Bernie Sanders gets it right on WalmartIt doesn't happen often. But when we fact-check an eye-popping claim and it turns out to be accurate, we award a coveted Geppetto Checkmark...
| |  | | Democracy Dies in Darkness | | | | | | | | | | The truth behind the rhetoric | | | | | | Bernie Sanders gets it right on Walmart It doesn't happen often. But when we fact-check an eye-popping claim and it turns out to be accurate, we award a coveted Geppetto Checkmark instead of Pinocchios. It happened this week with a claim from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), the past and present presidential candidate. He tweeted, "The Walton family makes more money in one minute than Walmart workers do in an entire year." His claim is accurate no matter which reasonable metric you use. Assuming a 40-hour work week, cashiers at Walmart earn $20,738 a year, for example, and sales associates make $21,632. An entry-level worker earns $22,880 a year, according to Walmart's own numbers. The Walton family controls 51.11 percent of Walmart stock, and they make $25,149 a minute in dividends, also assuming a 40-hour work week. (Stock gains, by the way, are taxed at a lower rate than income.) Sanders's math adds up. He makes a revealing point. He gets a Geppetto Checkmark. |  | | Enjoy this newsletter? Forward it to someone else who'd like it! If this e-mail was forwarded to you, sign up here, for the weekly newsletter. Hear something fact-checkable? Send it here, we'll check it out. Stephen Miller gets Four Pinocchios President Trump's senior adviser on immigration went on "Fox News Sunday" and claimed that "we've had thousands of Americans die year after year after year because of threats crossing our southern border." But there is no evidence these claims are true. In fact, the available evidence suggests they're false. Regular readers probably have become accustomed to seeing us write about the Trump administration's loose relationship with the facts when it comes to immigration, crime and the southern border. Administration officials may not like the mountain of research and studies showing that immigrants of all kinds — legal or undocumented — commit crimes at lower rates than the native-born population. But that's no excuse to peddle fictions. In this case, Miller claimed thousands of people were killed on a yearly basis because of "threats" coming through the southern border. Hard data to judge these claims are hard to come by because states and federal agencies generally do not keep track of prisoners by their immigration status. But looking at Texas, which does keep track of prisoners by immigration status, and some other studies shows there's nothing supporting Miller's claim about "thousands" of murders. He earns Four Pinocchios. | | | Fake fact checkers With so much misinformation, propaganda and conspiracy theorizing on the Internet, we're not surprised to see this insidious new form of deception: Impostors posing as fact-checkers. It happened in Brazil, it happened in Sweden, and "Belgian debunking site Lead Stories was also targeted over the summer by a marketing site that ripped off more than 7,000 of its articles," according to a handy rundown by Poynter. "Brazilian fact-checker Aos Fatos published an investigation about a fake news website that had ripped off its brand to publish bogus content," Poynter's Daniel Funke wrote. "Instead of AosFatos.org, the network published to AosFatos.com." The real AosFatos later discovered "a link between the original hoax site and a bigger network of fake news websites — one of which was the subject of a federal investigation." We're always looking for fact-check suggestions. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | |
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