When Donald Trump brought up debunked claims about immigrants eating dogs and cats in the Ohio city of Springfield, at last week’s presidential debate, Ohio-based reporters were not nearly as surprised as the rest of the country. In fact, they’d been bracing for it.
“That was the big question for us going into the night: Was Trump gonna go there?” said Darrel Rowland, a veteran political reporter with the Columbus-based WSYX6 and FOX 28. “And yes, he did. The fuse had been lit.”
Rowland and his colleagues across the state had already been tracking worrisome rhetoric about the thousands of Haitian migrants who made Springfield their home in recent years—a move welcomed, at least until recently, by businesses and town officials who saw the city of sixty thousand as badly in need of revitalization. In July, J.D. Vance, now the Republican vice presidential nominee, had given the story a boost when he began sharing allegations that hospitals and schools were being overwhelmed by a surge in immigrants. The Saturday before the debate, Vance added fuel to the fire when he tweeted out unfounded reports that Haitians were abducting local pets and eating them.
Contrary to previous rumblings, Trump has no plans to make a campaign stop in Springfield, according to a source familiar with the former president’s travel. But his decision to mention the city in the debate heightened tensions in town.
Within a week, at least thirty-three bomb threats would lead to the evacuation of buildings, the closure of schools, and the cancellation of numerous events around the city.
“This week’s been a disaster,” said Jeremy P. Kelley, the editor of the Springfield News-Sun, when first reached at the peak of last week’s frenzy. The small paper was busy accounting for all of the incoming threats, providing updates on elementary school evacuations, and documenting the local university’s plans to move to online-only instruction.
It has also led much of the coverage tackling misinformation about the town. Jessica Orozco, a News-Sun staffer, was the first to report—within a half hour of Vance’s Saturday post on X—that local police couldn’t find any recent evidence of pets being stolen or eaten. She’s since written nearly two dozen articles for the paper, including one on how local leaders have responded to the situation by rejecting falsehoods and urging residents to focus on actual challenges presented by the population influx, such as increased competition for housing, school funding, and healthcare.
By this Tuesday, Kelley finally had a moment to reflect. “The biggest challenge of covering the story has been trying to stay on top of near-constant developments for over a week,” Kelley said in an email. “When you’re twenty seconds into a news meeting over Teams, and you find out City Hall’s being evacuated because of the very first bomb threat, you drop the news meeting and run down the street to interview the city manager. That doesn’t help with your planning process.”
As things settle down, Kelley added, he hopes to shift the paper’s focus to deeper coverage of “the larger underlying issues of how Haitian immigration affects Springfield”—and how the community will recover once the media circus leaves town. One article posted over the weekend asked twenty residents about their hopes for the future.
Several of the Ohio-based reporters who have been covering the story in recent months say they worry about the same thing: whether the intense media coverage has made things worse for the town—and if the efforts to fact-check have made much of a difference, in the face of a brazen onslaught of falsehoods.
“Especially among people who are more supportive of the immigrants, nobody wants this attention,” said Jake Zuckerman, a politics reporter for Cleveland.com who reported from Springfield at the outset of the immigration uproar. “Nobody asked for this. Nobody said we want to be the center point of a presidential election.”
“This is the first time I’ve felt like I’m just up against a wave of misinformation,” said Sarah Donaldson, a reporter for Ohio’s Statehouse News and the state’s NPR and PBS affiliates, who was in Springfield last weekend.
“It’s been a long week and it’s been a challenging week, and I have only been to Springfield once this week,” she said. “So I’m thinking about my fellow reporters who have been on the ground every day, because I think you are seeing a lot of backlash at ‘the media’ when, of course, the media is not a monolith.”
Rowland, the veteran political reporter, said he sometimes finds himself wondering, Is our very presence in that town making things worse? “And part of you comes away with not a great feeling,” he said. “Because you think, on the one hand, I want to get the truth, and I can tell folks are reluctant to be interviewed. You’re saying that the national media are not depicting your community accurately, but if you don’t talk, where else is the story going to come from?”
He went on: “What we’re seeing in little Springfield, Ohio, is kind of a microcosm of this whole issue of claims of truth, claims of untruth, and how we do our jobs as journalists. It’s like, What is our responsibility? How vociferously do we point out that these are falsehoods?”
Jake Lahut is a campaign reporter based in New York. He covered the 2024 GOP primary from New Hampshire for The Daily Beast and authored the Trail Mix newsletter. He previously worked at Business Insider and the Keene Sentinel.