Our inability to agree on what’s true has taken a new form in recent weeks with several conservative sites pledging to factcheck reporters who are doing just that.
For years, conservatives have said factchecking sites like PolitiFact are inaccurate and reek of liberal bias. For instance, Trent England of the right-leaning Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs suggested today in The Federalist that factchecking is a sham, referring to “how PolitiFact twists and turns to declare true statements ‘False.’”
The solution? To turn this whole thing on its head and factcheck the nonpartisan factcheckers’ fact checks. If that sounds like a waste of resources, keep in mind that it may require more factcheckers who can factcheck the factcheckers who are factchecking the factcheckers. After all, in today’s America, everyone’s a truth seeker!
So, conservative site NewsBusters, already committed to “exposing and combating liberal media bias,” according to its tagline, has begun a series of posts that attempt to dispel the influence of factchecking.
“(Media Research Center, which runs NewsBusters) routinely finds instances when fact-checkers bend the truth or disproportionately target conservatives,” Media Research Center President Brent Bozell said in a press release. “We are assigning our own rating to their judgments and will expose the worst offenders. Americans deserve the truth.”
To give you a taste of what this is like, NewsBusters’ most recent factchecking post criticized a PolitiFact analysis of a Tweet from President Donald Trump, who had said that “caravans” were coming to the United States, without explaining what that meant exactly.
PolitiFact rated the caravan statement half true, because the site could confirm the existence of only one caravan, not multiple, and because it was possible that most of the group of 1,200 to 1,500 people would stay in Mexico.
NewsBusters’ Tim Graham gave the PolitiFact analysis a rating of “Deeply Distorted,” which is incidentally the name of the metal band I hope to front one day. Oddly, NewsBusters doesn’t think one caravan is all that different from a bunch of caravans, proving that your favorite drunk relative was right at Christmas – one is basically the same as a whole, whole lot.
“Trump’s brief tweet shouldn’t have to say ‘“Caravans” coming each year’ to be recognized as factual. Multiple caravans have been launched at the U.S. border,” Graham wrote on NewsBusters, without providing evidence of the “multiple caravans” beyond his word.
If that isn’t quite up your alley, then consider RealClear Politics’ database that aims to quantify the work of six factchecking sites, including Snopes and PolitiFact. While explaining the project, RealClear Media and George Washington University fellow Kalev Leetaru brought up a big, imaginary washing machine.
There’s a reason for that. A “Christian satire” site, the Babylon Bee, wrote about this appliance in a clear work of conservative satire with the headline, “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine To Spin News Before Publication.” Now that’s a knee-slapper!
But Snopes factchecked the post, claiming that some readers mistook it as news, leading Facebook to flag the washing machine as false. Factcheckers who work with Facebook can label articles as satire, but Snopes didn’t.
So, Leetaru of RealClear Politics expressed concerns with third parties having sway over what’s kosher to post on Facebook.
“The problem lies in how major platforms like Facebook are starting to outsource decisions about false and misleading news to these fact-checking organizations,” he wrote. “This means, as the Babylon Bee learned, that the decision of a single fact checker can have very real consequences for the distribution of a given story or even the funding streams of its creator.”
That’s a valid point, and while RealClear Politics has gathered the kind of information that takes a lot of time and manpower (or both) to put together, I didn’t get much out of it. They also aren’t including factchecks of hoaxes, which I interpret to mean they’ll exclude topics like Pizzagate, a conspiracy theory that had real-world consequences.
Moreover, I didn’t understand why they coded things the way they did at times. For instance, the researchers coded a factcheck on whether or not the earth has a new moon as opinion.
That particular myth was based on NASA’s 2016 announcement that an asteroid was circling around Earth during its orbit around the sun, according to PolitiFact. The report called the asteroid a quasi-satellite – not a moon.
A “new moon” describes a phase of the moon, but we totally do not have a new moon. That’s not something you can have an opinion on. We have the number of moons we have, and it’s the same dang number of moons we’ve always had.
That’s the problem with the cultural atmosphere we’re in. Americans can’t agree about how many moons we have. We think believing a downright lie doesn’t make it a lie. It makes it an opinion.
Contact Mollie Bryant at 405-990-0988 or bryant@bigiftrue.org. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter.
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