Water is wet.

Surprise!

Media fact checkers are biased.

Bankrupt Media.


Reason magazine points out the intellectual bankruptcy behind the media's "fact checking" project, the worst aspect of which is that it fails to check the claims made by the government about the exercse of government power:

In December the Pulitzer Prize–winning website PolitiFact, which is run by the Tampa Bay Times, announced its list of 10 finalists for “Lie of the Year.” Perhaps sensitive to conservative criticisms over prior Lie of the Year winners (Sarah Palin in 2009 for saying that ObamaCare will create “death panels,” and anyone in 2010 who said the law amounted to a “government takeover of health care”),the fact checkers came up with an evenly split list of 10 nominees: five that were Democratic lies about Republicans, and five that were Republican lies about Democrats. Delaware Gov. Jack Markell’s assertion that “Mitt Romney says he likes to fire people” was there alongside Rush Limbaugh’s claim that ObamaCare includes “the largest tax increase in the history of the world.” And so on.

But the real problem with such lists isn’t the lack of partisan diversity; it’s the glaring lack of lies told to the public in the service of wielding government force. Only one of PolitiFact’s Top 10—Obama blaming 90 percent of the 2009−12 deficit increase on George W. Bush—involved an official lying about his own record. The rest all focused on the way that politicians (and their surrogates) characterized their competitors’ actions and words. This isn’t a check on the exercise of power; it’s a check on the exercise of rhetoric.

And when it comes to rhetoric that motivates journalists into action, nothing beats culturally divisive figures from the opposing political tribe. So it was that in May 2011, the respected Nieman Journalism Lab set the mediasphere abuzz with an academic study of more than 700 news articles and 20 network news segments from 2009 that addressed a single controversial claim from the ObamaCare debate. Was it the president’s oft-repeated whopper that he was nobly pushing the reform rock up the hill despite the concentrated efforts of health care “special interests”? Was it his promise that “if you like your health care plan, you will be able to keep your health care plan,” something that has turned out not to be true? Was it the way Obama and the Democrats brazenly gamed and misrepresented the Congressional Budget Office’s scoring of the bill, claiming it wouldn’t add “one dime” to the deficit?

No. The cause for reconsideration of the ObamaCare coverage was not the truth-busting claims made by a sitting president in the service of radically reshaping an important aspect of American life but rather the Facebook commentary of a former governor, Sarah Palin.

“Our data indicate that the mainstream news, particularly newspapers, debunked death panels early, fairly often, and in a variety of ways, though some were more direct than others,” survey authors Matthew Schafer and Regina Lawrence concluded.“Nevertheless, a significant portion of the public accepted the claim as true or, perhaps, as ‘true enough.’ ” Meanwhile, the president got away with abusing the facts while ramming through an unpopular law and continues to be hailed as a noble truth teller in a fallen empire of lies.

At the end of November, Politico published an article about how progressive journalists, now that Obama was safely elected, were beginning to consider criticizing the president a bit more. “He was the champion of our side, he vanquished the foe,” New Yorker political columnist Hendrik Hertzberg said. “[But] now liberals don’t have to worry about hurting his chances for re-election, so they can be tougher in urging him to do what he should be doing.”

It was a remarkable admission of what many have long suspected: Portions of the press are in the tank for Democrats. Now that’s a fact worth checking.

Question: If Journalists are biased and partisan leftists in their ordinary news reporting...

....why would anyone believe that they suddenly become trustworthy and objective just because they label their product "fact-checking"?

Answer: because some folks are very gullible.

"Fact checkers" in the news media haven't exactly been covering themselves with glory when they work behind the scenes over the last couple of decades. If you doubt that, just ask Dan Rather after he gets off his job of hosting the nightly news....oh, wait, he lost that gig because his "fact checking" was, shall we say, mildly tendentious because of his desire to wreck George W. Bush's re-election chances.

James Taranto describes the "bizarre rise of "fact checking" propagandists:

Perhaps the reason other journalists are so deferential toward the "fact checkers" is that these fact checkers, unlike the traditional ones, don't check the facts of journalists but of politicians. By and large, they aren't actually checking facts but making and asserting judgments about the veracity of politicians' arguments.

The quality of their work is generally quite poor. "The MSM's ['mainstream' media's] fact-checkers often don't know what they're talking about," notes Mickey Kaus, who cites an example on a subject he knows well:

The oft-cited CNN-"fact check" of Romney's welfare ad makes a big deal of HHS secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius' pledge that she will only grant waivers to states that "commit that their proposals will move at least 20% more people from welfare to work." CNN swallows this 20% Rule whole in the course of declaring Romney's objection "wrong":

"The waivers gave 'those states some flexibility in how they manage their welfare rolls as long as it produced 20% increases in the number of people getting work.' "

Why, it looks as if Obama wants to make the work provisions tougher! Fact-check.org cites the same 20% rule.

I was initially skeptical of Sebelius' 20% pledge, since a) it measures the 20% against "the state's past performance," not what the state's performance would be if it actually tried to comply with the welfare law's requirements as written, and b) Sebelius pulled it out of thin air only after it became clear that the new waiver rule could be a political problem for the president. She could just as easily drop it in the future; and c) Sebelius made it clear the states don't have to actually achieve the 20% goal--only "demonstrate clear progress toward" it.

But Robert Rector, a welfare reform zealot who nevertheless does know what he's talking about, has now published a longer analysis of the 20% rule. Turns out it's not as big a scam as I'd thought it was. It's a much bigger scam.

The merits of the argument are beyond the scope of today's column. It is quite possible that there are people whose knowledge of the subject is as deep as Kaus's and Rector's but whose honest interpretation is more favorable to the Sebelius position. An appeal to their authority could carry as much weight as our appeal to Kaus's and Rector's.

But an appeal to the authority of "independent fact checkers" carries no weight at all. In case you're skeptical of this assertion, let's look at some other examples of their output from the past week.

Here's an excerpt from an Associated Press "fact check" of Paul Ryan's convention speech:

RYAN: "And the biggest, coldest power play of all in Obamacare came at the expense of the elderly. . . . So they just took it all away from Medicare. Seven hundred and sixteen billion dollars, funneled out of Medicare by President Obama."

THE FACTS: Ryan's claim ignores the fact that Ryan himself incorporated the same cuts into budgets he steered through the House in the past two years as chairman of its Budget Committee. . . .

RYAN: "The stimulus was a case of political patronage, corporate welfare and cronyism at their worst. You, the working men and women of this country, were cut out of the deal."

THE FACTS: Ryan himself asked for stimulus funds shortly after Congress approved the $800 billion plan.

In both of these cases, the AP neither disputes nor verifies the factual accuracy of Ryan's statements. Each of these is simply a tu quoque--an argument against Ryan. Under the guise of fact checking, the AP is simply taking sides in a partisan political dispute.

Taranto offers these additional examples:

Sometimes the "fact checkers" are ignorant even of facts that, in contrast with the welfare material above, require no special expertise to know. This is from a CNN.com "fact check":

In a new policy paper, his Republican rival for the White House, Mitt Romney, says, "President Obama has intentionally sought to shut down oil, gas, and coal production in pursuit of his own alternative energy agenda." . . .

Obama has, for sure, angered some oil and coal producers by steering federal money to alternative energy sources. But there is no evidence that he is trying to "shut down" traditional energy industries.

No evidence? How about Obama's own words? "So, if somebody wants to build a coal-powered plant, they can. It's just that it will bankrupt them, because they're going to be charged a huge sum for all that greenhouse gas that's being emitted."

Sometimes the "fact checkers" simply pronounce trivial truths. From the AP on Mitt Romney's convention speech:

ROMNEY: "I have a plan to create 12 million new jobs. It has five steps."

THE FACTS: No one says he can't, but economic forecasters are divided on his ability to deliver. He'd have to nearly double the anemic pace of job growth lately.

This is like "fact checking" somebody's wedding vows by asserting that while marriage can be wonderful, it's hard work and ends in divorce half the time.

Who you gonna believer - the media "fact checkers" or your lying eyes.

Alas, for many of my liberal friends, the answer is "media fact checkers."

Via Hot Air:



To be fair, Obama said that the plant would be there for another 100 years; he didn't say that it would be open.

That reminds me of Schopenhauer's bitter comment to his mother that his books would still be on the shelves 100 years in the future, and her response, "yes, still unopen and unread."

Final Score: Ryan 3; fact checkers 0.

Holding Paper - Fact Checkers.

You have to love the media "false flag" operation of "fact checking," where biased liberal journalists claim to be objective fact checkers in order to do what they do as journalists - insert their political biases into what are supposed to be objective reporters of fact.

But bless the pointy-headed left who gobble up the idea that because something is labeled "fact checking" it must be objective, unlike, apparently, most journalistic work, which they know on some level is not.

What happened to the vaunted slogan of "question authority"?

A case in point is the media's quick jump on the claim that Ryan misrepresented facts about the closure of the GM plant in RNC speech. The problem for the "fact checker" scam is he didn't, which highlights, again, that we need to question authority.

Ryan acknowledged that the plant had already been slated for shutdown in 2008. That was his point. People voted for him because they thought Obama represented hope to get the plant back in operation. In fact, that had been known since at least February 2008, when Obama came to Janesville to speak, and specifically addressed the plant closure in his remarks, delivered at the plant itself — and promised to keep it and other plants like it open “for the next hundred years” (emphasis mine):

It was nearly a century ago that the first tractor rolled off the assembly line at this plant. The achievement didn’t just create a product to sell or profits for General Motors. It led to a shared prosperity enjoyed by all of Janesville. Homes and businesses began to sprout up along Milwaukee and Main Streets. Jobs were plentiful, with wages that could raise a family and benefits you could count on.

Prosperity hasn’t always come easily. The plant shut down for a period during the height of the Depression, and major shifts in production have been required to meet the changing times. Tractors became automobiles. Automobiles became artillery shells. SUVs are becoming hybrids as we speak, and the cost of transition has always been greatest for the workers and their families.

But through hard times and good, great challenge and great change, the promise of Janesville has been the promise of America – that our prosperity can and must be the tide that lifts every boat; that we rise or fall as one nation; that our economy is strongest when our middle-class grows and opportunity is spread as widely as possible. And when it’s not – when opportunity is uneven or unequal – it is our responsibility to restore balance, and fairness, and keep that promise alive for the next generation. That is the responsibility we face right now, and that is the responsibility I intend to meet as President of the United States. …

Those are the steps we can take to ease the cost crisis facing working families. But we still need to make sure that families are working. We need to maintain our competitive edge in a global by ensuring that plants like this one stay open for another hundred years, and shuttered factories re-open as new industries that promise new jobs. And we need to put more Americans to work doing jobs that need to be done right here in America.

That’s the promise that Barack Obama failed to deliver — even when the government took ownership of GM. Ryan had it exactly right, and the fact checkers have made a mockery of their own profession by stepping all over their own biases to refute Ryan

More "fact checking" the "fact checkers" can be found here.