I really appreciated your reporting in Kenosha at the time. I felt like I was going insane because all my friends would post random stuff about it and every time I tried to verify I’d hit a brick wall.
This was one of the first events that made me truly feel like everyone was living in an alternative world. There's something weird that happens when you see everyone around you lose contact with reality. It really sort of freaks you out. At least it did me.
When my daughter was in late elementary school, and continuing through high school, we started attending our university's basketball games. She left for college 30 years ago, but these experiences still mean a lot to us (in fact, she and her boys are on a plane as I write this...coming to visit us).
What we both noticed was fascinating. When a foul was called on the home team, fans would get livid. Highly educated people with spittle blasting from their mouths screaming and waving their arms and fists. My daughter and I would invariably look at each other and say: "Looked like a foul to me."
When the home team committed a foul, there was silence. It was like a church.
Point: Facts play less of a role in peoples' experiences than we imagine or hope that they might. Arthur Brooks recently noted that "Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk, had an important idea, which is that our greatest attachment tends to be to our opinions." (I'm paraphrasing, but want to give Brooks credit, because I am copying some of his words.....so am putting it into quotes.)
Facts are filtered through peoples' beliefs, and those beliefs are all powerful, as that monk said. They are often more important than even our most important relationships. To have someone be a real "fact checker" they would almost have to have no beliefs.
About the best that could be done would be to expect fact checkers to be teams made up of diverse individuals with diverse opinions. Do a "point/counter-point" type of thing. Second idea would be for people to not read any fact checker that was not in a publication that had someone (else) do a check of the fact checker's column a year later.
>About the best that could be done would be to expect fact checkers to be teams made up of diverse individuals with diverse opinions. Do a "point/counter-point" type of thing.
No accident that as journalism and academia have become overwhelmingly progressive institutions, the quality of knowledge being produced has declined precipitously. Not because progressives are worse at either of these things than conservatives (conservative journalism is prone to the same kinds of biases and motivated reasoning as progressive), but because a lack of ideological diversity inevitably results in an echo chamber.
"Not until they prove that they themselves have a firmer and less ideologically blinkered handle on these concepts."
No.
No one, not even an amoral computer or a logical Vulcan, should ever be trusted to suppress information. Entities like PoltiFact should aspire to become trusted sources. The moment they decide to assert control over information, they should lose all trust.
Agreed. That sentence was a misfire. I'm glad that Jesse exposed the flaws in their articles about Blake, but even if Politifact had been perfect, the desire to suppress speech is a red flag
Funny how the fact-checking apparatus exploded during Trump's 2015 campaign and was on the news cycle 24/7, and then disappeared the day Biden got sworn in.
Every story involving firearms is at least this poorly reported, knowing about guns has single handedly made me completely untrusting of the media and academia, without even knowing what else they twist quite so intimately.
What kind of stuff, generally? I ask because, I'm not saying you do this, but a lot of pro gun people will point out pretty superficial errors not especially germane to the facts as reason to disregard any gun coverage:
newspaper: "He unloaded his six round clip into Mr. Smith"
Gun owner: "Pfft. It's a 6 round revolver he fired the 6 shots from, it doesn't have a clip. How can I ever trust this newspaper again?"
It's like, as a teenage metalhead, when I read a newspaper article calling Slayer a "death metal band" and I say "Pfft. Slayer are thrash, how can I ever believe this newspaper again?"
Again, not saying you do this. But there is definitely a pointless, superficial "gotcha" things in gun coverage complaints. (Pro gun people being far from the only people that engage in pointless, superficial gotcha complaints, of course.)
Well, off the top of my head conflating automatic and semi automatic has long been a go to, but the bigger distortions recently have been more like treating the AR-15 like some sort of exotic death ray, or ignoring who really drives the murder rate and with what weapons in lieu of fear mongering about Bubba out in the sticks.
I can also do the more traditional "anti gun people have no clue what they're trying to regulate" stuff you're alluding to, politicians and journalists constantly getting technical things wrong (which you'd think would be important when writing or agitating for regulations), but that's played out unless it crosses it crosses over into "shoulder thing that goes up" level idiocy.
I literally lol'd at the AR-15 thing. My mother who's endlessly glued to MSNBC always talks about "all those people with AR-15's".
In any case I basically agree, I was just thinking it behooves anyone to be aware that extremely technical complaints are as annoying and unconvincing when I do it to someone as when someone does it to me. And we should all keep that in mind.
BJ Campbell at Handwaving Freakoutery, who I highly recommend, has written often about gun-related issues, including a number of useful posts walking through how the media dishonestly reports on guns, with no irrelevant pedantic nitpicking. Here's a good example:
I had a similar journey to cynicism. Even without the spin, the uncritical of anti-gun orgs' talking points and vocabulary, and the outright lies, the entire conversation around guns in media can be easily summed up by comparing the coverage of defensive gun uses to criminal gun uses. The Rittenhouse example is a real outlier as far as DGU coverage goes because national media acknowledged it at all. There are DGU stories every single day of people defending themselves, families, or homes with firearms but they get a small blurb on the local news and ignored entirely by national media. A criminal gun use will get much more prominent local coverage and many of them will get at least acknowledged in the national news. When they deign to mention defensive gun use at all, they insinuate that they are rare. Oh, they also count DGUs in the "gun violence" numbers. And I used to believe every word of it. It became impossible to keep the faith once I started actually learning about firearms, shooting sports, and self-defense. These days I don't believe them when they tell me it's raining without looking out the window.
I think fact-checking has had worse than "no effect" - it's made people who aren't progressives completely skeptical and mistrusting of any mainstream "fact checkers" for exactly the reasons described in this article. Rather than seeking truth and clarity, "fact checks" are usually petty ways to slam a politician the organization doesn't like.
It seems to be just another cudgel for those who believe they are blessed with the authority to declare the proper way to look at the world.
The Covington/Native American situation was clear to me upon my first reading of the news story and my subsequent viewing of the actual video linked in the story. Almost nothing in the article was supported by what I saw on the video--clearly. There's ZERO way the writer watched the video before writing the article and publishing their "reporting" and "facts." It was pure, pure narrative, nothing more.
Let the quotes/claims stand on their own. Link to the original videos, and let us see the "context" (for Mexican immigration was it "They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists" as it was quoted--or was it "They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, their rapists"? Those are pretty different).
Use the original words, and give some minor latitude to the speaker--we're not all measuring every scintilla of evidence when we speak--we speak somewhat broadly, and that needs to be given some breadth--especially when it's not whether a bomb landed on a hospital or a parking lot. Most things are far less consequential than that, and a small amount of grace needs to be offered to both sides when "checking facts."
Snopes was great back in the day, for validating scams and spam. I was excited to see fact checking come to more substantive issues--but as a flexible-minded conservative, it became immediately clear that these 'checks' were being done through a liberal lens. For facts presented on the Right, there was much "context" added to the 'checks,' and the finest of details (was it "brandished," reallllly?) were subject to the highest of standards, while claims made by the Left were largely supported without "context."
"Context" is just an excuse for the counter-political-fact-checker to nitpick and broaden the initial claim into something they can dismiss or disprove.
That's a good point--I actually do think context is important because not many things in life are neatly "yes or no" questions. I think that Fact Checkers should try to avoid getting sucked into these types of scenarios though--stick with checking actual, real, verifiable, definitive facts or lies. Everything else is conversation and argument.
"The earth is a sphere." True enough. Not an actual sphere, though, as mathematicians would define it--so it's "false?" No "context" is really needed here--we get that it's shorthand for non-math-purposes of conversation. The earth certainly isn't a pyramid.
"Democrats want zero restrictions on abortion." Not all Democrats. Some want very minimal restrictions, some want full restrictions. But it is true that at least a couple Democrats want zero restrictions on abortions and some party platforms explicitly say so. So it's.... false?
I like most of this comment, but let me counter your final bit: "context" is often the most valuable thing, because one can make a great many correct statements that are not informative or are actively misleading.
I'm not sure we ultimately disagree about anything, but we may be using different language to express the same ideas.
The "context" provided quotes an engineer at Rand Corp saying "There is no goal to fully electrify every single vehicle in the fleet by 2050." Mmm kay. No "goal." Does that prove that they don't *want* there to be a goal? No--just that they haven't formalized any desire or non-desire via a goal, I guess.....
Then Politifact lists all the initiatives that are in progress under the US Army's "climate strategy" one of which explicitly says "Fully electric tactical vehicles by 2050, and the necessary charging infrastructure," but then the "fact checkers" say "The strategy document doesn’t mention tanks." Even I can do a Google search to discover that tanks can be considered a "tactical vehicle." Maybe they aren't--but they *can* be considered "tactical vehicles" by military definitions (https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/military-tactical-vehicle).
Again, no curiosity about whether the Biden admin *wants* this, even if they're not planning for it. Reading the plain words is what should be fact-checked. Would anti-oil folks want "green tanks"? (hahah) It's a fair guess they would--is there any evidence that they *don't* and therefore the statement is "False?" None is provided in the fact check.
Lots of "context and information" but nothing that actually addresses the substance of the quote in question.
I like you--and I think we agree--I'm just in a fightin' mood! :-)
Writing from Canada, the first thing I thought about was how incredibly uncritically the US media jumped on to the "mass graves of Indigenous children" bandwagon, when it was (and remains) a story about underground radar-read soil disturbances: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/first-nations-graves
When I discovered, over a year after this story broke out, that there are as of yet no graves or remains of Indigenous children in Kamloops, I lost all faith in mainstream media. Fact-checkers did nothing, I found this information out purely by accident. I now treat all information with a solid grain of salt, and if something is important enough for me to know more about, I fact check it myself. I hate being this cynical and mistrusting, but that's life in the age of the internet, I suppose.
As ever, those who scream loudest about misinformation are the biggest purveyors of misinformation and disinformation. And now we have malinformation too, which is something that is true but inconvenient. A lot of malinformation appears here, not by the critiqued but by the critic, of course.
The last place in the world that I would consult for actual facts is PolitiFact. We need to lose the Orwellian term, "fact-checking." Ideology-checking would be much more honest. Also, it is a sign of our strange times that many people who get so incensed by the lies of Donald Trump feel free to tell whoppers of their own.
We don't have much actual journalism any more, we have the binary of preferred narratives vs. non-preferred narratives. A few years back, Matt Taibbi wrote an excellent essay about the Sovietization of the American press, which this post put me in mind of.
And this year Fredrik deBoer wrote a superb Substack piece on how in this age of social media, journalistic narratives form so quickly. What are called facts now are ammunition to bolster preferred ideological narratives.
Lastly, I have written this before but it bears repeating, fine, so large numbers of #Resistance people want to tell lies. I will oppose you as vehemently as I oppose Trump. But just stop with your self-righteousness, wrapping yourselves in flags of truth and democracy, you sacks of manure.
Yeah, every conservative just brushes off the fact-checking websites, so I'm not sure what their utility is.
One note about brandishing- Wisconsin doesn't actually define what constitutes "brandishing." I know from concealed carry classes that some states consider your left palm forward (in a "stop" gesture) with your right hand on your holstered firearm brandishing, so it seems like holding a knife while physically engaging with a police officer would easily meet that definition ~somewhere, if not Wisconsin.
"Yeah, every conservative just brushes off the fact-checking websites, so I'm not sure what their utility is."
The ugly truth is a combination of two things:
1) Conservatives are not really their target audience. Their target audience is themselves and others like them -- they feel good in "correcting the record" for their liberal friends, and serving as ammunition depots in the culture wars.
2) To the extent that they think about conservatives reading their work, they are woefully incompetent at understanding how that audience sees the world, and what they should do to be taken seriously by conservatives. They get virtually every rhetorical choice wrong...because they talk like they are speaking to liberals.
Idk what brandishing is, specifically, but “acting aggressively in stabbing distance while holding a knife” is a good way to get shot in self defense in any US state.
I totally agree with your point about brush offs. These fact checkers are delusional, if they think a single Trump supporter has ever changed their minds about any fact they bring up.
This piece alone was worth my $5 this month. I really value detailed, well-supported critiques like this, which I'm sure take a lot of time and effort.
Also, how anyone can push for more social media ”misinformation-suppression,” with a straight face, after the Twitter Files is beyond me. Genuinely asking: did people on the left just dismiss that whole story? How is there any credibility left in the idea that social media should actively suppress information?
There was a near-total mainstream media blackout of the Twitter Files, and the few outlets that gave it any attention dismissed it as a right-wing conspiracy theory. Garden-variety progressives who get their news from the NYT, WaPo, CNN, NPR, etc. have either never heard of the Twitter Files or been told it's fake news.
This is excellent. We need many, many more versions of this story in multiple outlets until the mainstream/center-left love affair with this biased and incompetent version of "fact-checking" is fully dispelled.
Fact-checking institutions do not work, because they're far too easily corrupted. We need fact-checking individuals, because a person, unlike a firm, can have principles. Thank goodness those of us here have at least one of those guys working in our favor.
Bill Adair says it's necessary to get fact checks to the people who "need" them without explaining the mechanism by which this will change anything. It's a tick-box exercise. I actually have more of a problem with Adair's ignorance here (failing to understand that 'disinformation' is actually a demand-side issue, not supply-side).
Unless, of course, he is being honest. The people who "need" to see fact checks are the people who never believed a claim in the first place. So that they have a stick with which to beat their opponents. Which neatly accounts for the most common biases in the 'disinformation and fact-checking' industry.
Disclosure: disinformation is my wheelhouse. I had a podcast on the need for it. Before I realised what it is really about.
As an ardent and unimpeachable critic of police violence, I have no qualms admitting Jesse is absolutely correct here.
I really appreciated your reporting in Kenosha at the time. I felt like I was going insane because all my friends would post random stuff about it and every time I tried to verify I’d hit a brick wall.
This was one of the first events that made me truly feel like everyone was living in an alternative world. There's something weird that happens when you see everyone around you lose contact with reality. It really sort of freaks you out. At least it did me.
When my daughter was in late elementary school, and continuing through high school, we started attending our university's basketball games. She left for college 30 years ago, but these experiences still mean a lot to us (in fact, she and her boys are on a plane as I write this...coming to visit us).
What we both noticed was fascinating. When a foul was called on the home team, fans would get livid. Highly educated people with spittle blasting from their mouths screaming and waving their arms and fists. My daughter and I would invariably look at each other and say: "Looked like a foul to me."
When the home team committed a foul, there was silence. It was like a church.
Point: Facts play less of a role in peoples' experiences than we imagine or hope that they might. Arthur Brooks recently noted that "Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Buddhist monk, had an important idea, which is that our greatest attachment tends to be to our opinions." (I'm paraphrasing, but want to give Brooks credit, because I am copying some of his words.....so am putting it into quotes.)
Facts are filtered through peoples' beliefs, and those beliefs are all powerful, as that monk said. They are often more important than even our most important relationships. To have someone be a real "fact checker" they would almost have to have no beliefs.
About the best that could be done would be to expect fact checkers to be teams made up of diverse individuals with diverse opinions. Do a "point/counter-point" type of thing. Second idea would be for people to not read any fact checker that was not in a publication that had someone (else) do a check of the fact checker's column a year later.
Thanks. Good information in today's piece.
>About the best that could be done would be to expect fact checkers to be teams made up of diverse individuals with diverse opinions. Do a "point/counter-point" type of thing.
No accident that as journalism and academia have become overwhelmingly progressive institutions, the quality of knowledge being produced has declined precipitously. Not because progressives are worse at either of these things than conservatives (conservative journalism is prone to the same kinds of biases and motivated reasoning as progressive), but because a lack of ideological diversity inevitably results in an echo chamber.
"PolitiNuance" and "PolitiContext" unfortunately did not perform nearly as well in A/B audience testing.
But have they tried Politi-ItsComplicated ?
"Not until they prove that they themselves have a firmer and less ideologically blinkered handle on these concepts."
No.
No one, not even an amoral computer or a logical Vulcan, should ever be trusted to suppress information. Entities like PoltiFact should aspire to become trusted sources. The moment they decide to assert control over information, they should lose all trust.
Agreed. That sentence was a misfire. I'm glad that Jesse exposed the flaws in their articles about Blake, but even if Politifact had been perfect, the desire to suppress speech is a red flag
Yep. Anyone who wants to suppress "misinformation" instantly loses me.
I can *maybe* imagine a time of existential war might cause me to loosen my standards on this, but I'm not even sure then.
Funny how the fact-checking apparatus exploded during Trump's 2015 campaign and was on the news cycle 24/7, and then disappeared the day Biden got sworn in.
Like the antiwar movement when Obama got elected?
No, more like the left wing budget balancing movement outraged at W's level of borrowing. Remember that?!
( Or like the right wing budget balancers whenever a Republican is elected POTUS)
It's almost like every single utterance out of Biden's mouth isn't an outrageous falsehood requiring fact-checking… Also: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/list/?category=&ruling=false&speaker=joe-biden
Every story involving firearms is at least this poorly reported, knowing about guns has single handedly made me completely untrusting of the media and academia, without even knowing what else they twist quite so intimately.
What kind of stuff, generally? I ask because, I'm not saying you do this, but a lot of pro gun people will point out pretty superficial errors not especially germane to the facts as reason to disregard any gun coverage:
newspaper: "He unloaded his six round clip into Mr. Smith"
Gun owner: "Pfft. It's a 6 round revolver he fired the 6 shots from, it doesn't have a clip. How can I ever trust this newspaper again?"
It's like, as a teenage metalhead, when I read a newspaper article calling Slayer a "death metal band" and I say "Pfft. Slayer are thrash, how can I ever believe this newspaper again?"
Again, not saying you do this. But there is definitely a pointless, superficial "gotcha" things in gun coverage complaints. (Pro gun people being far from the only people that engage in pointless, superficial gotcha complaints, of course.)
Well, off the top of my head conflating automatic and semi automatic has long been a go to, but the bigger distortions recently have been more like treating the AR-15 like some sort of exotic death ray, or ignoring who really drives the murder rate and with what weapons in lieu of fear mongering about Bubba out in the sticks.
I can also do the more traditional "anti gun people have no clue what they're trying to regulate" stuff you're alluding to, politicians and journalists constantly getting technical things wrong (which you'd think would be important when writing or agitating for regulations), but that's played out unless it crosses it crosses over into "shoulder thing that goes up" level idiocy.
I literally lol'd at the AR-15 thing. My mother who's endlessly glued to MSNBC always talks about "all those people with AR-15's".
In any case I basically agree, I was just thinking it behooves anyone to be aware that extremely technical complaints are as annoying and unconvincing when I do it to someone as when someone does it to me. And we should all keep that in mind.
BJ Campbell at Handwaving Freakoutery, who I highly recommend, has written often about gun-related issues, including a number of useful posts walking through how the media dishonestly reports on guns, with no irrelevant pedantic nitpicking. Here's a good example:
https://hwfo.substack.com/p/anatomy-of-a-gun-lie
His entire archive of gun-related articles can be found at
https://hwfo.substack.com/s/guns/archive?sort=new
I had a similar journey to cynicism. Even without the spin, the uncritical of anti-gun orgs' talking points and vocabulary, and the outright lies, the entire conversation around guns in media can be easily summed up by comparing the coverage of defensive gun uses to criminal gun uses. The Rittenhouse example is a real outlier as far as DGU coverage goes because national media acknowledged it at all. There are DGU stories every single day of people defending themselves, families, or homes with firearms but they get a small blurb on the local news and ignored entirely by national media. A criminal gun use will get much more prominent local coverage and many of them will get at least acknowledged in the national news. When they deign to mention defensive gun use at all, they insinuate that they are rare. Oh, they also count DGUs in the "gun violence" numbers. And I used to believe every word of it. It became impossible to keep the faith once I started actually learning about firearms, shooting sports, and self-defense. These days I don't believe them when they tell me it's raining without looking out the window.
I think fact-checking has had worse than "no effect" - it's made people who aren't progressives completely skeptical and mistrusting of any mainstream "fact checkers" for exactly the reasons described in this article. Rather than seeking truth and clarity, "fact checks" are usually petty ways to slam a politician the organization doesn't like.
It seems to be just another cudgel for those who believe they are blessed with the authority to declare the proper way to look at the world.
The Covington/Native American situation was clear to me upon my first reading of the news story and my subsequent viewing of the actual video linked in the story. Almost nothing in the article was supported by what I saw on the video--clearly. There's ZERO way the writer watched the video before writing the article and publishing their "reporting" and "facts." It was pure, pure narrative, nothing more.
Let the quotes/claims stand on their own. Link to the original videos, and let us see the "context" (for Mexican immigration was it "They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists" as it was quoted--or was it "They're bringing drugs, they're bringing crime, their rapists"? Those are pretty different).
Use the original words, and give some minor latitude to the speaker--we're not all measuring every scintilla of evidence when we speak--we speak somewhat broadly, and that needs to be given some breadth--especially when it's not whether a bomb landed on a hospital or a parking lot. Most things are far less consequential than that, and a small amount of grace needs to be offered to both sides when "checking facts."
Snopes was great back in the day, for validating scams and spam. I was excited to see fact checking come to more substantive issues--but as a flexible-minded conservative, it became immediately clear that these 'checks' were being done through a liberal lens. For facts presented on the Right, there was much "context" added to the 'checks,' and the finest of details (was it "brandished," reallllly?) were subject to the highest of standards, while claims made by the Left were largely supported without "context."
"Context" is just an excuse for the counter-political-fact-checker to nitpick and broaden the initial claim into something they can dismiss or disprove.
Of course, "context" is very important when discussing mobs calling for the genocidal massacre of Jews.
That's a good point--I actually do think context is important because not many things in life are neatly "yes or no" questions. I think that Fact Checkers should try to avoid getting sucked into these types of scenarios though--stick with checking actual, real, verifiable, definitive facts or lies. Everything else is conversation and argument.
"The earth is a sphere." True enough. Not an actual sphere, though, as mathematicians would define it--so it's "false?" No "context" is really needed here--we get that it's shorthand for non-math-purposes of conversation. The earth certainly isn't a pyramid.
"Democrats want zero restrictions on abortion." Not all Democrats. Some want very minimal restrictions, some want full restrictions. But it is true that at least a couple Democrats want zero restrictions on abortions and some party platforms explicitly say so. So it's.... false?
Ugh and double-ugh.
I like most of this comment, but let me counter your final bit: "context" is often the most valuable thing, because one can make a great many correct statements that are not informative or are actively misleading.
I'm not sure we ultimately disagree about anything, but we may be using different language to express the same ideas.
For the purposes of our argument <smile>, I'd love to give in and agree that "context" is truly valuable.
Howwwwevrrrrr... I just went to PolitiFact to randomly choose the type of context that grates me: Trump said the Biden administration wants to ‘make our army tanks all electric.’ That’s False (https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2023/dec/21/donald-trump/trump-said-the-biden-administration-wants-to-make/). Trump's (ugh) statement was judged solidly "False."
The "context" provided quotes an engineer at Rand Corp saying "There is no goal to fully electrify every single vehicle in the fleet by 2050." Mmm kay. No "goal." Does that prove that they don't *want* there to be a goal? No--just that they haven't formalized any desire or non-desire via a goal, I guess.....
Then Politifact lists all the initiatives that are in progress under the US Army's "climate strategy" one of which explicitly says "Fully electric tactical vehicles by 2050, and the necessary charging infrastructure," but then the "fact checkers" say "The strategy document doesn’t mention tanks." Even I can do a Google search to discover that tanks can be considered a "tactical vehicle." Maybe they aren't--but they *can* be considered "tactical vehicles" by military definitions (https://www.lawinsider.com/dictionary/military-tactical-vehicle).
Again, no curiosity about whether the Biden admin *wants* this, even if they're not planning for it. Reading the plain words is what should be fact-checked. Would anti-oil folks want "green tanks"? (hahah) It's a fair guess they would--is there any evidence that they *don't* and therefore the statement is "False?" None is provided in the fact check.
Lots of "context and information" but nothing that actually addresses the substance of the quote in question.
I like you--and I think we agree--I'm just in a fightin' mood! :-)
"Missing context" oftentimes means they're about to wriggle like a worm on a hook.
Writing from Canada, the first thing I thought about was how incredibly uncritically the US media jumped on to the "mass graves of Indigenous children" bandwagon, when it was (and remains) a story about underground radar-read soil disturbances: https://nationalpost.com/news/canada/first-nations-graves
When I discovered, over a year after this story broke out, that there are as of yet no graves or remains of Indigenous children in Kamloops, I lost all faith in mainstream media. Fact-checkers did nothing, I found this information out purely by accident. I now treat all information with a solid grain of salt, and if something is important enough for me to know more about, I fact check it myself. I hate being this cynical and mistrusting, but that's life in the age of the internet, I suppose.
As ever, those who scream loudest about misinformation are the biggest purveyors of misinformation and disinformation. And now we have malinformation too, which is something that is true but inconvenient. A lot of malinformation appears here, not by the critiqued but by the critic, of course.
The last place in the world that I would consult for actual facts is PolitiFact. We need to lose the Orwellian term, "fact-checking." Ideology-checking would be much more honest. Also, it is a sign of our strange times that many people who get so incensed by the lies of Donald Trump feel free to tell whoppers of their own.
We don't have much actual journalism any more, we have the binary of preferred narratives vs. non-preferred narratives. A few years back, Matt Taibbi wrote an excellent essay about the Sovietization of the American press, which this post put me in mind of.
And this year Fredrik deBoer wrote a superb Substack piece on how in this age of social media, journalistic narratives form so quickly. What are called facts now are ammunition to bolster preferred ideological narratives.
Lastly, I have written this before but it bears repeating, fine, so large numbers of #Resistance people want to tell lies. I will oppose you as vehemently as I oppose Trump. But just stop with your self-righteousness, wrapping yourselves in flags of truth and democracy, you sacks of manure.
Yeah, every conservative just brushes off the fact-checking websites, so I'm not sure what their utility is.
One note about brandishing- Wisconsin doesn't actually define what constitutes "brandishing." I know from concealed carry classes that some states consider your left palm forward (in a "stop" gesture) with your right hand on your holstered firearm brandishing, so it seems like holding a knife while physically engaging with a police officer would easily meet that definition ~somewhere, if not Wisconsin.
"Yeah, every conservative just brushes off the fact-checking websites, so I'm not sure what their utility is."
The ugly truth is a combination of two things:
1) Conservatives are not really their target audience. Their target audience is themselves and others like them -- they feel good in "correcting the record" for their liberal friends, and serving as ammunition depots in the culture wars.
2) To the extent that they think about conservatives reading their work, they are woefully incompetent at understanding how that audience sees the world, and what they should do to be taken seriously by conservatives. They get virtually every rhetorical choice wrong...because they talk like they are speaking to liberals.
Idk what brandishing is, specifically, but “acting aggressively in stabbing distance while holding a knife” is a good way to get shot in self defense in any US state.
Yeah for sure. There’s no universe in which you’re not shot or at least kissing pavement when you pull a knife on a cop.
I totally agree with your point about brush offs. These fact checkers are delusional, if they think a single Trump supporter has ever changed their minds about any fact they bring up.
This piece alone was worth my $5 this month. I really value detailed, well-supported critiques like this, which I'm sure take a lot of time and effort.
Also, how anyone can push for more social media ”misinformation-suppression,” with a straight face, after the Twitter Files is beyond me. Genuinely asking: did people on the left just dismiss that whole story? How is there any credibility left in the idea that social media should actively suppress information?
There was a near-total mainstream media blackout of the Twitter Files, and the few outlets that gave it any attention dismissed it as a right-wing conspiracy theory. Garden-variety progressives who get their news from the NYT, WaPo, CNN, NPR, etc. have either never heard of the Twitter Files or been told it's fake news.
This is excellent. We need many, many more versions of this story in multiple outlets until the mainstream/center-left love affair with this biased and incompetent version of "fact-checking" is fully dispelled.
It's not going to happen for the simple reason that the audience for it is so much smaller than the audience for partisan bullshit.
Fact-checking institutions do not work, because they're far too easily corrupted. We need fact-checking individuals, because a person, unlike a firm, can have principles. Thank goodness those of us here have at least one of those guys working in our favor.
Bill Adair says it's necessary to get fact checks to the people who "need" them without explaining the mechanism by which this will change anything. It's a tick-box exercise. I actually have more of a problem with Adair's ignorance here (failing to understand that 'disinformation' is actually a demand-side issue, not supply-side).
Unless, of course, he is being honest. The people who "need" to see fact checks are the people who never believed a claim in the first place. So that they have a stick with which to beat their opponents. Which neatly accounts for the most common biases in the 'disinformation and fact-checking' industry.
Disclosure: disinformation is my wheelhouse. I had a podcast on the need for it. Before I realised what it is really about.
Yes, his "to the people who need it most" comment really jumped out at me.