Topic: Newsmax
NewsMax heavily promoted Peter Schweizer's book "Do As I Say (Not As I Do): Profiles in Liberal Hypocrisy," even offering special deals on it through its online store. Among the lead claims in that book -- teased in NewsMax's promotional materials as well as several other NewsMax articles, most recently a Nov. 1 article by Jim Meyers -- is that House Speaker-designate Nancy Pelosi supports unions, but the vineyard she owns employs non-union help.
Turns out there's a lot more to that story that Schweizer and NewsMax hasn't told anyone.
Think Progress reports that a San Francisco TV station looked into Schweizer's claim and found some interesting things:
- Pelosi treats her workers better than unionized vineyard workers, offering them higher-than-union wages.
- Pelosi is prohibited by law from helping her workers unionize. A United Farm Workers Union representative explains: “It is patently illegal for any grower to even discuss a union contract, which is the only way you can supply union workers, without the workers first having voted in a state conducted secret ballot election.”
Even more interesting (and hilarious), Schweizer defends his lazy reporting: “It’s not my responsibility to go and find out how every single particular circumstance is handled on the Pelosi vineyard.”
Any chance NewsMax will tell its readers the whole Pelosi story? Don't count on it.
But NewsMax isn't the only ConWeb sector that needs to clarify the record (and probably won't): three WorldNetDaily articles promoting Schweizer's book and two columns by Joseph Farah repeated the highly misleading claim.
