Image Source: Chicago Pennant Company – George Mason University Archives – CC BY-SA 4.0

In researching a story for FAIR last month, I was reminded of a fast-forgotten scandal. It didn’t make sense to include the scandal in that story, but it’s worth recounting, if only because it provides a tiny window into the cornucopia of corruption that defines 21st-century America.

Not only has this scandal long since been forgotten, but the offender still has a prominent institute named after him, ensuring he’ll be remembered long after the rest of us. Here is how the game is played.

Quote someone else

I started reading the Washington Post two decades ago when I moved to DC. And among my earliest observations was that the Post must really like this fellow named Stephen Fuller, since he was constantly being quoted.

Turns out I wasn’t the only one who noticed — so had higher-ups at the Post, who quietly sought to curtail Fuller’s innumerable quotes. The Post mentioned this in passing in a 2015 story marking Fuller’s semi-retirement.

After noting that Fuller had been cited or quoted “in nearly every article about the DC-area economy over the past two decades,” the Post wrote: “At one point, his voice became so ubiquitous that Washington Post reporters were discouraged from quoting him, in hopes that they would find fresh analysts.”

Notwithstanding this guidance, Post reporters still found it hard to quit Fuller, as he always knew just the right thing to say. That Fuller’s views usually dovetailed neatly with the interests of developers only added to his appeal for the Post, a paper that has long sided with local elites.

Despite Fuller’s coziness with power, his quotes came cloaked in academic objectivity, owing to his dual titles as an economics professor at George Mason University and leader of the school’s Center for Regional Analysis. In 2017, the university bumped up his title, creating the Stephen S. Fuller Institute.

‘I didn’t sell out’

It took many years, but Fuller was finally dethroned in 2019 — by none other than the Post.

The Post’s reporting was all the more impressive in light of who Fuller’s secret dance partner was — Amazon, the company founded by Post owner Jeff Bezos.

Here are the opening lines of the Post’s 2019 story by Dalton Bennett and Robert McCartney:

A........

© CounterPunch