-- BombThrowers--Remember when fact-checking was something journalists did to themselves, instead of an extracurricular activity deployed to fire hose even more political bias into every nook and cranny of the news cycle?
Ironically, journalistic fact-checking is now performed almost exclusively on people who aren’t journalists. This aligns perfectly with other exemptions journalists unblushingly apply to themselves, such as the New York Times’ official policy that it will not publish letters-to-the-editor that criticize or even dispute writers published in the New York Times.
In recent years, fact-checking other people (as opposed to checking your own paper’s content) has grown into a separate media beat. It is now the stealthy, de facto, third-front editorial page in most daily newspapers (after (a) the actual editorial page and (b) the editorializing blighting the rest of the news articles).
This new fact-checking beat is every bit as biased as the editorial page beat: it just isn’t as honest about its biases, and it relies more on academic experts. But I repeat myself.
Here’s an example: if Maureen Dowd were a fact-checker, she wouldn’t just free associate stupid sentences like “[Barack Obama] had to turn himself into a dream catcher.” She would pose a stupid question (Is Barack Obama a dream catcher?) and then follow it up with quotes from tenured Professors of Dream Catcher Studies, who would lend that ineffable veneer of academic effluence to their assertions that, yes, factually, it is at least 97 percent true that Barack Obama is a dream catcher.
Throw in a graphic showing pulsating magical unicorn power for the liberal responses and demonic pants-on-fire for the conservative ones and you’ve got PolitiFact.
There are now literal armies of fact-checkers deployed among the tattered ranks of daily paper newsrooms. How do newspapers afford such a luxury when they’ve been hemorrhaging subscribers and cutting back on every other news beat? They don’t, of course. The new fact-checking is funded by grants from all the usual leftist suspects.
Journalism schools that are also funded by grants from all the usual leftist suspects also help out.
So, in addition to further obliterating the wall between journalistic objectivity and opinion writing in newsrooms, the fact-checking movement is further obliterating the difference between higher education and journalism.
Of course, newspaper editors say all that free money from left-wing donors doesn’t influence their political reporting — not one single whit. Those who helm the Tampa Bay Times (formerly the St. Petersburg Times), home to PolitiFact, the granddaddy of all fact-checking cadres, post the following vehement disclaimer to show how very serious they are about not being influenced by trivial stuff like the millions of dollars they receive from donors:
[W]hen it comes to the question of “Who is PolitiFact?” or “Who pays for PolitiFact?”, we can assure you that no one is behind the scenes telling us what to write for someone else’s benefit. We are an independent, nonpartisan news organization. We are not beholden to any government, political party or corporate interest. We are proud to be able to say that we are independent journalists.
Well, “independent” except for George Soros’ Open Society Foundations, the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the Ford Foundation, and various other big money leftists who pay to keep the Tampa Bay Times and PolitiFact afloat.
The Tampa Bay Times is a curious newspaper: although it is a for-profit entity, it is owned by a nonprofit called the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. In addition to funneling money to the Times to keep its lights turned on, the Poynter Institute bills itself as a journalism school.
Nice tax structure if you can get it, but, hey, rules are for the little people.
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And, when it comes to buying off newspapers, there are only so many Mexican and Internet billionaires to go around.
Since 2015, the Poynter Institute has also been running the International Fact Checker Network (IFCN), another nonprofit entity through which leftist donors can funnel un-taxed money to all those allegedly un-bossed and un-bought fact-checkers positioned on newspaper staffs.
Like most metastasizing leftist nonprofit empires, the Poynter Institute also finds a way to get its hands on public money: taxpayers get to involuntarily subsidize the Poynter Institute, (and thus the IFCN, PolitiFact, and the Tampa Bay Times) through one of its donors, the Duke University Reporter’s Lab, which describes itself, apparently un-ironically, as a creator of “new forms of storytelling.”
New forms of storytelling, indeed.
Here’s a story the Duke Reporter’s Lab isn’t headlining: through them, American taxpayers are also involuntarily on the hook for supporting private “fact-checkers” around the globe via Poynter’s IFCN international conferences, too.
The amount of taxpayer money is trifling, but the principle matters. It’s bad enough when journalism professors and college professors throw on the mantle of being educators to cover-up their left-wing political activism: it’s worse when they make the people they are attacking pay for it.
Real academic objectivity was strangled to death and left in an alley to be whizzed on by rats more than half a century ago. What replaced it was postmodernism, which declares that all knowledge is deceptive, with one exception: the knowledge spouted by postmodernists themselves, which is officially above reproach because, you know, they’re the postmodernists.
It’s unsurprising that journalists have wholeheartedly embraced this postmodern ethos. Excluding oneself from the rules you apply to others has always ranked high among journalists’ favorite pastimes, second only to drinking. In newsrooms everywhere, funded with fat grants from George Soros and Bill Gates, the act of replacing real objectivity with fake objectivity now has an official job title, one endowed with the unassailably appropriate irony that it used to be a title that really meant what it meant but doesn’t mean that thing anymore: fact-checker.
-- BombThrowers--Remember when fact-checking was something journalists did to themselves, instead of an extracurricular activity deployed to fire hose even more political bias into every nook and cranny of the news cycle?
Ironically, journalistic fact-checking is now performed almost exclusively on people who aren’t journalists. This aligns perfectly with other exemptions journalists unblushingly apply to themselves, such as the New York Times’ official policy that it will not publish letters-to-the-editor that criticize or even dispute writers published in the New York Times.
In recent years, fact-checking other people (as opposed to checking your own paper’s content) has grown into a separate media beat. It is now the stealthy, de facto, third-front editorial page in most daily newspapers (after (a) the actual editorial page and (b) the editorializing blighting the rest of the news articles).
