Bill Press described my 2009 book Obamanomics as “a searing indictment from the Left” of our current a president in his new book, and then one chapter later, derided me as a “right-wing” prostitute for the Koch brothers. But more embarrassing for Press — and more amazing to me — he filled his attack on me with factual errors because he relied for his information on one of the Center for American Progess’s serial fabulists.
So, I write this not to pick on Bill Press, whom I remember from his CNN days (while I was working for Bob Novak) as an unusually kind person, but just as a reminder of what happens when authors rely on sources like CAP.
When a CAP blogger wrote false stuff about my speech at a Koch-organized dinner in Aspen in 2010, I let it go, because it was a blogger with a history of writing unhinged stuff. When WorldNetDaily ran an article headlined “Soy is making kids ‘gay’,” no serious liberal journalist went out to “debunk” this silliness — and no major publishing house would have run a book citing the article as a source.
I just assumed that liberals understood that the Center for American Progress was there for employing Democratic operatives before and after they work for a Democratic administration, and also to roll out silly election-year propaganda into the political debate (like the 2010 line that China was funding the GOP through the U.S. Chamber of Commerce). I didn’t think liberals would actually cite ThinkProgress as if it were a reputable well of facts.
But Bill Press did.
Here are the factual errors about me that Bill Press made in his book, all of which he seems to have picked up from one ThinkProgess blogger:
· When I spoke at the Koch-organized dinner in Colorado, Press claims I was “flown there first class.” This is sort of a gratuitous little claim, and so it may seem petty to refute it, but no, I flew coach.
· Press writes that I was “paid a fat speaking fee.” That’s false. I got no speaking fee.
· Press cites ThinkProgress to claim I received a grant from the “Koch-funded ISI Enterprise Award.” That’s false. There is no such award. My first book, The Big Ripoff, won ISI’s “Templeton Enterprise Award,” so-named because it was funded by the Templeton Foundation, not the Kochs. ThinkProgess’s blogger had tweaked the name, misleading poor Bill Press.
· Press cites ThinkProgress’s statement that I won a fellowship from the “Koch-funded Phillips Foundation.” But if Press had followed the links ThinkProgress provided to supposedly back this up, he would have seen that the Kochs first funded the program three and a half years after I won the fellowship, and more than 16 months after I completed the fellowship.
· Press cites ThinkProgress’s report that I “once served as a paid fellow at the Koch-funded Competitive Enterprise Institute.” CEI awarded me the fellowship in 2005, five-and-a-half years after the last gift from the Kochs, according to TP’s data.
By my count that’s three outright factual errors, and two egregiously misleading claims that Press picked up from ThinkProgess and put in a book — under his own name. Those are just the errors about me in half of a page. I would hate to see a fact-check on the rest of Press’s book, especially if he regularly relied on the Center for American Progress.
