The Washington Post Deserves 324 Billion Pinocchios for Its Attacks on
Bernie Sanders
By David Sirota and Andrew Perez, Jacobin
05 February 21
For years now, fact-checking has been wielded by mainstream journalists
against Bernie Sanders's left agenda. Case in point: Jeff Bezos's
newspaper's recent attacks on Sanders for telling the truth about how the
Republican tax cuts benefited the rich like Bezos.
Jeff Bezos this week announced that he is stepping down from his job running
Amazon in order to focus more on his other assets, including the Washington
Post. Less than twenty-four hours later, his newspaper's chief "fact
checker" Glenn Kessler published a screed attacking Bezos's highest-profile
political opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, for mentioning that Donald Trump's
2017 tax law benefited rich people and large corporations.
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 scion of 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 Kessler's own newspaper.
At a time when Americans' trust in media has plummeted, Kessler is a perfect
illustration of how the cottage industry of fact-checking has turned itself
into a system of Orwellian misinformation - one that uses fact-o-meters and
Pinocchios to insist that war is peace and ignorance is strength.
Rather than clarifying reality, fact-checking is routinely used to hide the
truth and shield the powerful from accountability - it has helped
politicians hide their votes to cut Social Security; let health care
industry lobbyists distort statistics about medical bankruptcies and
Medicare for All; and abetted Wall Street's efforts to downplay bank
bailouts.
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 his retail conglomerate. And what a coincidence - the revision
is happening just as the tax policy may be revisited by a new Democratic
president.
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 legislation to shame the company for its labor
practices, he successfully pressured the company to raise its workers'
wages, and has championed legislation to tax billionaires.
Bezos's company has responded by attacking the Vermont senator - 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.
324 Billion Pinocchios
At issue is Sanders's innocuous water-is-wet comment on CNN this week, in
which he correctly said "my Republican colleagues voted for almost $2
trillion in tax breaks for the wealthiest people in this country and the
largest corporations."
These aren't controversial comments at all - and yet Kessler jumped at the
chance to award Sanders's indisputable statement "three Pinocchios" because
"the share of the tax cuts for the top 1 percent was not as much as the
share they pay in taxes" and because "most people would see an overall
reduction in taxes."
In essence, Sanders was declared a liar because some serfs received a few
crumbs, which supposedly proves that most of the loaf didn't go to the
nobility.
Kessler's entire line of argument deserves about 324 billion Pinocchios -
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's analysis shows that almost three-quarters of the tax cuts flowed to
that cohort.
Those findings echoed data from the Tax Foundation, which noted that "the
income group that will see the largest increase in after-tax income in 2018
is the top 1 percent."
The Tax Policy Center 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.
Oh, and within a year of the tax cut bill's passage, twice as many major
corporations were paying a zero effective tax rate - and that included
Amazon, the retail giant founded by the Washington Post's owner.
If those sources don't adequately underscore Kessler's mendacity, then just
go to the Washington Post's own reporting when the tax cuts were moving
through Congress in 2017. Back then, the newspaper's journalists accurately
reported:
. "Most of the benefits go to the wealthy and large corporations."
. In a piece headlined "9 Ways Trump's Tax Plan Is a Gift to the Rich," the
Post reported that "it 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."
. In a report entitled "The Trump Tax Cuts Would Be the Most Insane Giveaway
to the Rich Ever," the Post reprinted this shocking table and pointed out
that by 2027: "The 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."
Kessler accidentally admitted some of this in his fact-check demonizing
Sanders. At one point, he acknowledged that "the biggest beneficiaries of
the pass-through deduction were the top 5 percent of individual taxpayers."
But he predicated his Sanders slander on the idea that "any broad-based tax
cut is going to mostly benefit the wealthy because they already pay a large
share of income taxes." He added: "In 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."
Those latter points are actually correct - they prove the veracity of
Sanders's assertion by explaining precisely how the Trump tax cuts delivered
a disproportionate amount of the tax breaks to the rich. Trump's bill
deliberately slashed marginal tax rates, which then funneled money up the
income ladder, just as the Vermont senator said.
The implication from Kessler is that tax reforms can only disproportionately
benefit the wealthy - as if regressive marginal rate cuts are the only
possible tax policy. Fact-check: false.
Kessler quite obviously likes regressive tax cuts - 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't mean a lawmaker is lying
when he says that such a tax policy does indeed enrich the affluent.
Kessler is entitled to his own opinions - but he shouldn't 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't be one emblazoned with the "fact-checking" emblem.
"This Is An Important Institution"
This gets to the real issue here - 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.
If a pundit wants to write an op-ed defending regressive reductions in tax
rates and criticizing a senator, that's fine. But something far more
sinister happened here.
In this episode, we saw that the newspaper owned by one of the world's
richest men was not publishing an op-ed branded as one pundit's opinion -
instead, the paper knowingly shrouded hard-edged, fact-free,
billionaire-defending ideology in the cloak of just-the-facts-ma'am
impartiality right on its news pages. And this wasn't this some one-off - a
report last year from Monash University researcher Andrew Moshirnia
documented Kessler's long track record of ever-more-unhinged and inaccurate
diatribes.
These dogmatic polemics were all published under the banner of dispassionate
fact-checking, as Post editors berate reporters for expressing their
opinions and enforce rigid social media guidelines in order to project an
air of objectivity.
Couple Kessler's latest tirade with the Post's skewed reporting and
editorials on the economic debate in Congress, and the decidedly not
objective message from Bezos's megaphone is loud, deliberate, and
self-serving: Giving starving people $2,000 (or $1,400) checks gratuitously
benefits people who supposedly don't 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's coveted seal
of approval.
Of course, this doesn't 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 - even if everyone in the media
industry feigns fainting spells anytime anyone even hints that there might
be a connection between a newspaper owner's agenda and the newspaper's
coverage (remember this fake controversy over Sanders's obviously true
statement?).
In the case of the Post, the link between owner and newsroom is out in the
open: Bezos reportedly meets with Post executives, shares business advice
with Bob Woodward, and has insinuated that he purchased the newspaper for
more than just business reasons.
"I said to myself, 'If this were a financially upside down salty snack food
company, the answer would be no," he said about buying the paper. "But as
soon as I started thinking about it that way, it was like, 'This is an
important institution.' It is the newspaper in the capital city in the most
important country in the world."
As an instrument of influence in the seat of government, Bezos's newspaper
does not want to be brutally honest with its readers about its devotion to
Kessler's 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 - not a Joe Friday-esque fact-checker, but a Fox News-style
opinionist - to make extremist and highly subjective arguments about who
should benefit from public policies.
Being forthright about that might undermine the Post's brand, and thereby
risk influence and credibility. And so instead, Bezos's newspaper is trying
to smuggle the extremism into the discourse and into readers' minds by
stuffing it into the costume of objective "fact-checking."
That kind of slimy subterfuge is wildly, offensively dishonest - especially
because the particular disguise is so powerful.
Today, any news outlet with a legacy brand can slap the phrase "fact-check"
on any pundit's 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's miasma of
disinformation, these nuggets of "fact-checking" are seen as the rare signal
in the noise - the last bits of verified truth that can be unquestionably
trusted.
But Kessler and his ilk prove that much fact-checking absolutely cannot be
relied on. Preying on the public's understandable desperation for some
reliable arbiter of truth, these bad-faith actors have turned the entire
"fact-checking" brand into the misinformation era's single most deceitful
weapon of all.
The old saying used to be that there were "lies, damn lies, and statistics"
- but in today's dystopia, there are lies, damn lies, and fact-checking.