By now we should all know that the current spate of 'Fact Checkers' are basically thralls and hacks who rush in to defend the Left at all costs. Period.
There are many ways they do this under the guise of 'Fact Checking'. Ignoring a mountain range of correct analysis to zoom in on one falsehood uttered by a non-leftist. Or admitting a non-leftist is correct, but then finding something unrelated that is false just to say it isn't correct. Or the opposite, where the leftwing advocate has made a false claim, but rushing about to find something she said that is true.
And on and on. You know the tricks. Well, here is a fine example. So John C. Wright posted this:
It sure makes a point. Though I'm always skeptical of memes to begin with, so I did some digging. I eventually found a similar meme. It wasn't the picture Mr. Wright used, but it was another one making a similar point:
A strong point to be sure. According to this 'Fact Checker (TM)', however, that's a false meme. Because, apparently, it's not a lithium mine at all, but a copper mine. Therefore it's false. True, copper is used in electronic cars, but we won't go there. It's not a lithium mine, so technically the meme is false.
Instead, the "Fact Checker" points out that the biggest lithium mine in the world isn't anything like that one, so it's not just false but patently unfair. So I went to see the big lithium mine it mentions (in Australia, FWIW). And what does that mine look like? It looks like this:
So, we can have this meme instead:
The audience for fact checkers is people who want to believe they are thinking but who don't actually want to think. Therefore SOME reason is required for the verdict, but it doesn't matter it all if it is a completely bankrupt reason.
ReplyDeleteL:ke most things, I think people listen to the FCs who will tell them what they want to hear. Tickle their ears that is.
DeleteWhy research the truth yourself when you have trustworthy fact checkers to do it for you? That's way easier.
ReplyDeleteI'm surprised people muster the energy to search for Fact Checkers to be honest.
DeleteThere's probably an entire comedy book to be written about "fact-checkers in regards to Aesop's fables."
ReplyDeleteHeh.
DeleteThere was a Snopes article "debunking" the idea that Emory students felt threatened by a piece of pro-Trump grafitti. A lot of it was hair splitting, such as saying that claims of "emergency counseling" were lies if students merely got "counseling." But the claim that students were afraid was dismissed (in the original version of the article) on the basis of "we were unable to substantiate that anyone" made such claims.
ReplyDeleteThe article's author, Kim LaCapria, was contacted by a Daily Beast reporter who had interviewed several Emory students and offered to provide direct quotes from the interview. LaCapria declined, saying that this would be hearsay and it would be irresponsible to quote anything not directly from students. She was then offered contact information for the students since they had expressed interest in future interviews, so that she could hear from students directly that they were afraid. Once again she declined, this time on the basis that is not the purpose of Snopes to do original research.
For the icing on the cake, LaCapria was contacted by a president of an Emory student group a few hours later. His statements that no students were afraid on campus were immediately accepted and put into the article.
On top of that, the Snopes article used a student newspaper article to "debunk" the notion of "emergency counseling." But if you go into that article you find students saying things like "I don’t deserve to feel afraid at my school," "I’m supposed to feel comfortable and safe [here]," and in a student assembly when the crowd was asked what they felt, one of the most common responses was "fear." So Snopes OWN link showed that at least some students were afraid, and yet the article still has "students were afraid" under the "what's false" part of their verdict, with the primary reasoning still being that they were unable to determine that students were afraid.
It was seeing that article develop in real time that convinced me that "fact-checkers" aren't even trying to tell the truth.
Small correction: I found an archived version of the twitter conversation and the actual reason that LaCapria uses for not contacting students herself is, and I quote:
Delete"We call sources all the time, but not in pursuit of a clickbait OMG TEH COLLEGES R LIBRUL efforts."
The archive is here:
https://archive.fo/ixrt0
Yep. That's how most journalism operates anyway. Fact Checkers are merely a more flagrant display of naked partisanship under the banner of 'trust us, not partisan.' By now I can't imagine there is anyone left who thinks journalism is objective.
Delete