I discussed in an earlier post how this newspaper’s ‘Fact Checker’ section showed an egregious example of deception in giving Bernie Sanders’s accurate statement about health care bankruptcies three Pinocchios. But that is not the only case. The Sanders campaign has demanded the retraction of that statement plus two other false assertions made by it.

On June 27th, the Washington Post published a “fact check” story by Glenn Kessler about Senator Sanders correctly stating that “millions of Americans are forced to work two or three jobs just to survive.” Kessler asserted that the claim was “misleading” even though he admitted “Bureau of Labor Statistics data shows that nearly 8 million people hold more than one job.” To be clear: 8 million Americans are accurately described by Senator Sanders as “millions of Americans” — and yet Kessler’s false assertion that this statement of fact was “misleading” was never retracted or corrected by the Washington Post.

Similarly, on June 28th, the Washington Post published another “fact check” by Mr. Kessler about Senator Sanders correctly stating that three people own more wealth than the bottom half of the country. Kessler acknowledged that Senator Sanders’ statement was “based on numbers that add up.” However, he then asserted that because “people in the bottom half have essentially no wealth” the “comparison is not especially meaningful” — which is not merely subjective and tendentious, but also totally inaccurate. The fact that three people own so much wealth while tens of millions have absolutely no wealth is especially meaningful to working class Americans who are struggling to make ends meet.

It is astounding that Kessler can say that because “people in the bottom half have essentially no wealth” the “comparison is not especially meaningful”. Why not? Zero is as meaningful a number as any other, so people with no wealth have every right to be counted. What Kessler’s statement shows is not only that “this latest Fact Checker article is part of a much broader pattern of bias against Senator Sanders” but that he and his newspaper think that people who have no wealth don’t matter and thus are not worth counting. This shows how they see things through the prism of the interests of the oligarchy.