Earlier this week, the Washington Free Beacon unearthed and shared previously unreported documents contradicting a staple claim in Elizabeth Warren’s stump speech. The documents, from 1971 meetings of the Riverdale Board of Education, contradict Warren’s claim that she was fired from a teaching job for being pregnant. The documents show that she received a contract extension for her teaching job, from which she resigned two months later.
In an election challenging Donald Trump, a man whom I can most generously describe as having a tenuous relationship with the truth, Warren’s apparently false claim isn’t the world’s largest scandal, or even the worst of the Democratic primary so far. Although in recent years Warren has claimed that she was fired from her speech pathology job for being visibly pregnant, we could write it off as a standard politician’s lie. Or perhaps there’s some other evidence out there providing an explanation. (If only there were an industry responsible for sending people to report on the accounts of people who knew Warren or her employers at the time!)
But the Warren campaign refused comment to the Free Beacon. She has since received a soft treatment from CBS News, which made Warren’s denial the center of the story, not the glaring and continued inconsistency between her recollection and the official government documents.
I asked why the Warren campaign didn’t respond to inquiries from the Washington Free Beacon…https://t.co/im1Co60ER6 ..
though it did cooperate with CBS News: https://t.co/FBTQwzhwFS Hayden said: “We were already working with CBS before the Free Beacon reached out.”— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) October 8, 2019
A potential white lie then becomes a scandal in earnest, right? A politician punting an actual piece of investigative journalism and refusing to elucidate in a matter than constitutes doubling down on a fishy tale is an actual story, one that the media has haphazardly prodded. But that hasn’t stopped the Left from following the Trump playbook: Deem everything you don’t like Fake News!
This is wild stuff. The Free Beacon, a publication with zero editorial standards, makes some shit up and now it’s an Official Controversy. pic.twitter.com/2f79LYPKD7
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 9, 2019
So according to Matthew Yglesias, multiple official government documents directly contradicting Warren’s claims made in audio and video recordings — which, mind you, also contradict her other recollections of the same story — constitute the Beacon “mak[ing] some shit up.” Got it. Maybe next Yglesias will call them the “enemies of the people” for good measure.
Writing off credible reporting from outlets that happen to hire conservative commentators and journalists just follows the pattern the Left has used for years to protect their chosen candidates. It’s the playbook that they’ve used to write off the dozens of government documents that indicate that Ilhan Omar entered a sham marriage while still in a real relationship with someone else, and it’s the same they used to pretend that Warren’s lies about her phony Native American heritage really just amount to a vast right-wing conspiracy theory.
If only our firefighting journalists would stand up to defend such dishonest attacks on the Free Beacon and the free press.
