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June 16, 2009 03:37 AM UTC

A Belabored Point Too Far With Adam Schrager

  • 10 Comments
  • by: Colorado Pols

We blinked at the latest 9NEWS “Truth Test” with political reporter Adam Schrager, normally a source of solid and impartial fact-checking for political ads:

The following is a Truth Test on a commercial called “Against Us” and it is paid for by the United Food and Commercial Workers Union Local No. 7.

The union represents 17,000 grocery workers at King Soopers, Albertson’s and Safeway stores throughout Colorado. (Source: UFCW, http://www.ufcw7.org/) The union is currently involved in contract negotiations with all three grocery chains. (Source: 9NEWS.com, http://www.9news.com/rss/artic…

QUOTE: Seen the news lately? More corporate bailouts. CEO’s still making millions.

TRUTH: There are a couple points here which could use some context. The government’s recent decision to help Chrysler and General Motors as the giant automakers filed for bankruptcy has been labeled by some as a “bailout,” but there’s been no connection to government help for any of the grocery stores. None at all and to put that in a commercial dealing with grocery workers is disingenuous…

Sounds fair enough, until you keep reading–on the subject of the grocery business’ profitability in the current recession:

QUOTE: And the big national grocery chains? They’re making millions too.

Truth: This is true. While net profits have been down overall from 2008 to 2009, Safeway posted first quarter profits…

The Albertson stores in Colorado, northern California, Florida and Texas are owned by a New York-based investment firm called Cerberus Management. [Pols emphasis] It is not publically traded…

Wait a minute. Cerberus Capital Management, right? Cerberus owns Albertsons? That wouldn’t be the same Cerberus Capital Management that just lost its ownership of Chrysler after burning through a few billion ‘non-bailout’ taxpayer dollars, would it? Kind of makes the original point, the one Schrager called ‘disingenuous,’ seem all the more compelling–don’t you think?

We don’t even really think that auto industry Fed assistance was exclusively what this ad was talking about with “more corporate bailouts,” but damn. Minimal cross-referencing of facts, dear readers, is worth the effort, if for no other reason than to avoid getting things this ironically wrong.

Comments

10 thoughts on “A Belabored Point Too Far With Adam Schrager

  1. Schrager will correct this, I have to believe that because he is a straight-shooting guy. I’d say he just lost track of a very, very important fact while gleefully writing in “the zone.”

    But yeah, gotta agree with Pols…damn. Couldn’t have gotten this more ironically wrong.

  2. I appreciate your interest in the story and without question, I was not nearly as clear as I could have been in my writing. JeffCo Blue is kind to attribute it to “the zone,” I’d argue I needed to do a better job linking Cerberus to both Chrysler and Albertson’s. That point was not clear at all.

    That said, to the greater point, I did speak with the people behind the commercial and I don’t think the point I was making is off at all. They told me they were clearly referring to public frustration with bailouts of the auto industry and the banking industry and not that it matters, but they knew what I was writing and didn’t take issue with it.

    The bailout money for Chrysler was spent on Chrysler and not on Albertson’s operations. You’ve made an apples to oranges comparison. Unless you know the money was spent outside of helping Chrysler, is the point I made wrong? Again, I certainly didn’t clearly lay out Cerberus’s ownership of both businesses as well as I should have, but the point made about grocery stores not asking for government help was not ironic nor in error.

    Thanks again for the feedback.

    Adam Schrager

    1. We weren’t so much concerned with whether or not bailout money had been paid expressly to fund grocery store operations. The point, even if unintentional on the part of the people behind the ad, is that a company very much involved in the auto industry “bailout” also owns one of the parties to the grocery store labor dispute.

      In that context, it doesn’t really matter if the money Cerberus got from the government directly helped their Albertson’s business, in fact given the profitability of grocery stores we doubt it did. The fact is, Cerberus is a privately-held company and there’s no transparency to really know. Either way, attacking the ad as “disingenuous” for making that basic link, when as it turns out the link is a hell of a lot more direct than most people probably knew before you explained that detail to your readers, without actually making the connection yourself is–you have to admit–pretty ironic.

      With that said, we think you do great work overall. This should be considered constructive criticism, only offered in the first place because we’re suckers for, well, irony.

      1. Had Cerberus been bankrupted by Chrysler, they would have had to liquidate Albertson’s.

        To not connect the two would be like denying that social security and the Iraq war both contribute to the deficit because they have two totally different purposes, funding streams, and departmental authority. They are both wholly-owned subsidiaries of the federal government.

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