This is WESA Politics, a weekly newsletter by Chris Potter providing analysis about Pittsburgh and state politics. If you want it earlier — we'll deliver it to your inbox on Thursday afternoon — sign up here.
This week WESA and our friends at PublicSource are launching “Spot Check,” our election-season campaign to fact-check the tsunami of murky political claims. The first installment of that feature has been up for a couple hours, and already I hear people asking: “Where are the Pinocchios? How about a little temperature gauge, so we can see quickly whether this stuff is valid?”
The desire to sum up an issue with an easily digestible visual, instead of a wall of text, is powerful. But a preference for easily digestible summaries over nuanced discussion may have gotten our politics in this mess in the first place.
After all, political attacks especially may not traffic in facts, exactly, but they usually at least offer fact-similes — statements that are true on the surface but lead to false assumptions. Meanwhile, fact-checking itself has become weaponized, with candidates using fact-checks of earlier attacks to attack each other all over again. The checks often end up fueling the political food-fight they hoped to transcend.
For proof, you need look no further than the debate over fentanyl in Pennsylvania's marquee U.S. Senate race.
The fentanyl crisis used to be one of the few areas where a bipartisan consensus still held, because when mixed in with other illegal drugs, fentanyl causes more than 100,000 deaths nationwide each year. But fentanyl too became polarized, and it was all but destined to be a lightning rod in the race between Democratic incumbent Bob Casey and Republican challenger Dave McCormick.
Because fentanyl is typically cooked up outside the United States and brought in through Mexico, Republicans nationwide have linked the issue to complaints about a lack of border security during President Joe Biden’s administration. (Though it’s worth noting: Very little fentanyl gets transported by immigrants: It’s generally smuggled through ports, typically by Americans.)
On the other hand, China leads in the production of fentanyl and the ingredients used to make it. So it was maybe no surprise when Casey cited it to raise an issue he was sure to bring up regardless: McCormick’s track record as a former CEO of the hedge fund Bridgewater.
Casey did so with a $644,000 ad buy, according to data compiled by AdImpact, which tracks political spending. “While law enforcement and grieving families see a killer, Dave McCormick saw a way to get even richer” by having his company invest “in China’s biggest fentanyl producer,” a narrator contends.
McCormick fired back with an $819,000 buy in which he addressed the camera directly.” Bob Casey’s lying about me, and I won’t tolerate it,” he said. “I never made any investments in the makers of illegal fentanyl, ever.” He blamed the fentanyl crisis on “weak politicians like Bob Casey [who] left our border wide open.”
There’s no dispute that Bridgewater invested about $1.7 million in Humanwell, a Chinese firm that a Rand Corporation report says accounts for the vast majority of fentanyl produced there. But as McCormick’s insertion of the word “illegal” suggests, fentanyl can also be used legally, much like made-in-the-USA opioids such as OxyContin. Then again, the Rand report also makes clear that enforcement in China isn’t all it could be, so it’s hard to be sure where the fentanyl does come from.
The argument has been thoroughly vetted by various outlets. But while fact-checkers agree on the facts, audiences might well draw different conclusions from their findings.
WPMT-TV in York, for one, concluded that the Casey ad’s “claim is true,” and that while McCormick’s rebuttal “is also true [it] does not address the claim made in the Casey ad.”
Meanwhile, WGAL in Lancaster ruled that the “specific claim that McCormick invested in China's biggest fentanyl producer is true,” while “McCormick’s rebuttal is difficult to fact-check” because of the difficulty of proving no fentanyl products ever ended up here.
Arguably, it’s unfair to burden McCormick with proving a negative: where the fentanyl doesn’t come from. Luckily for him, however, a Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial flatly asserts that “Humanwell is not involved in [the illegal] supply chain in any way,” and that Casey should feel “shame” for suggesting otherwise.
The editorial also raised a counterpoint first reported by a Philadelphia Inquirer story about the debate and seized on by multiple conservative outlets: A mutual fund Casey is invested in has a stake in Humanwell, alongside many other firms.
As you’d expect, the McCormick campaign blasted out the favorable parts of such coverage, including McCormick’s own assertion that Casey “has put his own hypocrisy and lies on display.”
Or not. Jordan Libowitz, a spokesperson for the left-leaning Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, argues that “at the crux of the issue is a difference between active and passive investments” — the ones undertaken by the company you run versus the ones undertaken by a firm you are passively invested in. (And if Bridgewater’s investment in Humanwell was tiny, given the hedge fund’s size, Casey’s is minuscule: Libowitz estimates it couldn’t be more than $70, while the Casey campaign cites an Inquirer calculation that sets it at just 3 cents.)
In any case, investing in mutual funds “is a safe way for an official to have investments that doesn’t create a potential ethics problem,” said Kedric Payne of the Campaign Legal Center. “The holdings in a mutual fund are so diversified and widely held that any action you take as an official wouldn’t have a substantial benefit.”
Even if Casey wanted to drop the investment, Payne said, “I don’t know if that’s possible. And if you could do it, that would be a problem” because it would open the door back up to letting officials mix their public roles and their private holdings.
Coverage of the debate so far has mostly omitted that concern. So all this fact-checking may leave some with the impression that Casey is a hypocrite — precisely because of investments he made ethically. Which seems ironic!
All of which goes to show: Facts speak for themselves, but no fact-check is likely to be the last word. What a feature like Spot Check can do is help inform the debate.
