Bogus Fact Checks on Suburban Zoning Issue
1st September 2020
Although a small army of media fact-checkers claim otherwise, Joe Biden wants to end single-family zoning in America’s suburbs. On the first night Republican National Convention, Patricia McClosky said that Joe Biden and the radicals now running the Democratic Party “want to abolish the suburbs altogether by ending single-family home zoning.” McCloskey’s claim set off a frenzy of media fact-checks, all insisting that it just isn’t so. Nonetheless, McCloskey had it right.
The most egregiously mistaken McCloskey fact check was also the most widely disseminated. Thomas Beaumont’s fact check for the Associated Press was, like many other AP stories, reposted and reprinted at scores of local news outlets. Yet this supposed fact check was utterly confused and thoroughly mistaken. According to Beaumont, “Biden does not propose banishing single-family homes.” Or again, “[Biden] does not support requiring municipalities to refrain from building single-family homes as a condition for getting money from HUD — the heart of the distorted claims by Trump and the McCloskeys.”