In any other race, the story of John Fetterman’s conversation with the PennLive editorial board would have been that his Republican challenger for Pennsylvania’s open US Senate seat, Dr. Mehmet Oz, didn’t show up. Instead viewers tuning into Wednesday’s livestreamed interview were likely trying to parse Fetterman’s cognitive ability—the result of a media frenzy prompted by his recent interview with NBC News' Dasha Burns, his first in-person sit-down since having a stroke in May. NBC, whose interview was largely framed around Fetterman's health, caught heat for fixating on the accommodations—closed captioning—that Fetterman required due to auditory processing challenges caused by the stroke. "Dasha, this was not a typical candidate interview,” NBC anchor Lester Holt said Tuesday evening as he introduced the exclusive. Burns agreed and added, “In small talk before the interview, without captioning, it wasn’t clear he was understanding our conversation”—an addendum that emboldened Fetterman's detractors, and has resulted in a now multi-day news cycle involving medical experts, disability advocates, and some journalists sparring over their personal experiences with the candidate. 

“There’s no secret that sometimes I’m gonna miss words, and sometimes I’m gonna mush two words together, and that’s the truth,” Fetterman told the editorial board of PennLive, the digital version of The Patriot-News, Pennsylvania’s largest newspaper, acknowledging what he referred to as “the elephant in the room.” “That truth could have been fatal,” Fetterman added—something that Oz, a doctor, “has chosen to mock” and “make light of.” For months, news outlets have disclosed Fetterman, 53, using closed captions to read journalists questions.

Fetterman, Pennsylvania’s lieutenant governor and Democratic Senate nominee, appeared to be making a big media play this week, after recovering largely in private over the summer. It kicked off with a cover story in New York Magazine and an appearance on Kara Swisher’s new podcast, followed Tuesday with NBC's sit down. 

But it was Burns’ suggestion that Fetterman didn't “understand” what was going on that has continued to spiral. (It didn’t help that Axios’ Josh Kraushaar, sharing the information, initially shortened Burns’ quote and in doing so left out crucial context—the “without captioning” part.) Former Trump adviser Stephen Miller, among other conservative personalities and outlets, cited the NBC report to claim or strongly imply that Fetterman's health was disqualifying. Some mainstream reporters also piled on, with CBS’s Ed O’Keefe asking, “Will Pennsylvanians be comfortable with someone representing them who had to conduct a TV interview this way?” Jonathan Martin, who left the New York Times this week, tweeted that a snippet from the NBC interview was “a rough clip” for Fetterman that would “only fuel questions about his health.” 

A number of journalists who have recently interviewed or met with Fetterman swiftly pushed back against the response, including Rebecca Traister, Swisher, and Molly Jong-Fast. Burns, in a follow-up Wednesday, clarified that she had spoken to stroke experts and “they say these are side effects that do not indicate any sort of cognitive impairment” for Fetterman and claimed, “Our reporting did not and should not comment on fitness for office.” Politico’s Sam Stein noted that “there is ample history of stroke survivors serving in the Senate.” CNN’s Sanjay Gupta explained how this seems to be a case of a “processing issue versus a comprehension issue.” The news cycle also prompted outlets such as the Washington Post to interview neurological experts about auditory processing issues that can follow a major health event like a stroke, and how common the use of captions is in recovery.

The Fetterman interview and subsequent coverage in the media has prompted not only a question about how to handle a candidate who had a stroke in the middle of a campaign, but also one that may have some resulting disabilities—and raised broader issues about how journalists cover accessibility. “I was stunned to see how the coverage of his use of captions was so riddled with ableism,” Maria Town, the president and CEO of the American Association of People with Disabilities, told BuzzFeed. “Plenty of people with auditory issues (of which I am one) use closed captioning or other assistive tech at times to hear better. The implication that those people are less capable of understanding or tackling difficult things is patently untrue,” said Politico’s Steven Overly. 

A perceived lack of transparency around Fetterman’s condition and recovery has become a talking point for right-wing and mainstream media alike. “Legitimate newspapers are pushing for further documentation with some of the energy once applied to Hillary’s emails, while the right-wing carnival barkers treat complete medical records as they did Obama’s birth certificate,” New York’s Traister wrote in the profile. (Fetterman released a letter from his cardiologist weeks after his stroke, in which the doctor, Ramesh Chandra, said he had diagnosed Fetterman with “atrial fibrillation, an irregular heart rhythm, along with a decreased heart pump” when he first saw him in 2017 and that Fetterman had not seen “any doctor for 5 years and did not continue taking his medications”; Chandra said if Fetterman will “be fine” if he “takes his medications, eats healthy, and exercises.”) 

It's also been a major attack line for the Oz team. On Thursday, Oz did an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo, who asked Oz, “I mean, how is he going to make decisions about Pennsylvania and fight for the Pennsylvanian people, if in fact he needs to have a device alongside him?” Oz, a doctor, replied, “No one knows. We've not been actually exposed to this before,” claiming that campaigning is “what we normally do in a democracy” and “I don't think there's closed captioning on the floor of the Senate.”