Shockingly, Left-Wing Report Makes It Into Washington Post With Little Fact-Checking, and Rife With Errors

@johnekdahl sends this along, noting that it's one of my pet peeves. While, for example, that Pennsylvania AG case will be ignored by the national press (as the Gosnell case was ignored as a "local crime story"), all the left has to do is get one of its many house organs to type up a largely false and misleading report, send it over to one of the country's allegedly "mainstream" media outfits, and wait for its claims to be endlessly retransmitted throughout the country.

Powerline notes that a left-wing organization wrote up a report claiming that the Koch Brothers stood to benefit greatly from their operation of tar-sands operations in Alberta.

There are numerous problems with the claims made. The report claims, falsely, that the Koch Brothers are the largest leaseholders of Canada's tar sands. That's simply false. Apparently the article compares their holdings to Exxon and Conoco and Chevron but fails to check for other leaseholders -- other companies own more.

They then assume that companies with the most acreage of leaseholds must be producing the most oil -- which is false. The Koch Brothers' holdings are in fact largely non-productive. Despite their acreage of leaseholds, they're a "negligible" producer as far as actual extraction of oil.

But the last misleading claim made is that the Koch Brothers stand to make a windfall from the Keystone XL pipeline. This not only isn't true, but it's admitted as not being true in the left-wing organization's own report:

The astonishing thing about the IFG report is that it admitted that the Keystone Pipeline will damage Koch’s economic interests. Keystone would funnel Canadian oil to the Midwest, thereby driving down oil prices in that region. The original IFG report admitted that this would cost Koch $120 billion! Now, that is a stupid number based on a 50-year projection. But still, the basic point is correct: the Keystone Pipeline would hurt Koch Enterprises economically, which is why Koch has never come out in favor of the pipeline or lobbied on its behalf.

The IFG report hypothesized that despite this $120 billion hit, Koch would come out ahead in the long run–the very long run!–by selling two million acres worth of Alberta oil. Just one small problem: they forgot to consider the fact that the size of the Keystone Pipeline, 830,000 barrels per day, limits the speed with which Koch can recoup its $120 billion loss. As I calculated in my post, it would take 476 years for Koch to break even, using IFG’s own numbers.

So why make all these claims?

Because the Democratic Party has a lot invested in the proposition that the Koch Brothers are boogeymen and the Keystone Pipeline is their boogey-baby.

In the pages of the "mainstream" media press, the truth is whatever the Democratic Party needs it to be for this particular two-minute hate.

And there's some Democratic operative/media incestuousness here too, of course. Click over to Powerline for that.

posted by Ace at 02:12 PM

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