Did Sanders Lie About
Clinton’s Oil Money? NPR Factchecker Can’t Be Bothered to Check
When media outlets check the
facts, it’s supposed to be in the first sense Google‘s dictionary offers
for the word “check” :
1. examine (something) in
order to determine its accuracy….
But sometimes media seem more
intent on carrying out the second meaning of the word:
2. stop or slow down the
progress of (something undesirable).
That’s the approach that NPR‘s
Peter Overby (4/1/16) seemed to take when he wrote a “factcheck” about a
controversy involving Hillary Clinton and fossil fuel money. Online, NPR
displayed a video clip of an encounter between Hillary Clinton and a Greenpeace
activist:
The activist, Eva
Resnick-Day, says: “Thank you for tackling climate change. Will you act on your
words and reject future fossil fuel money in your campaign?” To which Clinton
responds:
I do not have—I have money
from people who work for fossil fuel companies. I’m so sick. I’m so sick of the
Sanders’ campaign lying about me. I’m sick of it.
Resnick-Day, who says
she was “genuinely shocked” by Clinton’s response, states she is “in no way
affiliated with the Sanders campaign.” NPR‘s Overby does quote Sanders
spokesperson Michael Briggs, though—with Overby characterizing the quote as the
Sanders campaign taking the opportunity “to pounce on Clinton”:
The truth is that Secretary
Clinton has relied heavily on funds from lobbyists working for the oil, gas and
coal industry.
So the factchecker’s job is to
determine whether Clinton is right to say that she just gets money from people
who work for fossil fuel companies, and that the Sanders campaign is lying
about this, or whether the Sanders campaign is actually correct in saying that
she relies heavily on funds from fossil-fuel lobbyists—right?
See, that’s why you don’t have
a job at NPR.
Overby’s job, as he interprets
it, is just to confirm that Clinton was indeed accurate in saying she accepts
money from people who work for fossil-fuel companies:
The Center for Responsive
Politics, parsing Federal Election Commission reports, finds that workers in the oil
and gas industries have given Clinton $307,561 so far — compared to, say,
$21 million from the securities and investment industry, or $14.4 million from
lawyers and law firms.
Put another way, the oil and
gas money is two-tenths of 1 percent of Clinton’s $159.9 million overall
fundraising.
If there’s an “implication
that dirty energy has got her on a string,” Overby observes, “campaign finance
data suggest it wouldn’t be much of a string.”
But what about “lobbyists
working for the oil, gas and coal industry”—isn’t that what Sanders is supposed
to be lying about, to the point of making Hillary Clinton sick? To give him
credit, Overby is good enough to tell us what he isn’t telling us:
The industry total here
doesn’t include lobbyists with fossil-fuel clients, and it doesn’t do what the
Republican opposition research group America Rising did: include corporate money
to the Clinton Foundation. The presidential campaign cannot raise corporate
money.
Well—why not include lobbyists
with fossil-fuel clients, since that is what the Sanders campaign, like other critics, was explicitly talking about? According to Greenpeace, Clinton has gotten “$1,465,610 in
bundled and direct donations from lobbyists currently registered as lobbying
for the fossil
fuel industry.” That’s quite a bit more string.
And corporations can’t give
directly to campaigns, but they can give to Super PACs that support campaigns.
Greenpeace cites “$3,250,000 in donations from large donors connected to the
fossil fuel industry to Priorities Action USA, a Super PAC supporting Secretary
Clinton’s campaign.”
That works out to $5 million
altogether. It’s hard to say what the going rate for buying a presidential
candidate is, but unlike Overby, I wouldn’t refer to Clinton’s
fossil-fuel-industry contributions as “paltry.”
And even though Overby warns
you away from looking at the Clinton Foundation—because it’s the sort of thing
a “Republican opposition research group” would do—you don’t
need to go to a middleman; the Clinton Foundation lists its donors on its website.
There you can learn that the Foundation has received at least $10 million from
Saudi Arabia; at least $5 million from Kuwait, as well as from oil-refining
billionaire Mohammed H. Al-Amoudi; at least $1 million from ExxonMobil,
natural gas-producer Cheniere Energy, Qatar, Oman, United Arab Emirates, the
Dubai Foundation, “Friends of Saudi Arabia,” etc.
Those are the facts. NPR did
its best to stop or slow them down.
Jim Naureckas is the editor of
FAIR.org. You can follow him
on Twitter: @JNaureckas.
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