Quick Fact: Beck falsely claims “SEIU” is “number-one visitor to the White House”
Posted in Main Blog (All Posts) on January 8th, 2010 5:46 am by HL
Quick Fact: Beck falsely claims “SEIU” is “number-one visitor to the White House”
On January 7, Glenn Beck falsely suggested that Service Employees International Union (SEIU) president Andy Stern is the “number-one visitor to the White House.” Politifact has rated Beck’s prior claim that Stern was “the most frequent visitor at the White House” as “false.”
From the January 7 broadcast of Premiere Radio Networks’ The Glenn Beck Program:
BECK: Don’t you see how well-orchestrated this is to overwhelm the system. You can’t tell me that organized labor, with as much as they control this country now, that the number-one visitor to the White House and meeting with President Obama is SEIU. And they’re against this, and their case is “we will not be able to afford the Cadillac health tax. We’ll not be able to afford the health plans for these pensions if you pass this.” There shouldn’t be anything else on the agenda. If he’s meeting with President Obama — SEIU and organized labor — they shouldn’t talk about anything else, every time. “You must not pass that. You must not pass that. You must not pass that.”
Fact: SEIU’s Stern is “not the number-one visitor to the White House”
Politifact rated as “false” Beck’s previous claim that SEIU’s Andy Stern was “the most frequent visitor at the White House. In a December 7, 2009, post, Politifact reported:
We found the source of Beck’s claim. When the White House released its first batch of visitor logs on Oct. 30, 2009, as part of a pledge to bring more transparency to the White House, Stern’s name did indeed appear 22 times, more than anyone else listed, including Clinton, who was listed three times.
But that’s not the whole story.
Stern led the pack for the first data release, which covered visits from Jan. 20, 2009 to July 31, 2009. But he was surpassed by several other individuals in the second release, which updates the data through Aug. 31, 2009 (and which was made public more than a week before Beck aired his comment).
Among those who visited more frequently than Stern, according to the combination of the two logs, were Lewis (Lee) Sachs, counselor to Treasury Secetary Timothy Geithner, with 92 visits; associate attorney general Tom Perrelli, with 49; Federal Communications Commission chairman Julius Genachowski with 47; Spencer Overton, principal deputy assistant attorney general, with 38; and Health and Human Services office of health reform director Jeanne Lambrew, with 27. (Stern visited twice more during the period covered by the second batch of data, giving him a total of 24 visits.) [Politifact, [12/7/09]
Stern does not appear in the visitor logs the White House subsequently released on December 30 for the period from September 16 through September 30.
