Power Line vs. ThinkProgress: A Scorecard

Last spring, it became apparent that the Left had decided to create a distraction by demonizing Charles and David Koch and their company, Koch Industries. A series of crazed attacks on the Koch brothers appeared, most of them originating at ThinkProgress, an Obama administration mouthpiece headed by John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s transition team. Several of these attacks by ThinkProgress–TP for short–were picked up by the New York Times, the Washington Post and other ostensibly mainstream outlets.

The Left’s attacks on the brothers contained the merest kernel of truth–they are rich and they support a number of conservative and libertarian causes. Beyond that, pretty much everything that emanated from TP and its cohorts was a lie. In a series of posts, we undertook the Augean task of correcting some, at least, of the countless errors and lies propagated by TP and others. Other conservatives also joined in, and after a while the Left, apparently embarrassed by the hammering it was taking, quietly dropped the Kochs and went on to other diversions. To be sure, their names still pop up here and there, but it appears that the Left’s concerted effort to demonize them is over, at least for now.

A reader undertook to compile some of TP’s errors and lies, with links both to their original stories and to the refutations that appeared on this site, and others. The compilation, titled “CAP Error and Dishonesty Tracker,” is interactive, and we have set up a Power Line page to host it. You can go here to check it out. This screen shot that shows what it looks like:

The compilation is not yet complete; for one thing, it doesn’t include Contango Confusion, one of the most fun things I’ve ever written. It represents, I think, the moment when the Left decided that its obsession with the Koch brothers was making it look idiotic. We will have to fill in that gap and a few others over the coming weeks.

In the meantime, the Error and Dishonesty Tracker reveals how shameless TP and similar left-wing web sites are. Out of all of the blatant lies and errors in which we and others have caught TP, that site has made only a single correction. That is a testament to the sorry state of liberal “journalism” on the internet.

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