The Washington Post ran to the defense of Pete Buttigieg after he declared that some roads and bridges were constructed with racism in mind.
We posted on Buttigeig’s comments here.
Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler was asked to weigh in on the topic and he quickly began quoting an author who made the same claims as Buttigieg:
This is detailed at length in Robert Caro's Pulitzer Prize-winning book on Robert Moses, "The Power Broker." See especially pages 318-319: "He began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low — too low for buses to pass."… https://t.co/QmgpxU6Lag
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) November 8, 2021
…"Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouraging long and arduous. For Negroes, who he considered inherently 'dirty,' there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups …."
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) November 8, 2021
"…found it very difficult to obtain permits, especially to Moses's beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted off to parks many miles further on Long Island." There's much, much more. Easily one of the best nonfiction books ever written. https://t.co/vV0MWKxJRX
— Glenn Kessler (@GlennKesslerWP) November 8, 2021
Well as it turns out, the account from this book that Kessler used to defend Buttigieg had been largely debunked, and experts were quick to let him know this:
FOX NEWS – The Washington Post admitted Wednesday it was wrong to do a knee-jerk defense of Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg’s recent comment about racist highways and bridges.
“We should be more careful to double-check on the latest views of historians,” Washington Post fact-checker Glenn Kessler wrote.
But Kessler got cold feet, publishing a story on Wednesday declaring he jumped the gun after multiple historians reached out to him.
“Well, our knee jerked,” he wrote, noting that associate professor of history at Case Western University Peter Shulman informed the Post the tale from Caro’s book was “largely debunked.”
Kessler then decided to “dig a little bit deeper” and get to the bottom of the story he previously defended. The Post’s fact-checker went into a lengthy history of Robert Moses, the famed builder who spent most of the 1900s creating the infrastructure of New York City and its surrounding areas who is the key figure in Caro’s book.
Kessler figured out the only source used in the 1974 book for the story parroted by Buttigieg 47 years later died two years before the book was even published and many experts feel the claim was exaggerated.
“There has been some revisionism and Moses’s achievements are now viewed in a better light. In particular, the anecdote about the parkway bridges has been increasingly questioned, along with other details in Caro’s book,” Kessler wrote.
One historian told the Post that “Moses did nothing different on Long Island from any parks commissioner in the country” because all parkways had low bridges at the time.
“Caro is wrong,” a separate historian emailed to the Post, noting anyone could access the beach.
Other historians disagree in the polarizing tale, but the Post’s in-house fact-checker feels “The Bottom Line” is that the liberal newspaper shouldn’t have been so quick to defend Buttigieg.
“Obviously this cannot be easily resolved. Caro quotes one of Moses’s top aides as saying the height of the bridges was done for racist reasons, but increasingly that story has been questioned as not credible,” Kessler wrote. “Buttigieg should tailor his remarks to reflect what is historically unimpeachable — and we should be more careful to double-check on the latest views of historians. Even a Pulitzer Prize-winning book is not always the last word on a subject.”
It’s good of Kessler to admit that he jumped the gun and got this wrong. But none of us are surprised that this happened. There’s almost always a rush to defend Democrats or ignore them completely when they say absurd things. But with Republicans…well, you know.