{"id":26282,"date":"2021-02-04T10:07:36","date_gmt":"2021-02-04T10:07:36","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/jacobinmag.com\/2021\/02\/washington-post-sanders-bezos-fact-checking\/"},"modified":"2021-02-04T10:13:44","modified_gmt":"2021-02-04T10:13:44","slug":"the-washington-post-deserves-324-billion-pinocchios-for-its-attacks-on-bernie-sanders","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/2021\/02\/04\/the-washington-post-deserves-324-billion-pinocchios-for-its-attacks-on-bernie-sanders\/","title":{"rendered":"The Washington Post<\/cite> Deserves 324 Billion Pinocchios for Its Attacks on Bernie Sanders"},"content":{"rendered":"\n \n\n\n\n

For years now, fact-checking has been wielded by mainstream journalists against Bernie Sanders\u2019s left agenda. Case in point: Jeff Bezos\u2019s newspaper\u2019s recent attacks on Sanders for telling the truth about how the Republican tax cuts benefited the rich like Bezos.<\/h3>\n\n\n
\n \n
\n Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post<\/cite>, in National Harbor, Maryland, 2018. (Alex Wong \/ Getty Images)\n <\/figcaption> \n<\/figure>\n\n\n\n\n \n

Jeff Bezos this week announced that he is stepping down from his job running Amazon in order to\u00a0focus<\/a>\u00a0more on his other assets, including the Washington Post<\/em>. Less than twenty-four hours later, his newspaper\u2019s chief \u201cfact checker\u201d Glenn Kessler published a screed<\/a> attacking Bezos\u2019s highest-profile political opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, for mentioning that Donald Trump\u2019s 2017 tax law benefited rich people and large corporations.<\/p>\n

This might seem like a simple example of a pundit knowing exactly who pays his salary, but in this case, the pundit in question has his own axe to grind. Kessler is the\u00a0scion<\/a>\u00a0of a fossil fuel baron, which means he has an interest in defending tax cuts that were a particularly big financial windfall for oil companies, including the one linked to his family, according to\u00a0Kessler\u2019s own newspaper<\/a>.<\/p>\n

At a time when Americans\u2019 trust in media has\u00a0plummeted<\/a>, Kessler is a perfect illustration of how the cottage industry of fact-checking has turned itself into a system of Orwellian misinformation \u2014 one that uses fact-o-meters and Pinocchios to insist that war is peace and ignorance is strength.<\/p>\n

Rather than clarifying reality, fact-checking is routinely used to hide the truth and shield the powerful from accountability \u2014 it has helped politicians hide<\/a>\u00a0their\u00a0votes<\/a>\u00a0to cut Social Security; let health care industry lobbyists\u00a0distort statistics<\/a>\u00a0about medical bankruptcies and Medicare for All; and\u00a0abetted<\/a>\u00a0Wall Street\u2019s efforts to downplay bank bailouts.<\/p>\n

Now, comes the crescendo: The newspaper owned by a man worth $180 billion is deploying fact-checking to try to revise the entire history of the tax cuts that enriched<\/a>\u00a0his retail conglomerate. And what a coincidence \u2014 the revision is happening just as the tax policy may be\u00a0revisited<\/a>\u00a0by a new Democratic president.<\/p>\n

Not surprisingly, this particular broadside is being directed at Sanders, arguably the most prominent critic of Bezos and Amazon in all of American politics. He introduced\u00a0legislation<\/a>\u00a0to shame the company for its labor practices, he successfully\u00a0pressured<\/a> the company to raise its workers\u2019 wages, and has championed\u00a0legislation<\/a>\u00a0to tax billionaires.<\/p>\n

Bezos\u2019s company has responded by\u00a0attacking<\/a> the Vermont senator \u2014 and now his newspaper is trying to reinforce those attacks under the deceptive guise of fact-checking, all as it warns readers on every story that democracy dies in darkness.<\/p>\n\n \n\n \n \n \n

324 Billion Pinocchios<\/h2>\n \n

At issue is Sanders\u2019s innocuous water-is-wet comment on CNN this week, in which he correctly said \u201cmy Republican colleagues voted for almost $2 trillion in tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country and the largest corporations.\u201d<\/p>\n

These aren\u2019t controversial comments at all \u2014 and yet Kessler jumped at the chance to award Sanders\u2019s indisputable statement \u201cthree Pinocchios\u201d because \u201cthe share of the tax cuts for the top 1 percent was not as much as the share they pay in taxes\u201d and because \u201cmost people would see an overall reduction in taxes.\u201d<\/p>\n

In essence, Sanders was declared a liar because some serfs received a few crumbs, which supposedly proves that most of the loaf didn\u2019t go to the nobility.<\/p>\n

Kessler\u2019s entire line of argument deserves about 324 billion Pinocchios \u2014 one for each dollar that flowed to the richest fifth of the country in just 2020 alone, according to the Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy. The group\u2019s analysis\u00a0shows<\/a> that almost three-quarters of the tax cuts flowed to that cohort.<\/p>\n

Those findings echoed data from the\u00a0Tax Foundation<\/a>, which noted that \u201cthe income group that will see the largest increase in after-tax income in 2018 is the top 1 percent.\u201d<\/p>\n

The\u00a0Tax Policy Center<\/a> similarly reported that tax cuts boosted the income of the richest households eight times more than they boosted the income of the poorest households. The center projected the lowest quintile of earners, comprising 27 percent of Americans, would see an average tax cut of $60, while the top 0.1 percent of earners would receive an average tax cut of $193,000.<\/p>\n

Oh, and within a year of the tax cut bill\u2019s passage,\u00a0twice<\/a>\u00a0as many major corporations were paying a zero effective tax rate \u2014 and that included\u00a0Amazon<\/a>, the retail giant founded by the Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s\u00a0owner<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

If those sources don\u2019t adequately underscore Kessler\u2019s mendacity, then just go to the Washington Post<\/em>\u2019s own reporting when the tax cuts were moving through Congress in 2017. Back then, the newspaper\u2019s journalists accurately reported:<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0\u201cMost<\/a>\u00a0of the benefits go to the wealthy and large corporations.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0In a piece headlined\u00a0\u201c9 Ways Trump\u2019s Tax Plan Is a Gift to the Rich<\/a>,\u201d\u00a0the Post<\/em> reported that \u201cit gives an outright tax cut to the wealthiest Americans and it preserves almost all of the most popular loopholes they use to reduce their tax bills.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2022\u00a0In a\u00a0report<\/a> entitled \u201cThe Trump Tax Cuts Would Be the Most Insane Giveaway to the Rich Ever,\u201d the Post<\/em> reprinted this shocking table<\/a>\u00a0and pointed out that by 2027: \u201cThe top 1 percent would get 79.7 percent of all the Trump tax cuts at that point. To put that in perspective, the even more rarefied top 0.1 percent, who make an average of a few million dollars a year, would receive almost twice as many dollars worth of tax cuts as the bottom 99 percent would combined.\u201d<\/p>\n

Kessler accidentally admitted some of this in his fact-check demonizing Sanders. At one point, he acknowledged that \u201cthe biggest beneficiaries of the pass-through deduction were the top 5 percent of individual taxpayers.\u201d But he predicated his Sanders slander on the idea that \u201cany broad-based tax cut is going to mostly benefit the wealthy because they already pay a large share of income taxes.\u201d He added: \u201cIn any broad-based tax cut, the wealthy will end up with more money from tax cuts because they already pay a larger share of taxes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Those latter points are actually correct \u2014 they prove the veracity of Sanders\u2019s assertion by explaining precisely how the Trump tax cuts delivered a disproportionate amount of the tax breaks to the rich. Trump\u2019s bill deliberately slashed marginal tax rates, which then funneled money up the income ladder, just as the Vermont senator said.<\/p>\n

The implication from Kessler is that tax reforms can only disproportionately benefit the wealthy \u2014 as if regressive marginal rate cuts are the only possible tax policy. Fact-check: false<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Kessler quite obviously\u00a0likes<\/em>\u00a0regressive tax cuts \u2014 he approves of legislation that enriches his fellow aristocrats, and look, he has every right to hold that grotesque view. However, just because he likes tax policy that mostly enriches wealthy people, that doesn\u2019t mean a lawmaker is lying when he says that such a tax policy does indeed enrich the affluent.<\/p>\n

Kessler is entitled to his own opinions \u2014 but he shouldn\u2019t be given a platform to abjectly lie about facts and slander public officials just because he does not like them. And at minimum, if he is given that platform, it shouldn\u2019t be one emblazoned with the \u201cfact-checking\u201d emblem.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n

\u201cThis Is An Important Institution\u201d<\/h2>\n \n

This gets to the real issue here \u2014 the systemic problem is less the hideous anti-tax zealotry, and more the machine that is constantly laundering such ideology and presenting it as fact.<\/p>\n

If a pundit wants to write an op-ed defending regressive reductions in tax rates and criticizing a senator, that\u2019s fine. But something far more sinister happened here.<\/p>\n

In this episode, we saw that the newspaper owned by one of the world\u2019s richest men was not publishing an op-ed branded as one pundit\u2019s opinion \u2014 instead, the paper knowingly shrouded hard-edged, fact-free, billionaire-defending ideology in the cloak of just-the-facts-ma\u2019am impartiality right on its news pages. And this wasn\u2019t this some one-off \u2014 a report<\/a>\u00a0last year from Monash University researcher Andrew Moshirnia documented Kessler\u2019s long track record of ever-more-unhinged and inaccurate diatribes.<\/p>\n

These dogmatic polemics were all published under the banner of dispassionate fact-checking, as Post<\/em> editors berate reporters<\/a>\u00a0for expressing their opinions and\u00a0enforce rigid social media guidelines<\/a>\u00a0in order to project an air of objectivity.<\/p>\n

Couple Kessler\u2019s latest tirade with the Post<\/em>\u2019s skewed\u00a0reporting<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0editorials<\/a>\u00a0on the<\/a>\u00a0economic<\/a>\u00a0debate<\/a> in Congress, and the decidedly not objective message from Bezos\u2019s megaphone is loud, deliberate, and self-serving: Giving starving people $2,000 (or $1,400) checks gratuitously benefits people who supposedly don\u2019t need money, but handing the richest sliver of the country hundreds of billions of dollars of tax breaks is a pragmatic, common-sense policy that deserves the fact-checker\u2019s coveted seal of approval.<\/p>\n

Of course, this doesn\u2019t mean Bezos is calling Kessler (or anyone else) ordering them to write things. But clearly, try-hards like Kessler know who they work for and aim to please the boss \u2014 even if everyone in the media industry feigns fainting spells anytime anyone even hints that there might be a connection between a newspaper owner\u2019s agenda and the newspaper\u2019s coverage (remember this<\/a>\u00a0fake<\/a>\u00a0controversy<\/a> over Sanders\u2019s obviously true statement?).<\/p>\n

In the case of the Post<\/em>, the link between owner and newsroom is out in the open: Bezos\u00a0reportedly<\/a>\u00a0meets with Post<\/em> executives, shares\u00a0business advice<\/a>\u00a0with Bob Woodward, and has\u00a0insinuated<\/a>\u00a0that he purchased the newspaper for more than just business reasons.<\/p>\n

\u201cI said to myself, \u2018If this were a financially upside down salty snack food company, the answer would be no,\u201d he said about buying the paper. \u201cBut as soon as I started thinking about it that way, it was like, \u2018This is an important institution.\u2019 It is the newspaper in the capital city in the most important country in the world.”<\/p>\n

As an instrument of influence in the seat of government, Bezos\u2019s newspaper does not want to be brutally honest with its readers about its devotion to Kessler\u2019s hatred of the Left in general and Sanders in specific. The newspaper does not have the guts or the integrity to just admit it is paying a pundit \u2014 not a Joe Friday-esque fact-checker, but a Fox News\u2013style opinionist \u2014 to make extremist and highly subjective arguments about who should benefit from public policies.<\/p>\n

Being forthright about that might undermine the Post<\/em>\u2019s brand, and thereby risk influence and credibility. And so instead, Bezos\u2019s newspaper is trying to smuggle the extremism into the discourse and into readers\u2019 minds by stuffing it into the costume of objective \u201cfact-checking.\u201d<\/p>\n

That kind of slimy subterfuge is wildly, offensively dishonest \u2014 especially because the particular disguise is so powerful.<\/p>\n

Today, any news outlet with a legacy brand can slap the phrase \u201cfact-check\u201d on any pundit\u2019s pile of disingenuous horseshit and it will inevitably appear in an attack ad and whip around social media as allegedly ironclad proof that something is true or false. And in the 24 \/ 7 new cycle\u2019s miasma of disinformation, these nuggets of \u201cfact-checking\u201d are seen as the rare signal in the noise \u2014 the last bits of verified truth that can be unquestionably trusted.<\/p>\n

But Kessler and his ilk prove that much fact-checking absolutely cannot be relied on. Preying on the public\u2019s understandable desperation for some reliable arbiter of truth, these bad-faith actors have turned the entire \u201cfact-checking\u201d brand into the misinformation era\u2019s single most deceitful weapon of all.<\/p>\n

The old\u00a0saying<\/a> used to be that there were \u201clies, damn lies, and statistics\u201d \u2014 but in today\u2019s dystopia, there are lies, damn lies, and fact-checking.<\/p>\n\n \n \n \n\n \n \n

You can subscribe to David Sirota\u2019s investigative journalism project, the\u00a0Daily Poster<\/em>,\u00a0here<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This post was originally published on Jacobin<\/a>. <\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jeff Bezos this week announced that he is stepping down from his job running Amazon in order to\u00a0focus\u00a0more on his other assets, including the Washington Post. Less than twenty-four hours later, his newspaper\u2019s chief \u201cfact checker\u201d Glenn Kessler published a screed attacking Bezos\u2019s highest-profile political opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, for mentioning that Donald Trump\u2019s 2017 [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1777,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26282"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1777"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26282"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26282\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26283,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26282\/revisions\/26283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26282"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26282"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/radiofree.asia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26282"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}