Posted on 02/07/2020 4:07:08 AM PST by Kaslin
Under President Donald Trump, the State of the Union address has become the Super Bowl for the left-leaning "fact-checkers." It doesn't matter if Republicans and independents enjoyed it immensely. Like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, these journalists want to rip his speech to pieces because it somehow overflows with "untruths."
But these supposedly "independent" guardians are failures at fact-checking the Democratic Party response, offered this year by Gretchen Whitmer, who was elected governor of Michigan in 2018. Let's do a quick roundup of the "fact-checker" focus.
-- The Associated Press, as usual, obsessed only about the POTUS under the headline "Trump's exaggerated 'great American comeback.'" They offered nine checks on Trump's veracity and zero fact checks on Whitmer.
- The Washington Post -- under fact-checker extraordinaire Glenn Kessler, who insists he has a running count of more than 16,200 "false or misleading claims" by President Trump -- offered 31 checks of Trump and zero of Whitmer.
-- PolitiFact offered 21 evaluations of Trump's speech and nothing on Whitmer. In fact, PolitiFact has no page on Whitmer. It has never evaluated her. (It does have a page for "Snooki" of MTV's "Jersey Shore.")
- FactCheck.org offered 14 checks of Trump and one sentence on how Whitmer was wrong to say that wages "stagnated" under Trump.
- The New York Times stacked up 36 evaluations of Trump's speech and then offered two on Whitmer, one of which included the wage-stagnation garbage.
Somehow these last two outlets get to look more "fair and balanced" by merely bowing to the notion that the Democratic response isn't a perfectly shaped bouquet of truth. Add up all these evaluations and Trump had 111 fact checks to Whitmer's three.
Trump loves to boast and exaggerate, so it's easy to throw out little "Pinocchio" ratings when Trump claims we have the lowest black unemployment rate in American history, since it's only been measured since 1972. But it's literally the lowest ever measured in American history. What the fact-checkers are doing is littering achievements with asterisks, trying to distract from the undeniable fact that unemployment is at record lows for blacks, Hispanics, women, the disabled and undoubtedly other groups Democrats claim to champion.
David Harsanyi at National Review offered a terrific article just taking apart The Washington Post fact check, calling these fact-checkers "janissaries of the Obama legacy." (Buckley hat tip for the $10 word.) Harsanyi noted that The Post "mentions Obama 13 times in a piece about Trump's speech." What resulted was "a litany of partisan arguments masquerading as factual correctives."
The best part was Harsanyi's amazement at The Post's evaluation of this Trump statement: "Thanks to our bold regulatory-reduction campaign, the United States has become the number-one producer of oil and natural gas in the world, by far." It's true that America became No. 1 in former President Obama's second term. But does Obama deserve credit?
Obama ran for president promising to inhibit energy production, coal and oil. A Republican Congress and the Supreme Court foiled his plans. Harsanyi observes: "It's quite the trick to not only censure Trump for bragging about oil and gas production but then, in the same fact check, confer on all the credit on Obama, who did everything in his power -- including banning drilling on most public lands -- to inhibit exploration and production."
Did these Obama defenders gear up to attack Obama's State of the Union addresses? A quick peek at Obama's speech in 2012, his reelection year, found PolitiFact could only muster three fact checks of Obama -- and two of Sen. Marco Rubio's Republican rebuttal -- compared with its 21-0 smacking of Trump.
Someone should fact-check PolitiFact boss Angie Drobnic Holan every time she claims, "PolitiFact seeks to present true facts, unaffected by agenda or biases." That deserves a "Pants on Fire."
The MSM is the enemy of the people. Period.
Home Depot sells a tool that can fix our media for $14.98.
“Fact checking” = fake news. Desperate for credibility the media is urgently remanufacturing its propaganda to make it more palatable.
GayStateFactCheckers has announced that they will now turn their attention to the question of Nancy Pelosi having amassed a net worth of $100 million on a $175,000 a year salary.
“Home Depot sells a tool that can fix our media for $14.98.”
Walmart as well, it’s in the laxative isle.
A greater alignment of propaganda architects has never existed.
Members of a certain tribe ?
Government built echo chamber.
True dat.
I have to laugh every time my Leftist friends cite the Fact-Checkers for their ‘truthisms’. ALL the ‘fact-checkers’ are LEFT. Sadly, that’s lost on my Leftist friends.
Home Depot sells a tool that can fix our media for $14.98.”
Walmart as well, it’s in the laxative isle.”
You’re gonna need a plunger.
Who’s Checking the Fact Checkers?
A new study sheds some light on what facts the press most likes to check.
https://www.usnews.com/opinion/blogs/peter-roff/2013/05/28/study-finds-fact-checkers-biased-against-republicans
The Masons?
I did a review of the “lies” database the WaPo has.
1) It’s not a database. It’s a spreadsheet.
2) I reviewed 1068 of their claims. It had such whoppers as “The economy is great”, which, according to their economists who have predicted 17 of the last 4 recessions with startling lack of embarrassment, is only able to be categorized as “good”. The whopper that apparently, Trump told over 150 times that the government of Saudi Arabia had agreed to $100 billion in arms purchases, when in fact they had agreed to, according to the WaPo’s own reporting, $100 billion in arms purchases. Why is that listed as 150+ counts of lies from Trump? Oh, that’s right. Because it was a 10 year deal and only $4.7 billion had been actually purchased, so he can’t claim what he was accurate on. Or the dramatic whopper of “1/3rd of women crossing illegally that were interviewed had been raped or sexually assaulted” when we ALL know it was only 31.7% or roughly 1/3rd.
The review left simple questions. Why was I still continuing to sift through such blatant piles of heaping dung? Who believes the propaganda they’re selling? Why did they put together such an easily provably false batch of claims? Of the 1068 I reviewed, I found that the vast majority were claims that he’d lied about opinions, lied about things that what he actually said was correct, but they didn’t like it, so they called it a lie, or simply him putting things in easy to comprehend English and so they called it a lie even though it wasn’t. There were 2 claims the President made that would be called “false”, and I believe one of them was that he made a mistake. The other was one that he was poking at the press to get them to report on something he wanted out there, and they refused to cover.
So, the big question is, why do these people still have jobs? Who is funding their lies? It’s insane that this is what we have to resort to. Correcting their propaganda on a hourly basis.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.