When I first read this editorial yesterday morning, I thought it was a late April fool’s joke! 

We’ve had a lot of great wins over the past several months, and it seems as though it’s brought out some angst from big government politicians and their allies. 

Tuesday’s Boston Globe ran an extraordinarily uninformed editorial attacking our organization. Major parts of this piece are inaccurate and untrue, both in the description of our position and on the facts pertaining to state campaign finance law. The editorial board never even bothered to contact our organization for clarification or with any questions when writing their opinion piece. 

MassFiscal respects the right of the Globe to reach its own editorial opinions.  Sometimes we agree with them, as we did with their editorial on March 8 urging the Office of Campaign and Political Finance (OCPF) to close the so-called union loophole.  And sometimes we don’t, as with this editorial. 

But opinions have to be based on facts—and this editorial gets its crucial facts objectively wrong in several places. Most glaring was their assertion that our organization advocates for ‘electioneering communications’ to be exempt from financial disclosures. The Globe then used this falsehood to justify a call for the OCPF to take action against us.

This is objectively false. 

In a desire to reach a predetermined conclusion, Tuesday’s editorial breached a red line: it created its own facts.  Even the most cursory fact-check of our letter to OCPF would have confirmed this. Perhaps if they contacted us when writing this editorial, they would have learned this. Far from demanding that electioneering communications be “exempt from any financial disclosure rules,” MassFiscal affirmatively reminded OCPF that such rules are already in place. In fact, we offered a comment letter to OCPF asking them to confirm—consistent with the existing state statute and regulation—that this remains the law.

That the Globe may not have been familiar with the laws cited in our letter does not entitle the Globe to editorialize in ignorance of them. 

Facts matter. And with the Globe’s great influence comes great responsibility. Given the sweeping nature of their editorial against MassFiscal, and the major objective factual errors upon which its conclusion was based, we requested and anticipate a retraction. 

As the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan said, “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts.”