Alana Goodman at the Washington Free Beacon showed three national news outlets easily "repeated without scrutiny" Gov. Tim Walz claiming he was in Hong Kong when the Tiananmen Square protests broke out in Beijing. Minnesota Public Radio discovered Walz was not in China at that time.
The Walz campaign "was unable to produce documentation to back up Walz’s statement that he was there during the uprising."
Deep in its online story, MPR explained that contemporaneous news reports showed Walz touring a National Guard storeroom in Alliance, Nebraska, in May 1989. They indicate that Walz did not leave the United States until August of that year, at least two months after the student protests ended with the Tiananmen Square massacre.
One local Nebraska news article from August 11, 1989, said Walz would "leave Sunday en route to China" after he had almost "given up participating [in the trip] earlier this summer during the student revolts in parts of China."
But Walz's biographical myth appeared on the front page of The New York Times on August 12:
In the summer of 1989, Tim Walz faced a difficult choice.
A newly minted college graduate from small-town Nebraska, he had just turned down a stable, 9-to-5 job offer and moved across the world to teach at a local high school in China. He had made it as far as Hong Kong, just across the Chinese border, when People’s Liberation Army tanks rolled into Tiananmen Square to crush pro-democracy protests.
Walz "settled into the cocoon of daily life on a small-town campus, even as the chaos of the Tiananmen Square crackdown more than 1,100 miles away rippled across the country," they wrote.
It also led an online story on CBS News on August 9:
Washington — Thirty-five years before Vice President Kamala Harris named Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, he was on his way to teach high school in mainland China as a bloody crackdown on pro-democracy protests in Tiananmen Square took place in 1989.
"As the events were unfolding, several of us went in," Walz said at a 2014 congressional hearing marking 25 years since the massacre.
On August 20, NPR didn't directly place Walz in Hong Kong during the protests. It was indirectly implied that he was in China:
“It was my belief at that time that diplomacy was going to happen on many levels, certainly people to people,” Walz recalled during a 2014 congressional hearing commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen crackdown. “The opportunity to be in a Chinese high school at that critical time seemed to me to be really important.”
And these are some of the news outlets that lecture about Republicans making charges with "no evidence."
Minnesota Public Radio also reported that Walz "was so proud of his extensive experience" traveling to China that he "occasionally used to exaggerate it"—claiming to have traveled there 30 times when his campaign now admits he has visited the country around 15 times.
Walz has a nasty habit of exaggerating his life story. Will CBS ask about this at the debate -- especially if it was at all embarrassed to repeat his tall tales?
PS: MPR made a video.
