Telegraph Busted For Inaccurately Reporting Kamala Harris Prepping Debate With Long-Dead Acting Coach (2024)

UK-based news site The Telegraph offered a chronologically nonsensical report on Vice President Kamala Harris’ debate prep, claiming that her team included “Lee Strasberg, an acting teacher who has been wearing a wide-shouldered boxy suit and red tie” to serve as a “stand-in” for former President Donald Trump.

The major problem with that reporting, of course, is that Strasberg has been dead since 1982.

The famous acting coach credited as the father of method acting worked with top Hollywood and Broadway stars like Marilyn Monroe, James Dean, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, Sally Field, Montgomery Clift, Anne Bancroft, Dustin Hoffman, and many others before dying of a heart attack in New York City at the age of 80.

In the Year of Our Lord nineteen-hundred-and-eighty-two.

When Strasberg died, Harris was a teenager and definitely not even thinking she might end up debating Trump, who was at that time still married to his first wife, over who should be America’s next commander-in-chief.

The Telegraph article, published on Saturday, Sept. 7, was headlined “Trump hits out at Harris’s 30-year friendship with network boss ahead of TV debate,” and focused on Trump’s criticisms of Harris’s friendship with an executive at Disney, the parent company of ABC News — the network that will host Tuesday’s debate.

The article went on to discuss how Harris and Trump were spending the final weekend before the debate preparing, with Harris “locked away in a Pittsburgh hotel rehearsing her attack lines”:

Ms Harris, meanwhile, is preparing for the debate with a stand-in Trump, Lee Strasberg, an acting teacher who has been wearing a wide-shouldered boxy suit and red tie. A full debate stage has been set up at her hotel. and she has rehearsed lines on the economy.

This paragraph led to some head-scratching among readers who possessed even a passing familiarity with Hollywood history. A screenshot of it went viral after being tweeted by Wired reporter David Gilbert, who jokingly called the story a “BOMBSHELL,” along with an asterisk highlighting the fact that “Strasberg died 42 years ago.”

Joshua Benton, the founder of Harvard’s Nieman Journalism Lab, connected the disinformation dots on how the bizarre Strasberg reference made its way into the Telegraph article, adding a screenshot from a New York Times article about Harris’s debate prep that did in fact reference Strasberg without resurrecting the guy from the dead.

“A remarkable look into how the “quality” British press gets made,” wrote Benton. “A @Telegraph reporter just lifts an anecdote from that day’s @nytimes — but he doesn’t actually understand it, so he writes that an acting teacher who died in 1982 is somehow doing debate prep for Harris.”

The Times article in question, written by Jonathan Swan, Maggie Haberman, Katie Rogers, and Reid J. Epstein, began with a reference to Harris rehearsing for the debate with a sparring partner described as adopting Strasberg’s method acting style to fill the role of the ex-president:

Vice President Kamala Harris is holed up for five days in a Pittsburgh hotel, doing highly choreographed debate practice sessions ahead of Tuesday night’s clash. There’s a stage and replica TV lighting and an adviser in full Lee Strasberg method-acting mode, not just playing Donald J. Trump but inhabiting him, wearing a boxy suit and a long tie.

The Telegraph article has since been updated to remove the erroneous Strasberg mention, but the original version is archived online by the Wayback Machine.

The current version, which does not note the error or indicate that it has been updated, now reads:

Ms Harris, meanwhile, is preparing for the debate with a stand-in Trump, an advisor who has been wearing a wide-shouldered boxy suit and red tie. A full debate stage has been set up at her hotel. and she has rehearsed lines on the economy.

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