For fifty years, the press has introduced its guests as “Nobel Prize-winning economists.”
They sit for long interviews. Newspapers write profiles of them. Their publishers splash “Nobel Prize-Winning Economist” across the covers of their books. They advise presidents, testify before Congress, and tell the country what to do about inflation, trade and debt.
There is no Nobel Prize in economics. I covered this in The Fake Nobel: Time to Tell the Truth About Economics’ Borrowed Prize. Alfred Nobel was explicit about what he wanted. His will named five prizes. Economics was not one of them, and nothing in the will allowed new prizes to be added. Even the Nobel Foundation’s own website keeps them apart: “the Nobel Prizes and the Prize in Economic Sciences”. In 1968 Sweden’s central bank could have created the Riksbank Prize in Economics, the way mathematicians built the Fields Medal and computer scientists the Turing Award. Ask anyone on the street what the Fields Medal or the Turing Award is. Blank stares. Ask what a Nobel Prize is. Everyone knows. That’s why the bank hijacked the Nobel brand. The prize’s official name is the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. How many people have heard that name? Nobody. Try fitting it on a book cover.
None of this is a secret. It’s widely known. There is no Pulitzer Prize for Investigative Reporting awaiting me for discovering this.
The New York Times knows this. The Wall Street Journal knows this. Washington Week knows this.
The introduction never changes.
Last Week’s Standard
Last week the press found a credential worth checking.
Katie Zacharia was named White House press secretary on October 9. After her first briefing on October 13, reporters asked where she had passed the bar. She said she passed one “when I moved to China.”
Independent journalist Judd Legum had already searched bar rolls in all 50 states and DC. The Washington Post checked her maiden name too. The State Bar of California issued a statement. A watchdog group filed a complaint.
Then she went on Fox News and said she had failed the bar and never retook it. On October 16, after five days on the job, she was out.
So apply that standard to the press itself.
Will reporters start hounding the beloved network reporters and cable show hosts who introduced their guests as Nobel Prize winners? Will anyone ask them the question they asked her: where did that credential come from?
There are only two answers.
They didn’t know there was no such prize. Then they broadcast credentials they never checked, for fifty years.
Or they knew, and were told it was fine to say it anyway. Then they knowingly repeated a title that isn’t real.
Neither answer survives the standard they applied to her.
This week the Wall Street Journal‘s opinion page made her its cautionary tale: “Don’t lie on your résumé. You’ll be sorry. Maybe not today or tomorrow. But someday. The bill always comes due.”
How many “Nobel economists” have a Nobel Prize on their résumé?
What this piece is not claiming. It is not claiming Zacharia passed the bar. She says herself that she failed it. This piece is about how the press decides which claims to chase.
The Credential That Matters
Zacharia’s job does not require a law license. It doesn’t even require a college degree. She was hired to speak for the President, not to file motions. It isn’t a cabinet position. The Senate doesn’t even confirm it.
Has anyone checked the résumés of the White House cooks, gardeners and housekeepers?
She has a law degree from Pepperdine. She worked at a large Beijing law firm. In ordinary speech, people with law degrees call themselves lawyers, the same way a botany graduate calls herself a botanist and a physics graduate calls himself a physicist.
The economists are different. Their borrowed title is the reason they’re booked. It is what makes their opinions carry weight with 340 million people.
One credential moves national policy. Nobody checks it. The other moves nothing. It got a national records sweep, and she was gone in five days.
The Kennedy Standard
John F. Kennedy Jr. graduated from NYU Law in 1989 and went to work as a Manhattan assistant district attorney. He failed the New York bar exam twice.
His job required a law license. The DA’s office gave every assistant three tries. If he failed the third, he was out.
He was sworn in with the title “assistant district attorney” in August 1989. He carried it for more than a year before he was admitted to the bar, and the press used it the whole time. After his first failure, news reports said he could keep working as an “unadmitted lawyer,” handling cases under a licensed attorney’s supervision. The press called him a lawyer. Nobody called it a credential scandal.
The tabloids had their fun. “The Hunk Flunks” ran on front pages. The wire services played it straight. When he failed the first time, the story was that he could keep his job, appeal his score, and try again. When he took it a third time in July 1990 and passed, the coverage read like a man finally getting good news.
Now imagine an unlicensed lawyer handling cases in Trump’s Justice Department. Would the coverage read like a man finally getting good news?
Kennedy failed the bar twice, in a job that required a license, and kept his job. Zacharia failed once, in a job that doesn’t, and lost hers in five days.
The Promises Nobody Checks
Hakeem Jeffries wants to be Speaker of the House. He has laid out what Democrats will do in their first 100 days: restore the ACA tax credits, reverse the Medicaid cuts, undo the tariffs, and vote against the Iran war.
None of the four can change anything. The first three need a new law, which needs the Senate and Trump’s signature. The fourth is a roll call; the war goes on. This isn’t opinion. It’s how a bill becomes law. I went through each item in Count the Promises They Can Deliver.
In essence, the Democrats can hold hearings and investigations. The rest, Trump can veto.
The only ways around the veto are a two-thirds override, which nobody expects, or removing the man holding it. That takes 67 senators. Then the pen passes to JD Vance, Trump’s own pick.
The AP ran the list. It mentioned the veto in its last few paragraphs.
I haven’t heard anyone challenge him on it. In my opinion, Washington Week spends whole segments poking fun at Trump’s boasts and how everything he does is “unprecedented.” I doubt Jeffries’s list will get one.
The Honest Caveat
If Zacharia had never gone to law school, that would be a real story. A made-up degree is fabrication. She has the degree. She worked at a law firm. She called herself a lawyer without passing the bar, for a job that never required one.
Washington runs on inflated résumés. Her boss says he has ended eight wars. Or seven. Or ten. I’ve lost count.
Lots of people inflate their past. What politician tells the truth?
One Standard
If loose credentials are disqualifying, start with the newsrooms that have said “Nobel economist” for half a century. Then Hakeem Jeffries and his 100-day promises.
If they are not disqualifying, and the press’s own guest list says they are not, then the Zacharia treatment was not journalism. It was theater.
Pick one standard. Then apply it to everyone, starting with yourselves.
Sources: SCMP, Oct 14, 2026 · AP, “Questions swirl about new White House press secretary’s resume,” Oct 14, 2026 · AFP via CTV News, Oct 14, 2026 · The National Desk, bar complaint, Oct 15, 2026 · Axios, “Katie Zacharia ousted as White House press secretary,” Oct 16, 2026 · WSJ Free Expression, “Katie Zacharia’s Résumé Inflation,” Oct 19, 2026 · NobelPrize.org, “Nobel Prize facts” · AP (Deseret News), “JFK Jr. bombs bar exam,” Nov 2, 1989 · UPI, “JFK Jr. takes bar exam third time,” July 24, 1990 · UPI, “Kennedy: No more ‘hunk that flunked,’” Nov 7, 1990