Politico's latest hit job on Elizabeth Warren is an embarrassment and doesn't bode well for the rest of the campaign

Anyone who covers politics knows that employees of a company contributing money to a politician’s campaign is not the same thing as the company giving to the politician. (And indeed, companies can’t give directly to campaigns.) The keen minds over at Politico definitely know this—but they elected to pretend they don’t in order to smearSen. Elizabeth Warren.

The headline: “Warren took tech’s money while ripping its biggest players.” The lede: “While Sen. Elizabeth Warren was railing against big tech companies, she was taking their money—plenty of it.”

The fact behind that incendiary framing: Warren got $90,000 in itemized (over $200) contributions from employees of Amazon, Facebook, and Google over her seven years campaigning for and in the Senate. To put that in context, that’s $90,000 over seven years from employees of companies with, combined, nearly 750,000 employees in 2018. Even if you don’t understand that the interests of workers and the interests of their employers are sometimes at odds—that workers may want laws that would change how their bosses do business—the numbers here make this a completely ridiculous hook for a news story.

Breaking! Employees of three major tech companies averaged contribution of entire pennies to prominent politician.

But of course, workers do sometimes—often, even—support different policies than their bosses. Also, voters may support a politician because they agree with three out of four of her positions despite disagreeing on the fourth. That too is a thing that happens.

What’s interesting here is Politico’s commitment, even at risk of embarrassing itself with this ludicrous story hook, to trashing Warren. Don’t forget that this is the very same publication that went after her right out of the gate with a “but is she likable” story. Whether Politico is coming up with this nonsense itself or allowing itself to be used to launder attacks on Warren is sort of irrelevant. The point is that when a publication that definitely knows better on the merits is willing to run something this outrageously stupid this early, it’s telling you loud and clear where it stands and how to read its future coverage.