Glenn Kessler Retire B*tch [TEASER]

Is fact-checking a legitimate enterprise? Is America's most famous fact-checker nothing more than a dweeb? Michael and Peter discuss.

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Transcript

Michael: Whatever zinger you do, I'm going to say this is misleading. Three Pinocchios. 

Peter: What if I just seriously answered. What if I just said, “Yeah, he's a fact checker for The Washington Post, and then you just said, [Michael laughs] “This needs context.” 

Michael: He sucks. That's actually additional context.

Peter: [laughs] I think that's a good bit. I think we should do it. 

[laughter] 

Michael: Okay, we need something for the music to kick in. 

Peter: Mm-hmm-mm-hmm.

Michael: All I know is that if I say he sucks, that needs zero Pinocchio [Peter chuckles] or should we just include this entire thing. 

[laughter] 

Michael: I mean, the music eventually kicks in?

[If Books Could Kill theme]

Michael: So this is an episode about the institution of fact checking, and our little entry point is Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post Fact Checker. He starts as a hard news reporter for Newsday. He then becomes a White House kind of foreign policy reporter, access journalism guy. 

Peter: Okay.

Michael: I did not know this when I started researching this, but the history of fact checking kind of is the history of Glenn Kessler. 

Peter: No one had ever thought to check a fact before Glenn came around. [laughs] 

Michael: I’m like [chuckles] is this true? Fact-checking really gets kind of invented in 2004. There's a speech by Zell Miller at the Republican National Convention in 2004 where he just goes after Kerry's war record and says, “He voted against this military spending.” And he just goes after him as, like, a soft on military guy. And it's just egregious, just lies and half-truths all the way through. And Kessler pitches to his editors, I want to write a front-page debunker of, like, all of the false claims that you heard the other night. And this starts to be seen as the internet is starting to take over news, as the information environment is changing, this starts to be seen as like actually a really important thing that journalistic organizations should be doing. 

Peter: Right. What if when someone said something, we checked the veracity of that claim. This is something that we thought of in 2004 as a society. 

Michael: I know there's something very interesting to me about how people who do fact-checking really do seem to think of it as a different thing than what other people are doing, especially other political reporters. But then it's like, “What do you think people are doing?” Like, “What?” 

Peter: Right, right.

Michael: Describe to me what you think journalism is, if not fact check.

Peter: Well, maybe it speaks to just how poisoned political journalism is, right. 

Michael: Right. 

Peter: Where all of those folks are just sort of accumulating a skill set of monitoring horse race coverage. 

Michael: Right. 

Peter: Therefore, you need this like, separate ancillary thing to be like, “By the way, is the thing that guy's saying every single speech, is that true?” 

Michael: Page 17. This guy's lying. [laughs] 

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: But then what's so interesting to me looking into this is that fact-checking was born out of a critique of both sides’ journalism. Like, a lot of the people who started fact-checking within these newsrooms were crusaders and reformers against exactly the critiques of media that me and you make on this show all the time. 

Peter: Ooh.

Michael: This is an excerpt from a really interesting book called, Deciding What's True: The Rise of Political Fact-Checking in American Journalism, by Lucas Graves.

Peter: “The speech by Zell Miller was a kind of epiphany for me, where I did nothing but write a horse race story and really felt guilty about it. Bill Adair, founder of PolitiFact, told fellow fact checkers at a 2011 meeting. This grew out of my own guilt. I had covered political campaigns and felt that I had been a passive co-conspirator in sort of passing along inaccurate information and hadn't fact checked it the way I should. And so I went to my editors with a proposal that we create a website where we would do fact-checking full time.” 

Michael: So, between 2004 and 2007 is where we start to get the foundation of things like PolitiFact. The New York Times has its own fact-checking desk. This becomes like a department within newsrooms of like, we have specialists that are going to look into all of the factual claims that you're hearing. Washington Post launches the Fact Checker column in 2007. Glenn Kessler takes it over in 2011. And Glenn Kessler himself says that the Pinocchio ratings, which is not something that he invented, that was the previous guy that did the Fact Checker column. But he kept-- he sort of relaunched the Fact Checker column and he decided to keep the Pinocchio ratings specifically as a response to both sides of journalism. That we need to have standard metrics. 

Peter: That's his idea of a standard metric. 

Michael: [chuckles] This thing that's not arbitrary at all. It's an objective metric of whether or not somebody's lying. This is from the introduction to his 2020 book, Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth.

Peter: It is like a reverse restaurant review, ranging from one Pinocchio, selective telling of the truth to four Pinocchios, a whopper. Those Pinocchios got politicians’ attention. No longer could they expect the newspaper to settle for dueling quotes from both sides, leaving readers puzzling over who was right. Instead, we are the reader's advocate, showing them how we do our research and why a politician's claim is misleading. 

Michael: So, we're not doing both sides stuff. You can actually look at this as an index, and pretty soon they start producing kind of homepages with politicians where you can look through. You can look up, Bill Clinton or Bernie Sanders and be like, “Okay, what's his overall Pinocchio rating?” 

Peter: How many Pinocchios has he accumulated over time? 

Michael: Over time, right. And then you can have almost an index of, “Okay, here's Hillary Clinton. She has 3.17 Pinocchios. [Peter chuckles] And here's Donald Trump, he has 3.8 Pinocchios.” And you can actually start to look at different averages. I think this is fucking asinine, but I'm going to pretend that I don't because we're going to have developments and twists later.

Peter: This is very admirable to think that you could sort of want to do this. 

Michael: [laughs] I know. 

Peter: As soon as you're like, “We will turn this into an objective science. Here's my scale of one to four Pinocchios.” Four Pinocchios, of course, reflecting a whopper, another abstraction.

Michael: [laughs] Another complete abstraction that I know. 

Peter: Like, “What are you talking about, dude?” 

Michael: It's also this thing that Glenn, from the very beginning, doesn't seem to understand how selective his own process is. Because he says, “They also have something called a Geppetto [Peter chuckles] for when you make just a factually true statement.” He's like, “We almost never give out the Geppetto’s. It's rare that a politician earns a Geppetto.”

Peter: And then you have a Jiminy Cricket [Michael laughs] for someone who says something that's sort of spiritually insightful.

Michael: Right. [laughs] 

Peter: This, of course, is a Donkey Boy. 

Michael: But then I think this sort of starts to point to some of the problems with this entire endeavor, that if you're only rarely giving out a that was true rating, you're obviously choosing the lies.

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Like, you're choosing to look into things that are misleading. So, an index of a politician of how many Pinocchios they've gotten over the years. It's like, if you're only choosing their lies, [chuckles] every politician is going to look equally dishonest. If you went through the show and you chose every single thing that you said that was slightly exaggerated, and everything that I said that was roughly true, you could say, “Oh, well, Peter gets four Pinocchios and Mike has zero Pinocchios.” You're not looking at the entire corpus of things that we've said. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: Unless you're doing it systematically. 

Peter: And if you did, you would realize that I am the moron. 

Michael: [laughs] How dare you? [Peter chuckles] As soon as you talk about speed running, four Pinocchios, six Pinocchios. 

Peter: Four Pinocchios. Speed running is actually cool. 

Michael: So that was a snapshot of some of the hype around the foundation of fact-checking. Over the last two decades, as fact-checking has become a more normal part of the news gathering apparatus, a lot of critiques have popped up of it, and I think some severe structural weaknesses have appeared. 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: And from the Vantage Point of 2024, it's looking a lot less like fact-checking. Is this invaluable mechanism of accountability for politicians? So, for the rest of this episode, we are going to talk about some of the structural weaknesses of fact-checking through one of America's least essential Fact Checkers, Glenn Kessler. 

Peter: Mm.

Michael: I looked at a bunch of Glenn Kessler fact checks over the years. We're going to go into deep Glenn Kessler lore and look at the origins of this kind of stuff. But then you looked into his fact checks of the Democratic National Convention a couple weeks ago. 

Peter: That's right. We will be fact-checking the Fact Checker. 

Michael: Ooh, who fact checks the Fact Checkers? Who Snopes, the Snopes. Yes. 

Peter: I am anticipating an apology from him to me directly after this episode airs. 

Michael: [laughs] So, I have a million of these. I maybe have too many. 

Peter: What's your actual total number of fact checks? I want to know. Because I want the people to get sense of how you operate differently from me because I have three. 

Michael: Oh, okay. [chuckles] Well, okay. A couple of them I cut because they overlap with yours, and then a couple of them are kind of repetitive. I have 12, [Peter laughs] but I don't think we're going to do well. I'll vibe it out. So, we're going to go over these in three categories. I will present mine and then we'll talk about whether or not yours fall into the same kind of category. 

Peter: Aha-aa.

Michael: I think we both looked into this and came up with our own typology of these, which I think are a little bit different. You can give me as many Pinocchios as you need to for my episode structure. Okay, the first major problem that you see with it is the selective use of pedantry.

Peter: Sure. 

Michael: With fact-checking, there's the question of are we checking the literal words in the sentence that politicians are saying or are we checking kind of whether this is meaningfully true. 

Peter: Right.

Michael: So in 2020, Bernie Sanders gives a speech where he says, “We will not give tax breaks to billionaires when half a million Americans sleep out on the streets.” So that's the claim. For this episode, I'm going to have me read the claims and you read the Glenn. 

Peter: What if I anticipated what Glenn's going to say right now? 

Michael: Well, I know you know this because you did the Schellenberger research. What is he about to say? 

Peter: I believe that he's about to say that just because you are homeless does not mean that you are sleeping out on the streets. 

Michael: Ding, ding, ding. Peter

Peter: Washington Post, “Give me Glenn's job.” [Michael laughs] All right. Glenn says, “This is a favorite line, but the way Sanders frames it is exaggerated. His number came from a single night survey done by the Department of Housing and Urban Development to count homeless people. For one night in January 2019, the estimate was that 568,000 people are homeless. But the report also says that two-thirds, nearly 360,000, were in emergency shelters or transitional housing programs. The 210,000 others were unsheltered, i.e., on the streets, as Sanders puts it. The number has been trending down over the past decade. It was 650,000 in 2007.” 

Michael: So, he's fact-checking the literal words, right? Bernie says, “People are sleeping on the streets.”

Peter: Bernie Sanders, drop out, [Michael laughs] you have humiliated yourself. I'm rating this one Monstro, monster of the whale. 

Michael: [laughs] The thing is, I'm going to say this is somewhat defensible. If you're going to say that people are sleeping out on the streets, you probably should mean sleeping out on the streets, especially considering that unsheltered homelessness is a distinct category of homelessness that is measured. And so, the point makes just as much sense to say, “We shouldn't give tax breaks to billionaires when 210,000 people are sleeping on the streets.” 

Peter: I agree. I think this is like a fine thing to fact check in a vacuum.

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: However, you need to be aware that what you're really fact-checking here is rhetorical flourish.

Michael: Yeah, exactly. If somebody's kind of speaking off the cuff in your head, you can say, “Okay, homelessness is 500,000.” And in your mind, you can,-

Peter: Yeah, yeah.

Michael: -okay, what's a synonym for homelessness? Sleeping on the streets. And then it turns out that's technically not true. It's sort of understandable as well. I would say. It's like if--we were doing Pinocchios, I would do maybe like half a one or one.

Peter: Yeah, 

Michael: “You shouldn't do this kind of thing. But also, you get how it happens, right.” 

Peter: It's hard to even call this dishonest. No one is staking out a policy position based on the sleeping on the streets line and then finding out that actually a good chunk of these people are in emergency shelters and being like, “Oh, well, then what are you complaining about?” The policy issue is still being framed largely correctly.

Michael: Yeah. He's also fucking up the distinction between technically true and meaningfully true. 

Peter: Aha-aa.

Michael: Glenn says, “Oh, these people are not technically sleeping on the streets because a lot of them are in emergency shelters, but a lot of people in those emergency shelters are regularly sleeping on the streets. They may not have been on the particular night when the point in time count was taken. But if you're saying 500,000 people sleep on the streets, Bernie may not have meant that on a specific night. He may have meant that habitually. And it turns out on top of the roughly 200,000 unsheltered homeless people, there's around 200,000 temporary beds.”

Peter: You know, the more I think about this, the less I'm even sure that it’s like--

Michael: [laughs] Zero Pinocchios. 

Peter: Well, I'm leaning towards 0.25 to 0,-

Michael: Okay.

Peter: -because when you hear sleeping on the streets, I don't necessarily think of literally sleeping on the streets. To me, that just sounds like this is the amount of homeless people, right?

Michael: Right.

Peter: If someone was like, “Oh, a lot of them are actually in cars.”

Michael: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Peter: Would that change your perception of the statement? No, of course not. You know what he means? And I think this is possibly a you know what he means situation. 

Michael: I love the car example because then it's, well, you can do pedantry of, “Oh, well, they're not technically sleeping on the streets, but then you can do uno reverse double pedantry and be like, well, the cars are on the streets.” [Peter laughs] Technically, they are sleeping on the streets. 

Peter: Is your home not built on a street? 

Michael: [laughs] Yeah. “What level of pedantry are we going for here?” Yeah. 

Peter: Right.

Michael: Okay, so that was the example of, “Okay, we're pedantically fact-checking the literal words in a politician statement.” We then rewind to 2011. This is Glenn's first year as the Washington Post Fact Checker. We have a statement in a speech by President Obama during the recession. He says, “Chrysler has repaid every dime and more of what it owes American taxpayers for their support during my presidency.” So that's the claim that Obama makes in 2011. This is Glenn's Fact Check. 

Peter: “Every dime and more sounds like such a bargain. Not only did Chrysler pay back the loan with interest, but the company paid back even more than they owed. Not so fast. The president snuck in the weasel words during my presidency,” in his statement. 

Michael: Where's the weasel words? 

Peter: According to the White House, Obama is counting only the $8.5 billion loan that he made to Chrysler, not the 4 billion that President George W. Bush extended in his last month in office. 

Michael: So when it was Bernie, we're pedantically checking the words of the statement for this one. We're saying, “Well, the words themselves are fine, but the words are bad.” Like, he included the weasel words. 

Peter: He's missing context. 

Michael: Right? 

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: Obama is doing, I think, what fact checkers would recommend that he do. He provides a caveat, right? Chrysler paid back all the money that we loaned them during my presidency. And he's saying, “Well, it's only during your presidency though.” 

Peter: That's what he said. 

Michael: Well, yeah. [chuckles] That's kind of the asterisk on this. And this one is so egregious that the actual White House responds. The White House puts out a press release saying, “First of all, they paid back 3 billion of the 4 billion that George W. Bush loaned them. And if Obama hadn't extended them the further 8.5 billion, they would have recouped none of that.” The question again, is like, “Is this technically true or meaningfully true?” It's a much better outcome to extend them more credit and they pay back more of the original loan than to simply lose that $4 billion anyway. So it's sort of like, “What actual point are you making here?” 

Peter: So, we're seeing both sides of this. One is a sort of demand for pedantry and one is demand for context and it's unclear what you could say about these things that would make Kessler not do a little fact check.

Michael: So dude, that's the first category is selectively weaponized pedantry. Do you have any along these lines, Peter? 

Peter: I want to step outside of Glenn Kessler for this one, because probably the funniest fact check of the DNC was by his colleague Amy Gardner. So, Amy Gardner is fact-checking Biden's speech on, like, I think it was night one of the DNC, Biden said, “Donald Trump says he will refuse to accept the election result if he loses again.” Amy says, “But that's not true. Trump just hasn't said that he would accept.” [Michael laughs] And she follows up by saying, and he has previously said, “The only way he loses is if the Democrats cheat.” 

Michael: Right. 

Peter: [chuckles] Let's piece it all together, Amy. 

Michael: All of these examples get to the core problem is that the fact checkers think of themselves as doing something like, above judgment. They're just applying this objective lens and they don't want to come to any conclusions. Whereas any intelligent person who's remotely familiar with Donald Trump would say, “Yeah, he doesn't recognize any form of accountability as legitimate, including the last time he fucking lost a presidential election.” So probabilistically, can you say this as a fact? No. But probabilistically, it's very likely that he will not accept the results of this election. But also, that requires you to be doing a little bit of opinionating. Like, that is opinion, right.

Peter: Right. 

Michael: But people who do this fact-checking are not allowed. I think their self-conception prevents them from doing this. 

Michael: So they have to rely on these weird, hair thin, [crosstalk] pedantic corrections of statements like that. When essentially, you're correcting an opinionated statement. 

Peter: I feel like what's happening is that Amy is looking at every line said by Joe Biden and trying to locate a falsehood, right?

Michael: Right. 

Peter: Because that's her job. That's what she's out there to do. So from time to time, you're just going to get over your skis because you're searching for it, because you want it to be there. Because not to get too dramatic, but your career to some degree, relies on you being able to locate these misleading statements. 

Michael: And also, what's so interesting about that one specifically is that Glenn oftentimes defends the practice of fact-checking by saying, “Look, we don't want to be too pedantic. What we're basically trying to do is inject a little bit of context. We want voters to be informed and we're kind of using the fact check as a platform to just inform people about, okay, how does the GDP work or whatever?” But the Amy example is actually misinforming the public.

Peter: Right.

Michael: 50-50 maybe he'll accept the results of the election and maybe he won't have when that's not really true. We know what happened last time, so you end up spreading misinformation under the guise of spreading information and delivering context.

Peter: Right, right. 

Michael: Okay. The second category of problematic fact checks that Glenn has done is true statements that he designates as false. There are so many examples of this. [chuckles] 

Peter: These are obviously all existing in an overlapping Venn diagram. But that Obama statement is very much like, “Well, this is true, but-

Michael: What if I don't like it? 

Peter: -what if it were false?”

Michael: So my favorite example of this comes from a presidential primary debate in 2019, when Beto O'Rourke, he's talking about the Green New Deal stuff. He says, “Wind and solar jobs are the fastest growing jobs in the country.”

Peter: Mm.

Michael: And here is Glenn's fact check. Do your Glenn voice. 

Peter: “What does he sound like?” 

Michael: Do your white guy voice. Do your black comedian doing a white guy voice. That's what I imagine him sounding like. 

Peter: Okay. Well, let me first, let me do black comedian. 

[laughter]

Peter: Then I'll transition. All right. “The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects solar photovoltaic installers and wind turbine technicians will grow the fastest between 2016 and 2026. But that doesn't mean they are common professions.” 

Michael: That kind of became Brooklyn. I think it's bleeding into your Brooklyn tough guy.

Peter: Maybe.

Michael: New Jersey tough guy. 

Peter: Let me take the baritone out of it. “The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects, solar photovoltaic installers, and wind turbine technicians will grow the fastest between 2016 and 2026. But that doesn't mean they are common professions.” 

Michael: Boom. Got ’em. Got ’em, Glenn. He said they're the fastest growing professions, but they are the fastest growing professions. 

Peter: But they're not common. 

Michael: He didn't say that they were common. He was just straightforwardly correct, but a different claim is not true. [crosstalk] So, okay. 

Peter: [laughs] What the fuck is this? What the fuck is this?

Michael: I think what he's trying to get at here is that, whenever anything is fastest growing, what that usually means is that it's starting from a very low baseline. 

Peter: Correct. This is why to put this in a context that only you and I can understand, when you launch a podcast, it will quickly hit the top of the Apple charts. 

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: This causes everyone who launches a medium-sized podcast to believe that they are the number one podcaster [crosstalk] in the world for a short period of time. But that's just the algorithm detecting that you went from zero to several thousand people or whatever. What's actually happening is that you are a mid podcast. 

Michael: Exactly. That's why everyone keeps saying that podcast is mid whenever we come up due to our placement on the Apple charts. [Peter chuckles] This should have been like a Geppetto. This is the thing where he's like, “We rarely give out Geppettos.” But, “Why isn't this just a true statement?” 

Peter: Yeah. 

Michael: “What does a true statement mean in this context?” 

Peter: This is another situation where if the name of the column was some additional context. Then you'd be like, all right, sure. But the fact that you are presenting it as a fact check makes the whole sort of framing a little bit suspect, because you're not really fact-checking. You're just adding information that you think is useful. That's great. But it's not fact-checking.

Michael: I probably have too many examples. There's an infamous one where Bernie Sanders said, “Millions of Americans are forced to work two or three jobs just to survive.” And Glenn is like, “Well, that's true. There's 5.2 million people working two or three jobs. But a lot of those jobs are part time.” So, [chuckles] it's like, “Okay. Well, there are millions of people working two or three jobs. Yes.” 

Peter: Thank you, Glenn. 

Michael: Dude, I did like a site like washingtonpost.com search for Glenn Kessler, Bernie Sanders. And he fucking hates Bernie Sanders so much. 

Peter: Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Michael: It's so obvious. All of his fact checks of Bernie Sanders are Bernie saying something that's just straightforwardly true. And then Glenn, paragraph upon paragraph, just yelling at him and calling him a liar. 

Peter: You say that the Child Tax Credit has been successful, but the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991 Bernie. 

Michael: [laughs] So, the next claim that he looks at is three people in this country own more wealth than the bottom half of America.

Peter: Oh, okay. I got it. 

Michael: You know this one too, right?

Peter: I believe so. I believe that what he's going to say is like, “This is only true if you count debt.” 

Michael: Yes. Basically. 

Peter: Bam. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: Washington Post, call me.

Michael: Boom. 

Peter: You can fire your research staff. I can do this off the dome. [Michael laughs] I will save you millions. 

Michael: The thing is, I think Glenn is also doing this off the dome, to be fair. 

Peter: Yeah, that's true, that's true. 

Michael: So, here's this.

Peter: Here we go. Glenn says-

Michael: Snappy talking points.

Peter: “This snappy talking point is based on numbers that add up, but it's also a question of comparing apples to oranges. Sanders is drawing on a 2017 report from the left leaning Institute for Policy Studies, which says that three billionaires, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Warren Buffet, had a total wealth of 249 billion, compared to 245 billion for the bottom 160 million of the United States. But people in the bottom half [chuckles] have essentially no wealth-

Michael: No wealth. 

Peter: -as debts cancel out whatever assets they might have. So, the comparison is not especially meaningful.” 

Michael: That's the end of the column, by the way. 

[laughter] 

Michael: He doesn’t like to say- 

Peter: Why isn't that--

Michael: Why isn't it meaningful, Glenn? 

Peter: You might think that the bottom 160 million have very little wealth, but that's because they have essentially no wealth.

Michael: Yeah, they have no wealth. And the billionaires do have more than them. 

Peter: Yeah. This is something that I've heard people say many times where it's like, “Yeah, but that's only if you count debt.”

Michael: Right.

Peter: It's like, “Well, yeah, [crosstalk] you should count debt. What are you talking about? What the fuck are you talking about? Why would you ignore debt?” 

Michael: But then, okay, what's interesting about this one though, is that there's a huge blow up about this. Glenn gets yelled at by all corners of the internet, and then he issues an update. This is another specific Glenn pattern. Not necessarily a problem in fact-checking, but a problem with Glenn that he does not take criticism well at all. So here is his update to this post. 

Peter: “I am being attacked by communists online.” [Michael laughs] All right, He says, “Oh, not even that far. There was some Twitter outrage. I love it when pundits frame criticism as, Twitter criticism just to demean it,” when it'll be like, “No, it was other journalists on Twitter.” 

Michael: Yeah. It was other journalists, exactly. [laughs] Articles in various political blogs and stuff who were also pointing this out.

Peter: There was some Twitter outrage about our conclusion that the comparison was not especially meaningful. So, we checked with Emmanuel Saez, the University of California, Berkeley professor who was the pioneer in this field of research and often cited by Sanders. He said, “He agreed with our assessment.” 

Michael: He agrees with us. 

Peter: “The real scandal here is that the bottom half of us families own essentially no wealth on net because debts cancel out whatever small assets they may have. He said in an email. If you exclude cars, the wealth of the bottom 50% is actually slightly negative, according to the most recent distributional Fed statistics. You don't even need to be a billionaire to own more than what the bottom half of Americans own. Billionaires in the Forbes 400 owned slightly less than 1% of total wealth back in 1982. Now they own about 3.5% of total wealth.”

Michael: The statement I want to zoom in on here is “He said he agreed with our assessment.”

Peter: Nothing in there. [crosstalk] [Michael laughs] Here's how he's being sort of slippery. All he did was say, “This is only true if you include debt.” And then he was like, “And therefore, it doesn't really matter.” It's that second part. That is what everyone is yelling at you about, dude. Not the first part. So he's saying, “Well, this economist agrees that this is only true if you count for debt.” It's like, “Yeah, everyone agrees with that plan.”

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: It's the conclusion you're drawing from that that everyone thinks is fucking stupid. 

Michael: And also, the guy in his email points out that they used to own 1% of total wealth, and now billionaires own 3.5% of total wealth. So, we're talking about an overall problem of increasing inequality in the United States, right? 

Peter: Right.

Michael: And so the basic fact here, which is true, is that if your net worth is $1, you are richer than the bottom 50% of the United States, technically. Because if you go to college and your $90,000 in student debt, then your net worth is negative $90,000. So, anyone who has a dollar has technically, more net worth than you. But the idea is that basically, you have this asset, essentially that you paid $90,000 for, eventually your earning power will be such that you're much more likely to have sort of an okay life after that. What Bernie is saying here is A, I mean, it is true, right? Billionaires have more wealth than the bottom 50% of Americans. And he's essentially doing a rhetorical flourish. He's talking about the top 0.001% and the bottom 50%. He's using that as an illustration of rising inequality in America, which is true. There's a sort of an interesting methodological thing about how they measure net worth. 

Peter: Right. 

Michael: But why is that not a meaningful comparison? 

Peter: It is a meaningful comparison. Debt is worse than no debt. Yeah, there are some people who, for example, when you are fresh out of law school, you might be a couple hundred grand in debt, but also making a couple hundred grand, that person is not experiencing any financial difficulty. And so measuring their financial situation by their wealth is a mistake, right. 

Michael: Right.

Peter: But student debt is also crippling for people who don't have higher incomes in many cases. So, you do want to count their debt in those situations. 

Michael: And there's many countries where if you go to medical school or law school or college, you don't end up $90,000 in debt. 

Peter: Yeah.

Michael: The fact that so many people are in so much debt is kind of part of the problem of inequality that Bernie is talking about. 

Peter: All right, I have one in this category, I think. 

Michael: Oh, okay. 

Peter: There was a statement by Hakeem Jeffries at the DNC. He said, “Trump was the mastermind of the GOP Tax Scam, where 83% of the benefits [Michael laughs] went to the wealthiest 1% in America. Kessler described this as mostly false and he says that he has previously given the statement, three Pinocchios.

Michael: I actually read one of these. Yeah, he did a lot of these, like the same thing when all this debate was going on. Yeah. 

Peter: When Republicans passed their big tax cut bill in 2017, they put an expiration date on some of the tax cuts for individuals, meaning that over the span of the next decade, people whose taxes were initially cut, their taxes would rise again. That allowed the budget math to make a little bit more sense. And it also creates political pressure to extend those tax cuts before they expire, right. Any president who's in office when the taxes are about to go back up again might think, “Ooh, bad idea. Let's get a bill passed to keep those cuts in place.” So, Hakeem Jeffries’ statement that 83% of the benefits of the bill went to the wealthiest 1% is true, [Michael laughs] but it assumes that the tax cuts won't be extended, which they might be. 

Michael: Right, right.

Peter: So, Kessler is saying that makes it mostly false because the tax cuts might still be extended. That's three Pinocchios. What the fuck is two Pinocchios then?

Michael: He also I found one where he dings Bernie for making this exact same claim like, “83% go to the wealthy.” He's like, “Bernie is being misleading because that won't apply until 2027.” 

Peter: So that's the same claim. He's basically saying, “Well, if in 2027 there has been no extension, then you could look back and say, yeah, 83% went to the top 1%.” But it's like, “No, dude, they passed a law.

[laughter]

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: The output of that law was 83% of the benefits going to the top 1%.” That's an uncontested fact here.

Michael: Yeah, yeah.

Peter: But he's like, “But what if something changes? You must account for that.” No, dude. No, it's not a lie. It's not a fucking lie. 

Michael: Yeah. 

Peter: Oh, I don't get it. This is beyond pedantry. It's not even adding content. It's literally saying, “Someone might pass a law later that makes this not true. What are you talking about?” 

Michael: Well, you know what it is, Peter? You know it is? It is our third category, political punditry disguised as fact-checking. You are absolutely going to love this one, Peter. I have a fact check from 2012 from the 2012 election, where he's fact-checking the voiceover of Obama attack ad on Mitt Romney. So, the voiceover of this ad says, “Running for governor, Mitt Romney campaigned as a--”

Peter: No, do the voice. 

Michael: [laughs] I'm not doing the voice. I can do long pauses. I can do long pauses. 

Peter: All right, then do black comedian. 

Michael: [laughs] It says, well, it's a voiceover. So, it's probably like terrible voiceover voice. It says, “Running for governor, Mitt Romney campaigned as a job creator, but as a corporate raider, he shipped jobs to China and Mexico. That was from the Obama campaign ad.” And then here is the first part of Glenn's fact check.

Peter: Oh, hell, yeah. I was wondering if he was going to be pedantic about the shipping jobs or the phrase and phenomenal to see that it's about the phrase. 

Michael: Yeah.

Peter: He says, “The phrase corporate rater has a particular meaning in the world of finance. Here's the definition on Investopedia. For context for folks who don't know, Investopedia is where first year lawyers go when their corporate clients are involved in some shenanigans that you don't understand. 

Michael: Oh, yeah. 

Peter: And you're like, “Oh, fuck. What is this? What type of security is this? How does this work?” [Michael laughs] You go to Investopedia and then you go talk to the partner, and the partner is like, “What is this?” And you're like, “Don't worry, sir. I looked on Investopedia.”

Michael: That's the first sentence of your essay. Investopedia defines short selling as--

Peter: [laughs] “A corporate raider is an investor who buys a large number of shares in a corporation whose assets appear to be undervalued. The large share purchase would give the corporate rater significant voting rights, which could then be used to push changes in the company's leadership and management. This would increase share value and thus generate a massive return for the raider.”

Michael: So that's the Investopedia definition of corporate raider. So, here's the rest of Glenn's fact check.

Peter: In other words, “This is generally an adversarial stance in which an investor sees an undervalued asset and forces management to spin off assets, take the company private, or break it up. In a previous life, the fact checker covered renowned corporate raiders such as Carl Icahn and his ilk. We have also closely studied Bain capital and can find no examples that come close to this situation. Its deals were done in close association with management.”

Michael: With management?

Peter: Indeed, Bain generally held onto its investments for four or five years, in contrast to the quick Bust ‘em Ups of real corporate raiders. So calling, making Romney a corporate raider is a real stretch. 

Michael: They did ship jobs overseas, but management wanted to ship those jobs. So, can you say it's bad?

Peter: I love using the technical definition of corporate raider, [Michael laughs] it's not like the SEC has a definition of this that I know of. You know, what I mean? 

Michael: It's just a pejorative term for private equity.

Peter: Yeah, yeah. 

Michael: It's basically like, “Yeah, fuck these guys.” You buy a company, you make it more “efficient,” which oftentimes means laying people off, shipping jobs overseas, whatever, and then you sell it back for a big profit. You're basically flipping it the way that you would flip a house. 

Peter: Right.

Michael: This is an opinion. I was thinking of if someone called us like, “Mike and Peter are dirtbag leftists.” You can't fact check that. That's a pejorative way of saying we're a progressive podcast. [chuckles]

Peter: Or maybe seven years ago, someone put together a definition of dirtbag leftist that technically wouldn't encompass us. And then we were like, “Actually the definition of dirtbag leftist is this,"

Michael: It's basically what they're saying is like, “This is a left leaning podcast and these guys suck.” 

Peter: I would say three Pinocchios. Michael Hobbs is center right. 

Michael: [laughs] So this gets four Pinocchios by the way, this voiceover. [crosstalk] He does also go into this thing of shipping jobs overseas. He's like, “Yes, Bain does that, but Mitt Romney wasn't overseeing it when Bain was doing that. And they shipped jobs to cheaper states.” They shipped it to Tennessee, where there's less union representation, but not necessarily overseas. But also, there's like an Indian call center that a Massachusetts company was going to outsource to. And Mitt Romney vetoed a bill that was going to prevent that. It's like another one of these ones where it's like just kind of a true. But he's sort of making it more technical and somehow gives it the highest rating. This is a whopper. 

Peter: Whopper Glenn, is like, “Where were you last night? With friends? That's a whopper. 

Michael: Exactly. Or like 80% of what Trump says. 

Peter: Right. I rate this one figuro. Geppetto's little cat. 

Michael: But he's basically, he's just doing political punditry here. Like, this is an op-ed column, right? He's like, “Is it fair to call Mitt Romney a corporate raider?” No, I think private equity is an important part of the economy, blah, blah, blah.

Peter: Context, America is the greatest country in the world. Let's get that straight. 

[laughter]

[music]

[Transcript provided by SpeechDocs Podcast Transcription]