By Dan Calabrese ——Bio and Archives--October 3, 2016
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The worst thing about a presidential campaign year - and Lord knows there are many contenders for that dishonor - may not be the terrible ads or the awful debates. The worst thing in my view is the growing prominence of the media "fact-check" genre of journalism. If you ever engage in online discussions about politics, I'm sure you've seen it. Person A makes an assertion about something. Person B responds not by saying anything at all, but by posting a link to a media "fact-check" site that presumes to disprove or debunk Person A's assertion.
And that is supposed to settle it, because these media fact-checkers are nonpartisan, unbiased and unfailingly factual in their assessments. When they issue a "ruling" of true, half-true, false, pants-on-fire or whatever else, you can consider that ruling tantamount to absolute truth. They're fact-checkers, dammit!
And because so many people simply assume the "fact-checkers" are operating in accordance with such lofty standards, their pronouncements are indeed given the weight of unassailable truth, authority and accuracy.Lately the “fact checkers” have been waging a campaign to portray Donald Trump as a contemporaneous supporter of the Iraq war, contrary to his assertions that he was an opponent. In Monday’s debate, Hillary Clinton pleaded for their help: “I hope the fact checkers are turning up the volume and really working hard. Donald supported the invasion of Iraq.” Moderator Lester Holt obliged, basing a question to Trump on the premise that the matter was settled: “You supported the war in Iraq before the invasion.” Trump somewhat inarticulately rebutted the claim: “The record shows that I’m right. When I did an interview with Howard Stern, very lightly, the first time anybody’s asked me that, I said, very lightly, I don’t know, maybe, who knows.” What Trump actually said on Sept. 11, 2002, when Stern asked him if he favored an invasion, was: “Yeah, I guess so.” That was an affirmative statement, but a highly equivocal one. Is it fair or accurate to characterize it as sufficient to establish that Trump was a “supporter”? In our opinion, no. He might well have had second thoughts immediately after getting off the air with Stern. He certainly had second thoughts in the ensuing months, and he came to oppose the invasion long before Mrs. Clinton did. EvenFactCheck.org was unable to come up with any other Trump statement supportive of the decision to go to war. By December 2003, according to the site’s timeline, Trump was observing (in an interview with Fox News Channel’s Neil Cavuto) that “a lot of people” were “questioning the whole concept of going in, in the first place.” Five years later, according to PolitiFact.com, Trump was calling for President Bush’s impeachment because, as he told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer, “he got us into the war with lies.”As Taranto demonstrates, the "fact-checkers" presumed to make a definitive, authoritative conclusion about the matter while ignoring crucial events and treating certain details as important, while other details were arbitrarily minimized or dismissed entirely. That's what they do.
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The most striking new wrinkle came from James Asher, the former Washington Bureau chief for McClatchy. After we had published our latest fact-check, we came across a tweet from Asher that said Sidney Blumenthal "long-time #HRC buddy, told me in person #Obama born in #kenya." Asher followed that up with an email to his former colleagues at McClatchy, describing how Blumenthal came to his office in 2008 during the Democratic primary. According to an article in McClatchy, Asher wrote, "During that meeting, Mr. Blumenthal and I met together in my office, and he strongly urged me to investigate the exact place of President Obama’s birth, which he suggested was in Kenya. We assigned a reporter to go to Kenya, and that reporter determined that the allegation was false." Blumenthal worked in the Clinton White House and later had a stint at the Clinton Foundation. There’s no question that he is a Clinton insider, but as for the rest of Asher’s story, Blumenthal denies it. He has told several news organizations "this is false." In a follow-up article, McClatchy confirmed that Blumenthal contacted Asher, and that a McClatchy reporter in Kenya explored whether Obama was born there, along with running down several other rumors. But McClatchy found no proof that Blumenthal questioned Obama’s birthplace. The article quoted an email Blumenthal sent to Asher in 2008. While Blumenthal discusses Obama’s family connections to Kenya, there’s no mention of where Obama was born. "On Kenya, your person in the field might look into the impact there of Obama’s public comments about his father. I’m told by State Dept officials that Obama publicly derided his father on his visit there and that was regarded as embarrassing," Blumenthal wrote. Asher gave a new statement to McClatchy that steps back a bit from the certainty he expressed in his original tweet. "Blumenthal visited the Washington Bureau of McClatchy, where he and I met in my office. During that conversation and in subsequent communications, we discussed a number of matters related to Obama. He encouraged McClatchy to do stories related to Obama and his connections to Kenya." Asher said he remembered Blumenthal mentioning Obama’s birthplace but acknowledged that he had nothing in writing.This is just stunning. It's one thing to say Asher couldn't prove his claim. That's undeniable. It's another thing entirely to continue to assert Trump's claim is false beyond question, and that nothing new had emerged on the matter, when at the very least Asher's tweet should leave some room for doubt. There are so many claims and counterclaims here, that no one can really present a statement of fact that says anything is clearly true or clearly false. Yet the conceit of the "fact-checkers" demands that they maintain their pronouncement from on high. So information that casts doubt on the pronouncement must be dismissed as unimportant, no matter how clearly we can all see that it is not. Another astonishingly bad "fact-check" performance comes from Politico on the matter of the anti-Clinton documentary Clinton Cash. Breitbart takes it apart, pointing out 13 egregious errors in a single PolitiFact piece presuming to fact-check Clinton Cash.
Politifact, in its analysis of the Uranium One/Rosatom/State Department story first reported by the New York Times and based on research from the NYT bestseller Clinton Cash, ignores numerous key facts, conflates opinion for fact, deemphasizes other key facts, makes 13 errors, declares an incomplete donor record as complete, and takes the word of a major Clinton Foundation donor who has a demonstrable record of deceiving media outlets about basic facts in this deal. All of these errors curiously redound to the benefit of Hillary Clinton. The fact-check article was written by Politifact staff writer Linda Qiu, who took to Twitter and joked about her newly acquired skill for searching SEDAR, Canada’s version of EDGAR for publicly traded companies.Be sure to click through and read the entire piece. It's simply astounding how much PolitiFact got wrong, and yet many people will post links to the piece as if it proves Clinton Cash was full of distortions. I know we're picking on PolitiFact a lot, and we'll get to some others momentarily, but PolitiFact is widely regarded as the gold standard of this genre - so it's worth taking an extended look at its worst failures. Many will remember the infamous 2013 "Lie of the Year" as declared by PolitiFact. It was the claim that under ObamaCare, people who wanted to keep their health plans and doctors would be able to do so. This was egregious not because it wasn't a lie - it certainly was - but because PolitFact, the very same outfit now calling it "Lie of the Year," had called it true in 2009. Avik Roy, writing for Forbes, takes down PolitiFact's duplicity on the matter:
On December 12, the self-appointed guardians of truth and justice at PolitiFact named President Obama’s infamous promise—that “if you like your health care plan, you can keep it”—its 2013 “Lie of the Year.” An understandable choice. But in its article detailing why the President’s promise was a lie, PolitiFact neglected to mention an essential detail. In 2008, at a critical point in the presidential campaign, PolitiFact rated the “keep your plan” promise as “True.” The whole episode, and PolitiFact’s misleading behavior throughout, tells us a lot about the troubled state of “fact-checking” journalism. On October 9, 2008, Angie Drobnic Holan of PolitiFact published an article using the site’s “Truth-O-Meter” to evaluate this claim: “Under Barack Obama’s health care proposal, ‘if you’ve got a health care plan that you like, you can keep it.’” The article assures us in its headline that “Obama’s plan expands [the] existing system,” and continues that “Obama is accurately describing his health care plan here…It remains to be seen whether Obama’s plan will actually be able to achieve the cost savings it promises for the health care system. But people who want to keep their current insurance should be able to do that under Obama’s plan. His description of his plan is accurate, and we rate his statement True.”Now, another purveyor of this genre who routinely presents his own opinions as facts is the Washington Post's Glenn Kessler. In 2014, I took Kessler to task for his attack on a Michigan cancer victim named Julie Boonstra, who testified about the problems she was having with her insurance because of ObamaCare. Kessler called Boonstra a liar without any understanding of her situation, and prompted more abuse of Boonstra by the awful "Michigan Truth Squad," a supposedly "centrist" outfit that is actually reliably left-wing. I took both Kessler and the so-called "Truth Squad" to task for their awful attacks on Boonstra:
Unfortunately, Michigan has its own version of these dumbass "fact checker" outfits in which liberal opinion writers disguise themselves as fact checkers and presume to pronounce high and mighty judgment on who is telling the truth and who is lying. This particularly horrendous outfit would be the so-called "Michigan Truth Squad," which is run by something called the "Center for Michigan," where liberal activists and journalists dishonestly label themselves as centrists and perpetrate liberal activism under the guise of non-partisanship. So Boonstra came in for another round of abuse this week as the so-called "Truth Squad" ran a piece that did little more than plagiarize Kessler's hit job of two weeks ago, then pronounced Boonstra's recounting of her own personal story a "flagrant foul." I guess the propagandists - er, sorry, "fact checkers" - at the so-called "Michigan Truth Squad" think they are basketball referees. The Detroit Pistons could use hacks like this in their back pockets. I wrote two pieces for the Detroit News this week in defense of Boonstra. The first pointed out that the "fact checkers" have really not even been dealing with Boonstra's actual problem. They merely add up her premiums and the listed out-of-pocket spending limits and act as though this is the beginning and end of the story with respect to health insurance. The second, which is largely reprinted here, is based on additional reporting about Boonstra's actual situation. Anyone who has ever dealt with a health insurer can tell you there is a lot more to what you may or may not spend on your health care than totals of premiums and supposed out-of-pocket limits. To date, Boonstra has not even received a contract from Blue Cross Blue Shield of Michigan. She has only received a “statement of benefits.” Would you take an insurance company at its word based on a “statement of benefits” without having read the fine print in the contract? Apparently The Washington Post and the so-called “Michigan Truth Squad” would. Julie Boonstra is a lot smarter than they are.Now, anyone can make mistakes, and the defenders of the media "fact-check" genre might respond to this column by arguing that a handful of mistakes does not disprove the credibility of everyone who practices the craft. But it does, and here's why: In every case cited above, the so-called "fact-checkers" went way beyond the mere checking of facts, and presumed instead to read between the lines and tell you things meant what they often did not mean at all. In the case of the 2008 "fact-check" of what become ObamaCare, PolitiFact regarded as fact that people would be able to keep their doctors simply because that's what Obama claimed would happen. People who believed otherwise were arguing the likely outcome of Obama's proposed policy, not the letter of the proposal itself. In other words, PolitiFact treated it as fact that the policy would perform exactly as Obama said it would, and treated any assertion to the contrary as false. That was not fact-checking. That was opinion journalism, which there is nothing wrong with, but it should be labeled as such. When a person makes a prediction about what will happen in the future, there is no way to know if that prediction is true or false until the events play out. Yet media "fact-checkers" frequently rate these predictions as "true" or "false" based on little more than the expectations of official government agencies. If your prediction matches what the official authorities say, it's true. If not, it's false. That's not fact-checking. It's an appeal to authority. Fact-checkers often treat a claim that something happened in the past as "false" because they can't confirm it. But that doesn't mean the thing didn't happen. It just means the didn't find the evidence (or found it but didn't take it seriously). I think this is important because, while many conservatives recognize the liberal bias of media "fact-checkers," they will nevertheless cite them with great glee when their "fact-check" seems to confirm a conservative position. I think that's a mistake because, even though it might help you win an argument at a point in time, it nonetheless affirms the notion that media fact-checkers are authoritative arbiters of fact. They're not, and they should never be cited with that kind of deference, not even when they agree with you. One other thing: A dinosaur journalist who was recently annoyed by my disregard for "fact-checkers" informed me breathlessly that PolitiFact has won a Pulitzer Prize. I guess that was supposed to show me that I was no one to question them. But all that shows is that the conventional thinking of the media industry has embraced this fraudulent genre, and has chosen to offer it plaudits for the piss-poor work it's doing. That's an indictment of the Pulitzer Prize committee, not of my critique of media "fact-checkers." Anyone can argue whatever they want. But stop treating these people as authorities. They're not. They're frauds. The sooner people realize that, the better.
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Dan Calabrese’s column is distributed by HermanCain.com, which can be found at HermanCain
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