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Fact checks? Good? Well, that generally agreed-upon … fact is getting some fact checks this week from people who think it’s fact that fact-checkers aren’t checking the right facts.
If that seemed convoluted or intentionally opaque well… things aren’t going to get better from here on out. Sorry.
While journalists, for most of history (please don’t fact-check this) tried their best to sort fact from fiction, the past decade saw the rise of a distinct type of reporter: The fact-checker.
It’s for two reasons. One, the rise of platforms that gave voice to billions allowed for vocal and visible pushback on the kind of banal falsities the political class traded in, making almost everyone realize there were a lot of things people were accepting as true just because.
And Donald Trump, who let’s say was more openly liberal with the truth in a way other politicians were not.
Hence the fact check. The Washington Post dedicated a whole team to debunking Donald, and determined he’d issued 30,507 false or misleading statements in his time in office. It’s an absurdly high number that unfortunately lacks proper context because no one has ever done the exact same kind of fact-checking on all the other statements from all the other presidents and candidates.
But if you fact-check one, you should fact-check the other.
(It appears our fact checkers are saying that’s false).
Liberals on BlueSky, where lefties flocked after Elon Musk took over, are bothered by a couple recent fact-checks from the Washington Post and Snopes.
The first outcry stems from a fact check of Hillary Clinton’s Monday address to the DNC, where she said that Vice President Kamala Harris “won’t be sending love letters to dictators,” knocking Trump’s often effusive praise for authoritarians.
The fact-check from the Post said that “there is no evidence Trump sent such letters. Clinton is making a leap to suggest that,” while mentioning that Trump did send letters to Kim Jung-Un and that he “fell in love.”
Tick-tacky? Sure. Torturedly or willfully ignoring a metaphor for the purpose of cold hard truth. Absolutely.
“This ‘fact check’ from The Washington Post is an embarrassment,” wrote one person.
“Did these people skip the section on metaphors in their primary school English class?” asked another.
“This level of obtuse pedantry is beneath a lawyer [derogatory], let alone a journalist,” said another.
At least it led to some decent memes about hypothetically particularly petty fact checks.
“FACT CHECK: The Gettysburg Address was on November 19, 1863, actually making it fourscore and seven years PLUS four months and fifteen days.”
“Little boy: but the emperor has no clothes! WaPo Fact Check: This is Misleading. In fact, within the emperor’s closet many clothes can be found, we rate the little boy 5 out of 5 Truth Whoopsies.”
It didn’t help that the Post had to correct their fact check, noting that the piece originally indicated the contents of Trump’s letters had not been revealed despite Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward publishing the letters.
The annoyance stems from long-standing issues with media coverage over the past ten years, that in harping on little lies Democrats tell pale in comparison to those of Trump, and that in covering them, they’re doing a disservice to a larger issue.
But all the energy invested in getting upset ignores how insular it all is. No Trump supporter is going to read a fact-check of a massive lie he told almost dying in a helicopter crash while the former mayor of San Francisco trashed Harris to him on the Post’s live blog of his presser, and no Harris stan is going to suddenly believe Clinton is now a bucket of untruths.
The obsession with DNC fact-checking crossed platforms and parties. Also on Monday, President Joe Biden delivered his farewell address on Monday, reiterating his long-standing position that Trump’s comments in the wake of the Charlottesville neo-Nazi rally inspired him to run for office in 2020.
Elon Musk cited a Snopes debunk of Trump’s “very fine people” comment that said Trump didn’t praise neo-Nazis, a push Biden’s long made.
Snopes has been under fire for a recent assessment of that event, paying particular attention to the fact that, as part of his long comment on the matter, Trump noted he explicitly condemned neo-Nazis.
“I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists, because they should be condemned totally. But you had many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists,” Trump said, which seems to make it clear he wasn’t referring to them, even if he was probably, maybe, sorta referring to them, in that Trumpian sort of double-speak he always does where he says one thing, then the opposite.
“snopes is now pulling *technically* bullshit,” said one person, noting how Musk and others were using Snopes to push what they call “The Charlottesville Hoax,” the media’s claim of Trump’s praise of Nazis an elaborate lie.
“Fuck Snopes on this one. We all knew what he said and what he meant,” said another.
“Wingnuts are all citing Snopes today,” said one comment, “which is usually their scourge.”
Snopes being the scourge of wingnuts presupposed like all of this, that reading a Snopes debunk of something makes them think it’s no longer true and not just another branch of the media lying to them on something else.
And while we all need an agreed-upon set of facts, if you aren’t going to believe the fact checkers, well then, you’re making the same argument as the side you claim doesn’t believe in the facts.
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