WaPo Blasted For ‘Racist’ Fact-Check Of GOP Senator Tim Scott, Leftists Defend Senator

The Washington Post and fact-checker Glenn Kessler received major pushback over a fact-check that the newspaper published on Friday about Sen. Tim Scott’s (R-SC) family history that was widely condemned by pundits as racist.

The report came after Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) announced on Thursday that Scott would give the Republican Party’s rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s address to Congress next week.

The article focused on the powerful story of Scott’s family history, which he describes as having gone “from cotton to Congress in one lifetime.”

The fact check concluded by not rating Scott’s statements about the harsh conditions that his grandfather experienced in the Jim Crow south, claiming that the story only missed “some nuance” and was shortened for “political consumption.”

Commentators and politicians weighed in on the piece with the following comments:

• Rep. Karen Bass (D-CA): “Tim Scott is an honorable man. It doesn’t matter what party you’re in – the journey of his family, from cotton to Congress in one lifetime, should be celebrated.”
• Karl Smith, Bloomberg columnist: “Not exactly covering yourself in glory here @GlennKesslerWP tl;dr Scott says his grandfather had to drop out of school at 10 yrs old to pick cotton, but ACKSHUALLY he was 11 & it was only because his father was a cotton farmer & the Great Depression had driven down prices.”
• Nikki Haley, former U.S. Ambassador: “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.”
• John Cooper, Heritage Communications: “Scott’s claim is 100% accurate and Kessler knows it, which is why he doesn’t actually challenge it. He just uses innuendo to imply that Scott is lying.”
• Stephen Miller, podcast host: “Lot of people are going to be googling Tim Scott after Biden’s speech, which is why Wash Post hit publish on this today. They know exactly what they are doing and why.”
• Bakari Sellers, CNN commentator and former Democrat politician: “Who thought this was a good idea?”
• Another political commentator added: “When the media is outraged: When Fox News hosts don’t post vaccine selfies. When the media isn’t outraged: When a WaPo columnist publishes a racist hit job on a black senator’s Deep South ancestors.”
• Kaylee White, blogger: “Imagine telling someone his family’s experience under slavery wasn’t actually that bad.”
• Mia Love, CNN commentator: “Politicians spend trillions on partisan projects while marketing them as something completely different (ie “infrastructure”). Yet somehow this is a target for deeper analysis?”
• Comfortably Smug: “Washington Post is so woke that a white liberal can tell a black man his family’s experience wasn’t black enough.”
• Rep. Burgess Owens (R-UT): “.@SenatorTimScott is the living embodiment of the American Dream, and I’m proud to serve with him. This “fact check” is insulting and incorrect.”
• Ben Shapiro, Editor Emeritus, The Daily Wire: “Owning Tim Scott by pointing out that his ancestors were an unbelievable American success story, buying hundreds of acres despite the crippling legal racism they had to withstand.”
• Phillip Bailey, writer: “Imagine the reaction to this if it were a fact-check of @MichelleObama or @CoryBooker ‘s family tree during the Jim Crow era? To be honest the silence reminds me of similar reticence on race-baiting attacks by Democrats v. Republican @DanielCameronAG in ’19.”
• Rory Cooper, political consultant: “Senator Scott deserves an apology for this. It’s everything wrong with the fact checking industry. The targeting. The lack of good faith. The personal side of it. It’s bad.”

Political commentator Erick Erickson weighed in with a lengthy thread on his analysis of the fact-check.

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

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

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

The Washington Post and Kessler both responded to the backlash the report received by claiming that research for the piece started several weeks ago.

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