Media Misfire: The Washington Post targets Sen. Tim Scott

It is a risk to target the first black senator from the South since Reconstruction. That’s what the Washington Post did with its fact-check column on the rags-to-riches story of South Carolina Republican Sen. Tim Scott, titled, “Tim Scott often talks about his grandfather and cotton. There’s much more to the tale.”

Researching land records and Scott’s lineage in a farming family that acquired significant land in the post-Civil War South, the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler concluded: “Scott tells a tidy story packaged for political consumption, but a close look shows how some of his family’s early and improbable success gets flattened and written out of his biography.”