NPR both excused and concealed the fact that Graham Platner knew his Totenkopf tattoo was a Nazi symbol when he first got it in the All Things Considered report, “Graham Platner faces growing calls to withdraw following allegation of sexual assault” (July 7, 2026).
Elena Moore and Barbara Sprunt’s report focused primarily on the most recent allegation against Platner, published in Politico, that he raped a woman. In reporting this, the authors referred to a June New York Times report which published three women’s accounts of Platner’s demeaning, unsettling and in one case, physically threatening, behavior.
NPR also mentioned some of Platner’s other “issues,” like since-deleted disparaging Reddit posts about minority communities and sexual assault victims and the Wall Street Journal article detailing how he sent sexually explicit text messages to other women while married.
Then, there was the tattoo. Moore and Sprunt served as Platner’s campaign spokespeople when they reported:
[Platner] acknowledged that in 2007 he unknowingly got a tattoo on his chest that resembled a Nazi symbol. Platner has said he was unaware of the association and has since covered up the symbol.
But the very same Times article NPR referenced (and to which it hyperlinked) regarding Platner’s poor treatment of women, addressed Platner’s lie about the Nazi tattoo:
Mr. Platner’s insistence that he did not know that his tattoo was a Nazi symbol until it became a campaign issue last fall was simply not true, Ms. Fifield said. After all, she said, he had taught her the word for it years earlier, referring to it as “my Totenkopf.”
Jewish Insider reported this as well in October 2025, but without using Fifield’s name.
Fifield was also asked, on the social media platform X, when she realized Platner had the Nazi tattoo. She elaborated, in relevant part, “when he told me ‘this is my totenkopf’ and poked his tattoo, he explained that he got it because he and his group of Marines were ‘killers’ just like the guys who used that logo so it wasn’t really a ‘nazi’ thing it was just a ‘special unit’ thing . . .”
In addition to this omission, NPR revealed neither Platner’s prior support for Hamas tactics, nor any of his other antisemitism, like his campaign’s since-deleted retweet of neo-Nazi Stew Peters or his appearance on an antisemitic conspiracy theorist’s podcast, all documented by CAMERA previously.
NPR parroted Platner’s tattoo defense, and in so doing, laundered his false narrative. The reporters either engaged in extremely lazy journalism by failing to read the evidence contained in an article they cited to, or they purposefully cherry-picked what was important to share from the Times article. In either scenario, they misled their audience and obscured the rank antisemitism – and lie – of a Senate candidate who had no problem displaying his tattoo, shirtless in bars, for nearly two decades.
