Fake News Comes to Seattle
A network of conservative activists are falsely insisting that the City Council and local media faked a report on homelessness spending. Here’s why it matters.
Frequent readers of this blog know that Forbes magazine will publish just about anyone through their Contributor program, so long as the arguments serve the trickle-down status quo. For years, Forbes hosted the work of a terrible economics commentator named Tim Worstall who published abysmal libertarian blog posts, including one remarkably braindead piece with a typo in the very first word, on a regular basis. Forbes apparently deactivated Worstall’s blog last year, soon after he published a full-throated defense of price-gouging in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.
This week, though, something even worse than Worstall’s typical dreck landed on Forbes. A Forbes Contributor named Roger Valdez published a histrionic piece of agitprop that contained several outright untruths. Valdez is a known figure around town, a conservative who heads up an organization called Seattle for Growth that maintains an anti-tax trickle-down worldview disguised as urbanism.
Headlined “Seattle: A Tax On Jobs, $400 Million, And The Report That Never Was,” Valdez’s post immediately attacks Seattle’s mayor and City Council for “a 5-year long binge of leftist sentimentality.” Then it gets into the titular report.
Valdez spins a super-twisted version of a story that’s been well-documented in Seattle media: respected research firm McKinsey & Company partnered with the Seattle Chamber of Commerce to investigate the real cost of addressing homelessness here in boomtown Seattle. Valdez writes, “It’s hard to nail down who requested McKinsey to figure out how much it would cost to ‘solve’ homelessness in Seattle,” and he quotes a spokesperson as saying the Chamber “did not commission this report.”
Technically, the Chamber spokesperson is right: McKinsey approached the Chamber to form a partnership, not the other way around. But the Chamber absolutely agreed to partner with the research firm. And as I noted, after McKinsey came back with the conclusion that Seattle needs to spend $400 million annually to house and provide services for our outsized homeless population, the Chamber basically pretended those findings didn’t exist.
Eventually, McKinsey did brief the City Council and several other elected officials on their findings, and they released a summary of the report on their site. (This is the “short report” I wrote about earlier this month.) Local media reported on their findings, which were then discussed pretty much everywhere online.
But Valdez’s Forbes piece claimed the McKinsey report never existed. “There was a report, quietly drafted. Very quietly. So quietly it didn’t exist,” Valdez wrote—emphasis mine—later calling it “the phantom report.”
“There never was a report,” he confidently reported in bold and with an actual underline for emphasis.
Valdez wasn’t done there. He attacked the Seattle Times, the Puget Sound Business Journal, and Crosscut for being complicit in spreading the story about this nonexistent report. Valdez, in his Forbes piece, suggests that he’s the brave lone wolf uncovering a massive conspiracy to push fraudulent information through a report that never existed.
Valdez’s story was picked up by local conservative talk radio host Jason Antebi, who writes and performs under the ridiculous stage name “Jason Rantz:”
Antebi aggregated what he called Valdez’s “damning report in Forbes” into a post on MyNorthwest accusing Seattle City Councilmember Lorena González of citing a supposedly nonexistent McKinsey report to support a vote for a head tax.
One problem: Valdez was spreading fake news. There is a McKinsey report. It absolutely exists.
And Councilmember González was briefed on that report, as she confirmed in a Twitter thread on Wednesday night. (Bear with me here—there are a lot of tweets and who-said-what-when explanations in this section, but that’s because it’s often harder to establish the truth than it is to tell a lie.)
And then local media struck back at Valdez’s claims that they were complicit in sharing the “nonexistent report.” Crosscut reporter David Kroman took issue with Valdez editing a comment to make Kroman look shady:
In the Twitter thread, Kroman concludes that Valdez’s column “drags me and others in a national platform without getting its information right and by ignoring/manipulating what I said. That’s a problem.”
The conservative hype machine backpedals
Right around now is when the conservative media machine started handing out corrections like shots at a frat party. Valdez’s original story sprouted an editor’s note at the top…
[EDITOR’S NOTE: Roger Valdez has published a follow-up piece detailing the timelines at issue in this story.]
…and an update at the bottom:
UPDATE: McKinsey has finally released a longer document called The Economics of Homelessness In Seattle and King County that is apparently the “report” cited by the McKinsey spokesperson.
Meanwhile, Antebi hilariously tried to massage the correction that rendered his entire column null and void into a positive development:
Good news: The Seattle City Council communications director has sent me the full report and says CM González received it. I’m looking over the report and it seems to indicate that Valdez’s report is incorrect and should be corrected. Will have an update tomorrow once I review.
The next day, Antebi published a post with a headline accusing Valdez of “Sloppy reporting,” saying Valdez “got a big story wrong and he owes the Seattle City Council an apology.” He goes on to say Valdez was “100 percent wrong.”
Antebi then tried to pivot, parsing González’s tweet to make himself seem like the victim. Valdez, similarly, tried to double down with a new, virtually unreadable Forbes post involving a long timeline and a numbered “litany of facts” before concluding “I stand by my original reporting.” (Yes, the same reporting that Antebi nearly sprained a calf muscle running away from.) It’s all very sordid and dumb.
Finally, who’s to blame?
Look, I realize that this seems like silly stuff—a Twitter-fueled inside-baseball media spat centered around a pair of ridiculous little men who make a living trying to spread the fiction that there’s an invisible silent majority of conservatives in Seattle.
But this does matter. Valdez’s fallacious, error-ridden reporting is now out there in Seattle social media, being quoted as though it were true. With a meaningful assist from Antebi’s credulousness, Valdez has further muddied the water of discourse during one of the most contentious debates in modern Seattle history.
The sad truth is, almost everyone in this story did exactly what they’re supposed to do. Valdez fired off some trickle-down potshots at the establishment. Members of our overworked and underpaid local media parsed fact from fiction. Antebi wedged in some braindead partisan cheerleading and masturbatory self-promotion, like he always does.
But the real problem here is Forbes. Even though Forbes posts a little disclaimer on every one of Valdez’s posts that “Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own,” the fact is that they’re responsible for the untruths that Valdez chooses to publish on their site.
If Valdez had published his dumb “no report” clickbait on his own blog, nobody would have paid any attention to it. It was the Forbes imprimatur that forced legitimate outlets to pay attention to Valdez’s sloppy so-called “reporting.” Forbes lent their legitimacy as one of the last national legacy business news outlets to Valdez, and Valdez used that legitimacy to boost a column that no legitimate news outlet would ever have published, to confuse the conversation about a civic issue of incredible importance.
People are dying on the streets. If Forbes can’t offer anything of substance to this conversation, they should at least refrain from doing harm through a reckless and irresponsible publishing model.
