the washington post is under fire for
using its fact checker to launder what
seems like a democratic hit piece
on republican senator tim scott the
article examined scott's story that his
grandfather never learned to read or
write because he quit middle school to
pick cotton
fact checker glenn kessler poured
through census data and property records
from scott's family dating all the way
back to the civil war
and concluded that the senator's story
was missing nuance
because he didn't say that his fat his
grandfather artist quit school to work
on his father's farm
the subtle message of the piece tim
scott's ancestors owned property so it
doesn't matter if his grandfather picked
cotton or not
if only they held other senators to such
strict standards of truth-telling
joining me now glenn greenwald author of
securing democracy
glenn thanks so much for coming on
i know that you're very good with you i
know that you're very aware
of how much fact checkers these days now
try to
assert things being true or false in
ways that
kind of reestablish the power of the
media to determine reality
it's something that we saw happen you
know repeatedly under
the trump administration throughout the
russia hoax and everything else within
this
this seems to be one latest example of
how the standards are completely
different depending on the politician
that they're targeting
right so as the public faith and trust
in journalism
collapses as all polls show and as they
realize because their industry is
failing
they're constantly looking for ways to
re-establish and reassert their
authority and their right to control
the discourse demanding that dissenting
voices be censored from the internet is
one way but
calling their you know journalism
something different than
journalism like fact checking as though
it's some kind of objectively verifiable
enterprise
is another another way they're looking
to bestow on themselves authority that
they're not actually
entitled to and you know in principle i
don't actually have a problem
with a journalist going and
investigating the kind of hard scrabble
story of a major politician like
senator scott i mean oftentimes
politicians do exaggerate the
difficulties confronted in childhood
just to make their story more dramatic
but you know in this case it read as
though he was debunking the story
but in reality there was nothing about
senator scott's story
that the washington post ended up
concluding was false in fact they
actually verified it but they used the
tone of debunking
and you were waiting for the debunking
and it never came
and you know i think the other part is
you know imagine can you even imagine
them doing this to say like stacy abrams
who has a similar story about growing up
as a black woman
in mississippi i'm sure she confronted
all kinds of
you know problems with racism and
poverty but she ended up at yale law
school there's questions about how her
parents got graduate degrees at emory if
you did a piece like that about her at
the washington post you would lose your
job by the end of the week and i think
that's really the problem
you know you mentioned one of the
elements of this being that people try
to silence others on the internet and
one of the things that we've seen is
these
fact checkers have been weaponized
effectively by
major entities like facebook to go after
and target to
to de-list articles that they dislike to
you know prevent them from being shared
often over things that are you know very
small
and and tiny errors if if they're even
errors at all or
oftentimes they're just differences of
opinion to me this is a very dangerous
development
in terms of our media landscape what are
your thoughts on it
yeah i mean i think the idea that any we
should trust any
human institution which by definition is
fallible
and likely to abuse its power that we
should trust
any institution to arbitrate what is
true and false
to the point where what is decreed to be
false is censored off of the internet
is something that we ought to be
extremely wary of doing and
you know for example the fact checker
that we were just discussing glenn
kessler who did the
fact check on senator scott when
president trump
called the story about from the new york
times and the c.i.a
about russians paying for bounties on
the heads of american soldiers
fake news he gave him three or four
pinocchios the adolescent
ranking system that the washington post
uses in part because president trump
said he wasn't brief but also because
he said it wasn't a true story and the
washington post determined it was and
then last week we learned
that the intelligence community itself
admits they have virtually no evidence
for it so
over and over we see these fact checkers
who don't want to just report but want
to control our discourse
getting caught lying or manipulating
information or disseminating
disinformation themselves
glenn thanks so much for taking the time
to join me on this important topic
good to be with you