Lee Fang

Lee Fang is a researcher for The Progress Report, an online publication of the Center for American Progress.

Lee lives in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He has a B.A. in government and politics from the University of Maryland-College Park.

He has worked at Progressive Accountability and as an intern at Media Matters for America. He has also interned for Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones (D-OH), and Westin Rinehart.

In 2005, Fang began working in the communications department at Think Progress.

Characterizations of his work

Fang's work has been described as a "disingenuous smear" and as intellectually dishonest.

Other comments include:

• "Lee Fang’s report is a tissue of lies."

• "Fang doesn’t give a damn about the truth, he cares about creating a plausible narrative that will allow the media to dismiss protesters en masse as a rabble."

• "A goofball left-wing web site called Think Progress seems to have assigned one Lee Fang to the Koch beat, full-time. Judging from his photo on the web site, Fang appears to be a high school student...But give him credit: Fang evidently noticed that the absence of quotation marks in [a story by Eric Lipton in the New York Times about Tim Phillips, the president of Americans for Prosperity] was a problem, so [Fang added quotation marks that were not in the New York Times story]...To be fair to young Mr. Fang, it is possible that in his school they don't get to quotation marks until 12th grade."

• "Next we have this fevered piece, by someone named Lee Fang, titled: 'How John Birch Society Extremism Never Dies: The Fortune Behind Scott Walker's Union-Busting Campaign.' I have no idea who Lee Fang is, but I can tell you this: he was born too late. His paranoid style would have fit beautifully with the John Birch Society, circa 1964. There is no parallel, nowadays, on the right, but you can still find that kind of conspiratorial thinking on the left."

• "Mr. Fang poses as a muckraker exposing a nefarious web of high finance. What is bizarre about this is that he himself lives on the largesse of billionaire liberals. According to SourceWatch (linked above), CAP took in over $28 million in donations from rich liberals (and companies like Wal-Mart) in 2008. These figures dwarf the paltry sums about which Fang pretends to be indignant--$20,000! $300,000! That is no coincidence. The big money in politics these days, especially the big money from the rich, is on the left."

• "[Fang’s] job seems to consist of making wild claims which are momentarily plausible enough to be picked up by ostensibly credible news sources like Paul Krugman, MSNBC, Nancy Pelosi and the DNC."

Tea Parties

One of the jobs assigned to Fang at the Center for American Progress is to write posts saying that some fiscally conservative organizations helped organize the 2009 tea parties and painting the tea party movement in a negative light.

In July 2010, Fang posted a video that "purported to be a collection of clips demonstrating racism at the Tea Parties. Fang later corrected the post to admit that one of the clips he used came from 2006, long before there were any Tea Parties.":

"What he failed to correct was the use of another clip showing a man saying “I’m a proud racist.” This snippet came from a longer clip which shows the man in question being hounded out of a Tea Party event by members who were understandably offended by his Nazi apparel. Even worse, Fang deceptively edited a clip of a man saying 'He’s too black to be President…' Sounds pretty racist until you see the full clip in which the man, who was attending with his black wife, says 'It’s not the color of his skin that troubles me, it’s not the blackness of his skin that troubles me. It’s the blackness inside his heart. He’s a bad guy.' This is the kind of blatantly dishonest scoop Lee Fang consistently produces."

External links

• Biography of Lee Fang
• 2004-2005 annual report of the Center for American Progress
• Lee Fang's blog at Campus Progress

References

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