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The Washington Post’s so-called “fact-checker,” Glenn Kessler, is facing heated backlash over the bias of his so-called “fact-checks.”
At issue is a particular fact-check published by Kessler on Friday that accused Sen. Tim Scott, a black man, of not being entirely truthful when he claims that his family went from “cotton to Congress.”
The claim is rooted in the fact that, despite Scott’s grandfather, Artis Ware, being an illiterate cotton picker, it was he who had inspired the senator to reach for the stars and one day become a sitting Republican member of Congress.
Listen to the senator’s story for yourself below:
As Scott, a South Carolina senator, explains in the video above, after his parents got divorced, he came to live with his grandfather. During his time there, he witnessed his grandfather reading the newspaper every single day.
But there was just one catch …
“It was 20 years later before I realized that my grandfather could not read. He wanted us to have a model to follow of someone who was so engaged in world affairs that his two grandsons would understand the power of reading and the power of education,” Scott explains.
“It’s because of his example that the Scott family went from picking cotton when he was a kid to picking a seat in Congress, so from cotton to Congress in his lifetime because the power of education is truly the closest thing to magic in America,” he adds.
But according to Kessler, who’s white, this claim, which is also documented in Scott’s autobiography, lacks “nuance.”
Sen. Tim Scott says he went from “Cotton to Congress in one lifetime,” but his ancestors owned unusually large amounts of land. Fact Checker investigates. https://t.co/HlLTppVTgM
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) April 23, 2021
“Scott tells a tidy story packaged for political consumption, but a close look shows how some of his family’s early and improbable success gets flattened and written out of his biography. Against heavy odds, Scott’s ancestors amassed relatively large areas of farmland, a mark of distinction in the Black community at the time,” Kessler wrote.
“Scott, moreover, does not mention that his grandfather worked on his father’s farm — a farm that was expanded through land acquisitions even during the Great Depression, when many other Black farmers were forced out of business,” he continued.
The underlying insinuation is that Scott isn’t an example of a black man going from nothing to something — but rather one of a “privileged” guy taking advantage of the “privileges” afforded to him by luck and happenstance.
But according to conservative commentator Erick Erickson, it’s this take — Kessler’s so-called “fact-check” — that truly lacks nuance:
I want to tell you why @GlennKesslerWP and @washingtonpost should apologize for what they have done today. They attempted to tell the story of a black man in the South by looking at public records. That’s relevant because at that time
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 23, 2021
“Separate but equal” was a legal standard. It was separate, but it was never equal. @GlennKesslerWP tries to tell the story of Scott’s family amassing land after the Civil War and can’t see the story of southern whites fighting back.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 23, 2021
By the time @SenatorTimScott’s grandfather is born, black families are having to abandon schooling in the south because it isn’t good, it isn’t equal, and it is very separate. They’ve got to go save their land.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 23, 2021
But @GlennKesslerWP and the Washington Post don’t attempt to tell the story of Tim Scott’s family as it was lived. They look at documents and make raw deductions devoid of the social context of the time.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 23, 2021
This is actually what racism of white elite often looks like. They don’t look at the story as lived, but as told by banks and legal records written at a time white society behaved one way and recorded things a different way.
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) April 23, 2021
Kessler’s take also seems to lack consistency.
Not once has he ever examined Vice President Kamala Harris’s widely questioned, longtime claim that she’d cried out for “fweedom” as a young baby.
“My mother used to laugh when she told the story about a time I was fussing as a toddler: She leaned down to me and asked, ‘Kamala, what’s wrong? What do you want?’ And I wailed back, ‘Fweedom,'” she wrote in her 2010 book, “Smart on Crime.”
She went on to repeat this claim ad nauseam, including on television. But according to a lengthy list of critics, not including Kessler, there’s a strong likelihood this claim was plagiarized from the late civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr.:
Kamala Harris under fire, accused of plagiarizing MLK anecdote in childhood story about ‘fweedom’ https://t.co/Cv3qhwLONr pic.twitter.com/avARkcEUNE
— Conservative News (@BIZPACReview) January 5, 2021
Kessler did at least address Massachusetts’ Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s since-debunked claim that she’s part Native American. But he addressed it by giving it credence.
“Warren’s Native American DNA, as identified in the test, may not be large, but it’s wrong to say it’s as little as 1/1024th or that it’s less than the average European American,” he defensively wrote in 2018.
The dichotomy between how he treats Democrats and how he treats Republicans, particularly Republicans of color, hasn’t gone unnoticed.
Look:
R ancestry “fact check” // Dem ancestry pic.twitter.com/VotrGdLHKk
— Drew Holden (@DrewHolden360) April 23, 2021
If a Democrat said this it would be championed and echoed 24/7 by the media
When a Republican says it, it gets a bogus fact check https://t.co/97G0wnac5d
— Ryan Saavedra (@RealSaavedra) April 23, 2021
What WaPo did to @SenatorTimScott is shameful.
When minorities refuse to be victims, disagree with liberal talking points, and think for ourselves, the media shames us and questions our credibility.
It’s why we must fight harder for conservative values that lift us all up. https://t.co/k7Qnle7gHz
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) April 23, 2021
So you found not a single lie but decided to smear him anyway…what was it Clarence Thomas said about the “high tech lynching of uppity blacks who deign to think for themselves…”
— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) April 23, 2021
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Vivek@bizpacreview.com
V. Saxena is a staff writer for BizPac Review with a decade of experience as a professional writer, and a lifetime of experience as an avid news junkie. He holds a degree in computer technology from Purdue University.
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