Florida Congressman Byron Donalds (R) is a little peeved over a recent Washington Post “Fact-checker” analysis story that appears to miss the mark in “fact-checking” what they were actually analyzing: Senator Tim Scott’s story of his grandfather’s land ownership.
“The "I'm not racist, I voted for Obama" liberals that work at the WaPo are showing their true colors, again,” stated Rep. Donalds. “Calling into question & diminishing @votetimscott's family story of perseverance from picking cotton to becoming a US Senator isn't journalism, it's bigoted & ignorant.”
Sen. Scott likes to reference the plight of this families southern farm ownership before, during, and after shortly after the turn of the 20th century, and because Scott is going to give the rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, it appears that this was enough reason for the Washington Post to dig into Scott’s claims about his grandfather.
In a tweet promoting his “analysis,” WaPo Author Glenn Kessler writes,” Sen. Tim Scott will give the GOP response to Biden. But there’s more to the story of his grandfather than he tells audiences.”
Donalds takes issue with Kessler's detailed post, where the data the author used was admittingly incomplete and for the most part, unfounded and lacked corroboration.
Who said the report used “unreliable” data?
The author did.
“Wherever possible, we sought to confirm census records with other publicly available information, such as property records. Census data is historically questionable at best — and at times unreliable — when tracking Blacks, particularly in that time in the South where naming practices and lack of vital records require caution in discerning identities.”
While Kessler did not “rate” Scott’s statements about his grandfather during the post's “Pinocchio Test,” Kessler, whose grandfather may have been a member of the Nazi Party, states that Scott’s “family’s early and improbable success gets flattened and written out” of the senator’s biography.
But in the end, all of the hoopla that “there’s more to the story of his grandfather than he tells audiences,” is surrounded around the author’s connection of the “unreliable” data dots where he finds that Scott does not tell audiences that his grandfather later worked on his father's farm.
“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”.
That's it. That's the big deal Washington Post "Fast-checker" story. Scott's grandpa worked on his dad's farm.
your grandfather was an actual Nazi pic.twitter.com/04hHR0uyAI
— Caleb Hull (@CalebJHull) April 23, 2021
