The Shame of Sandy Spending II

Fact-Checkers Issue Falsehoods

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In a two-essay series, I looked back on this tenth anniversary of Superstorm Sandy and the more than $60 billion in special appropriations that followed the weather event. One appropriations bill for about $10 billion went to the National Flood Insurance Program to meet an anticipated increased demand for insurance payments. A second bill for $50.4 billion was ostensibly emergency appropriations for disaster repairs. The first essay reviewed just how little of the appropriations of the second bill 1) fulfilled an emergency need and 2) were allocated for repairs for Sandy and similar disasters.

Emergency spending and disaster repairs were the reasons President Barack Obama gave for requesting the money, to which Congress considered, when it sent legislation to his desk to sign. I urge you to read The Shame of Sandy I (November 4, 2022), to have the full background for this second essay.

This final of the two essays scrutinizes several media outlets purporting to fact check the spending as well as criticism about the size, scope and use of the appropriations.

In a story titled “Was 2013 Hurricane Sandy Relief Package ‘Full of Pork’?” the New York Times reported Sen Ted Cruz (R-TX) remarked, “Two-thirds of that bill had nothing to do with Sandy.” This was a claim the Times would label as false.

The Times also noted a Cruz spokesman referred the newspaper to an analysis by Congressional Quarterly stating $17 billion went to Sandy aid and $33.5 billion for mitigation of “future disasters.” For anyone keeping track of the math, $33.5 billion is 66% of the total of the $50.4 billion disaster relief bill. Hence, this was probably the source of Cruz’s two-thirds claim.

To counter Congressional Quarterly’s analysis and Cruz’s statement, the New York Times made the absurd claim that “preparing for future storms [is] not the same as spending on projects that are entirely unrelated to Sandy.” That statement has no basis in fact. Spending money on events that have not yet occurred exactly fits the criteria of spending money unrelated to Sandy.

In its story, the New York Times also made a patently false claim that every dollar doled out to FEMA, NOAA, Army Corps of Engineers, and other agencies was to be spent as Sandy relief aid. Any decent editor would have asked the reporter, “Exactly when and where is FEMA spending the $11.5 billion it received? Make some calls. This story is not acceptable for publication until you find out.” Apparently, that exchange didn’t happen in the New York Times newsroom.

As addressed in The Shame of Sandy I, billions of those dollars were earmarked for projects unrelated to Sandy, unrelated to disaster relief, and were not an emergency need.

The Times also took issue with comments by Rep Bill Flores (R-TX-17)  that the post-Sandy relief bill “went crazy with it, packing it full of pork.” Flores was off the mark, the paper asserted. The Times made the preposterous claim that all of the money in the legislation was “for emergencies.” What proof did it offer? Believe it or not, its proof was that all money was contained in a bill named “Disaster Relief Appropriations.” If it’s in a bill with that name it must be for disaster relief, the Times reasoned.

The editorial position taken by the New York Times in August 2017 that nearly all of the appropriations were for emergency disaster relief contradicted its own reporting when the bill was being deliberated more than four years earlier in January 2013. Back then, the New York Times acknowledged - with a very lengthy list totaling billions of dollars - that the Disaster Relief bill was littered with pork barrel spending unrelated to Sandy or disaster relief.

About the same time the New York Times was insisting nearly every nickel and dime in the Disaster Relief Act was for emergency disaster relief, the Washington Post falsely claimed “virtually all of it was related to the damage caused by Sandy” (emphasis added).

As pointed out in the Shame of Sandy Spending I, Obama’s own Office of Management and Budget readily acknowledged that only $23.6 billion of the $60.4 billion Obama requested was disaster or emergency spending related. The balance of what Obama requested, $36.8 billion, which Congress eventually whittled down to $27.1 billion, was neither disaster or emergency related and, most certainly, not related to “damage caused by Sandy.”

Even Congress recognized that billions of dollars of money that went to agencies such as FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers were not disaster related. For example, Senator Pat Toomey (R-PA) raised a point-of-order regarding the nearly $5.4 billion that was allocated to the Army Corps of Engineers in the final bill. Toomey observed that “$3.4 billion that is identified for the construction of future mitigation projects” could not considered as emergency or disaster funding and must be treated as discretionary spending under the Budget Control Act of 2011.

That $3.4 billion was stricken from the categories of emergency and disaster funding although it remained in the legislation as discretionary spending. That single allocation represented nearly 7% of the entire bill’s total. There were countless other examples of spending that did not constitute emergency spending and were not disaster funding.

Like the New York Times, the lede in the Washington Post’s purported fact-checking was Senator Ted Cruz was wrong. As will be explained later in this essay, an attempt to discredit Cruz was the primary reason for the Post story.

The Post came up short in its attempt to make the case that criticism that the Disaster Relief bill was filled with pork was untrue. As documented in The Shame of Sandy Spending I, a majority of the bill – approaching or perhaps surpassing two-thirds of the total appropriation – was neither emergency or disaster related.

The Post attempted to buttress its position by citing a Congressional Research Service report. The newspaper implied the CRS confirmed all money would repair “damage caused by Sandy.”

But CRS made no such claim anywhere in the 47-page report. CRS reports to Congress on the legislative history of topics or measures. It does not take an editorial position on the merit of legislation or grade its performance.

In fact, documentation in the CRS report supported an opposite conclusion of what the Post promoted. A straightforward reading of the CRS document and a tabulation of the dollar amounts cited would make it abundantly clear that billions of dollars were spent on other than emergency needs or for disaster repairs.

Table A-1 of the CRS report provides totals of the various categories of spending. Nearly $13 billion was planned for “Mitigation” of future weather events.

As reported in The Shame of Sandy Spending I, even allocations for the “Response and Recovery” category included spending that was not disaster response related. Start adding all these numbers together and it becomes clear the Sandy disaster bill was stuffed with billions of dollars in non-emergency spending unrelated to disaster repairs.

To recap, the Washington Post claimed ““virtually all” of [the Disaster Relief bill] was related to the damage caused by Sandy” (emphasis added). In a ham-handed way, the Post cited a CRS document that listed nearly $13 billion (about 25%) of the $50.4 billion Disaster Relief bill total that was not disaster related. Only fuzzy math would allow the Post to claim that 75% was the same as “virtually all.”

Conclusion: This Washington Post “fact-check” is rated Pants on Fire!

There were other claimed fact-checkers at work that promoted false conclusions that were eerily similar to those of the New York Times and Washington Post. One was Politifact.

Another was USA Today.

You may ask yourself: if information is readily available that confirms a set of facts then why would some media outlets issue unsupported false claims? For one thing, they were counting on their readers to not fact-check their work.

According to one study, 59% of readers will share a story without actually reading it. They see a headline and share that story without even reading the article. Those that actually read some of the story rarely explore the references or web links that supposedly bolster the outlet’s story. Email service Constant Contact claims less than 9% of readers will actually click on a link in an article.

New York Times, Washington Post, Politifact, and other liberal outlets are counting on their gullible readers to accept their false claims at face value despite their sketchy track records of pushing false or debunked information. Examples are provided in the following paragraphs.

But then you may ask: how did these various outlets manage to publish such similar claims? That is easily explained. Many outlets simply copy of the work of others. Literally. They plagiarize even though it’s wrong. Their newsrooms may not fact-check a news story that falls in line with an acceptable narrative because they so desperately want it to be true. So, they copy it and repeat the story no matter how ridiculous or absurd it may be.

They believe there is safety in numbers. If enough similar-minded outlets publish the same false narrative that it will force the public to accept the narrative as true. The 2016 Russian hoax is such an example.

I provided several examples of media outlets copying the work of others in an earlier essay (The Media Echo Chamber, July 10, 2022). In one example, legacy media outlets including New York Times, Washington Post, Time, CNN, NBC News, among many others repeated - as fact - a false story that originated as a “guesstimate” in a 9-year old’s elementary school project.

One outlet was the first to screw up, others copied that work, and the dominoes began to fall, one after another.  All those legacy media outlets repeated one another without fact checking. (Imagine the irony. Fact checkers not fact checking their own stories.) Just think, if only one journalist among them had dared to perform real journalism rather than promote a favored narrative they would have quickly realized they were reporting - as fact - a statistic created in the mind of a 4th grader.

Another example of legacy media outlets copying the work of another occurred after the January 6 rioting on Capitol Hill. Citing “two law enforcement officials,” the New York Times falsely reported Capitol Hill police officer Brian Sicknick was killed after being struck in the head with a fire extinguisher leaving a “bloody gash” that led to him being “rushed to the hospital and [being] placed on life support.” The entire story was false. Sicknick died on January 7th of natural causes. There was no attack with a fire extinguisher, there was no gushing head wound, there was no placement on life support, and there were no law enforcement officials who confirmed the story. The New York Times story was a total lie from beginning to end.

The Associated Press became collateral damage in the Time’s fire extinguisher fib when the wire service implied it independently confirmed the Times report with what the public now knows were non-existent “two law enforcement officials.” When it became apparent the entire story was fabricated the public also learned the Associated Press took a gamble and lost. It repeated a fake story. It’s likely no one would have ever known the AP lied about getting independent confirmation if the Times story was true.

It's worth noting that the reporter who wrote the 2017 New York Times attack piece on Cruz was hired away from Politifact by the Times just weeks earlier. It wouldn’t be unheard if the Times and Politifact were coordinating their stories before they published them.

Okay, now we’ve revealed how these outlets likely got it spectacularly wrong in such similar fashion. Now, let’s explain why these outlets attacked only certain politicians, and why on this occasion.

John Cornyn and Ted Cruz are senators from Texas. Both voted against and were very critical of the bloated 2013 Disaster Relief bill. Both senators called for federal aid after 2015 Memorial Day weekend flooding damaged large parts of Texas. And both called for aid after Hurricane Harvey struck the Lone Star state in 2017. But there were only detailed attacks against Cruz. There was no concerted attempt to criticize Cornyn at the same time. Why the difference?

Let’s dive a little deeper. Cruz called for emergency federal aid after flooding in Texas in 2015. But there wasn’t any Washington Post criticism, no New York Times attack piece, and no Politifact fact-checking. There were no efforts to claim Cruz was a hypocrite two years after voting against the 2013 Disaster Relief Act. Doesn’t that seem odd?

Why were these outlets virtually silent when Cruz called for federal aid in 2015, but chose to raise a ruckus in 2017? The difference between the two years was that Cruz was running for reelection in 2017. He faced a heavily funded opponent in the 2018 election. Robert O’Rourke was a darling of the Times, Post, CNN and other liberal outlets. The 2018 election provided these outlets with the best opportunity to help elect a Democrat to the US Senate from Texas for the first time since 1988. Defeating Ted Cruz would be icing on the cake.

This is a time-worn tactic by activist media outlets: wait until an election or reelection nears before launching an attack. A prominent example was the Access Hollywood video recorded in 2005 that captured Donald Trump behaving in a boorish, degrading and insulting manner. NBC News knew of the existence of the video for months but did not release it until October just weeks before Election Day 2016 when it would have the biggest impact on the election.

This pre-election surprise tactic is the same reason why Politifact levied attacks against Senator Marco Rubio and Governor Ron DeSantis in 2022 on the issue of Superstorm Sandy funding from ten years earlier. Both Rubio and DeSantis were facing reelection fights and Politifact was quietly working to defeat them.

Politifact reported that Rubio voted against the final 2013 Disaster Relief bill, which passed on a 62-36 vote. But Rubio also voted for a smaller appropriation of about half as much money, but that substitute bill was defeated in the Senate by a party-line vote. The smaller bill was not laden with billions in pork barrel spending and appropriations that should have been considered during routine discretionary spending deliberations, as was the $50.4 billion Disaster Relief bill.

When Politifact uses the phrase “missing context” in a fact-check it is often followed by an effort to change a truth into a lie or morph a fib into fact. It depends on whether the person being fact-checked is someone Politifact supports or opposes.

This fact-check of Rubio’s Sandy votes would have been a most appropriate time to use the phrase “missing context.” It could explain Rubio voted against the $50.4 billion bill, but voted in favor of the $24 billion alternative. Instead, Politifact rated the claim that Rubio voted against Hurricane Sandy aid as “mostly true.” In a worst case, Politifact should have rated Rubio’s two votes - one a yes and the other a no - as neutral. It didn’t. It chose political activism instead.

The Washington Post joined the attack against DeSantis in the final weeks before the 2022 general election.

The Washington Post is using an apples-to-oranges comparison by suggesting DeSantis’s role as the chief executive of the Sunshine state is exactly like his role when he was a member of Congress. Of course, that is total nonsense. Each office has different roles, responsibilities and obligations. As governor, DeSantis was not bound by the Budget Control Act of 2011, as were members of Congress in 2012. How federal disaster assistance funds are appropriated are not his responsibility as a sitting governor. To suggest Florida Governor DeSantis had the same fiduciary obligations to federal appropriations as do House and Senate members is ridiculous. But the Washington Post operates in the darkness when it attempts to characterize what the paper thinks democracy should look like.

Media outlets like the New York Times, Washington Post, Politifact and similar minded organizations will continue to target individuals they oppose and provide political cover to those they support. But it is dishonest to issue falsehoods masquerading as fact-checks. Readers should be wary when reviewing their work.

Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, and Parler at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.

His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).