs of the outlets that have thrived in the 21st century congressional media world.

National outlets are going to focus on Congress as a whole, meaning the power players who run it and the major issues before it, with a dash of coverage for the occasional high-profile backbencher. The ideological outlets are going to focus on policing their own side against softness, or maybe sticking it to the big-name lawmakers on the other side. And the policy outlets are going to get granular on lawmakers who deal with whatever the publication is about, like finance or aviation.

If Granger had still been the Appropriations Committee chair when she stopped showing up for votes, it’s hard to imagine that it would have gone unnoticed. But because she’d stepped back from that crucially powerful job, the most energetic attention was elsewhere. That doesn’t change the fact that reporters for all kinds of outlets might have asked questions about age earlier, when she was in a more powerful position — and didn’t, in ways that mirrored other recent elderly politician controversies.

Once she stopped voting, there were even fewer eyes on her. There’s a lot of capacity in this ecosystem, but not a lot of financial incentive to cover members just because they’re there. Or, as it happens, not there.

The good news is that, after the Biden years, it’s a lot less likely that a Granger-type situation would go uncovered. That’s because the issue of aging pols has been elevated to an important national subject, meaning even the most obscure lawmaker’s senior moment could potentially be a story.

But for stories that don’t involve something officially newsy, there’s little sign that the Granger story has led to any change in big-newsroom protocols that would make up for the decline of local outlets that actually bird-dog backbenchers.

“They're never going to pay close attention,” said Gillman. “The most extreme cases of misconduct or wackiness are going to draw the attention of the national players, but the more medium-level cases of iffy behavior or venality or wackiness are probably not going to get attention unless it involves somebody who is in leadership or otherwise extremely high profile.”

Instead, philanthropically funded outlets may be left to do what the free market cannot. Grube’s Hawaii outlet and Gillman’s project with the Cronkite School are nonprofits whose funding enables them to do the local-delegation work once done by no-longer-profitable hometown papers. And the Allbritton Journalism Institute last month announced the launch of the Washington Bureau Initiative, underwritten by a $500,000 grant from Google and money from several other charitable outfits. The initiative funds Washington reporters who work with nonprofit newsrooms covering Oklahoma, Louisiana, San Diego and Stockton, California, among other places. The reporters, the institute says, will focus on lawmakers from their regions and on federal issues important to their respective hometowns.

Another place that’s hoping to add a Washington reporter: The Dallas Express. It’s less unusual, of course, for a politically engaged publication to have muscle in the Beltway. But Putnam said that the marching orders won’t be to churn out Trump coverage.

“Absolutely it would be, ‘Hey, let's go focus on what our people are doing,’” he said, referring to Dallas-area pols. “We have relationships with all of them. We have some characters here.”