When it comes to the urgency of the “fact-checking” of some prominent politicians, the Washington Post appears quite selective.
Sen. Tim Scott, R-SC, was the subject of a long piece Friday by the Post’s star fact-checker, Glenn Kessler.
The piece, “Tim Scott often talks about his grandfather and cotton. There’s more to that tale,” examined the “origin stories” of comments the Senator has made over the years about being an ancestor of slaves. Scott has said his grandfather dropped out of elementary school to pick cotton, so the liberal newspaper enlisted its fact-checker to get to the bottom of the claim.
“The tale of his grandfather fits in with a narrative of Scott moving up from humble circumstances to reach a position of political power in the U.S. Senate,” Kessler wrote. “But Scott separately has acknowledged that his great-great-grandfather, Lawrence Ware, once owned 900 acres in South Carolina.”
Kessler declared he “dug into the South Carolina census records” to “close this gap in Scott’s narrative” despite admitting “census data is historically questionable at best — and at times unreliable.”
“Our research reveals a more complex story than what Scott tells audiences. Scott’s grandfather’s father was also a substantial landowner — and Scott’s grandfather, Artis Ware, worked on that farm,” Kessler wrote.
“Scott’s family history in South Carolina offers a fascinating window into a little-known aspect of history in the racist South following the Civil War and in the immediate aftermath of slavery — that some enterprising Black families purchased property as a way to avoid sharecropping and achieve a measure of independence from White-dominated society.”
“Senator Kamala Harris started her life’s work young,” writer Ashley C. Ford led off the piece. “She laughs from her gut, the way you would with family, as she remembers being wheeled through an Oakland, California, civil rights march in a stroller with no straps with her parents and her uncle. At some point, she fell from the stroller … and the adults, caught up in the rapture of protest, just kept on marching. By the time they noticed little Kamala was gone and doubled back, she was understandably upset.”
“My mother tells the story about how I’m fussing,” Harris told the magazine. “And she’s like, ‘Baby, what do you want? What do you need?’ And I just looked at her and I said, ‘Fweedom.’”
This was a story Harris has told over and over again from her June 2020 appearance on “The Tonight Show” to her 2019 book tour. It was documented as early as 2004 in an interview with W Magazine.
A spokesperson for The Washington Post told Fox News, “The Fact Checker began research on this story several weeks ago. As with all Post reporting, we publish when stories are ready.”
The Post did not immediately respond to Fox News’ inquiry when asking if the fact-check wasn’t “ready” until 3 AM Friday morning.
Regarding the fierce backlash the report received, the paper stood by the fact-check, telling Fox News, “The Fact Checker piece acknowledges that Sen. Tim Scott may not have known his full family history and that historical records regarding the lives of Black Americans are often scant.
Nonetheless, our reporting adds information found in official records to Scott’s public remarks and writings about his grandfather. The Fact Checker occasionally delves into the origin stories of politicians, often without reaching a conclusion about their completeness or veracity.”