As Mark Twain once said, “There are lies, damned lies and liberal progressives” well that’s close anyway.
Low information voters (aka Democrats) are well known for buying into the biggest bunch of ummmm – let’s say malarkey (not to take anything away from Joe Biden, the guy needs all the charisma he can get). But putting all of the blame upon these voters isn’t really fair, most of them are victims (not to sound all liberal) of a left wing media and a plethora of “fact checkers”
The problem with the way things are done in the fact checking world currently is simple, “What happens when the fact checkers unintentionally or very intentionally get it wrong?”
Writing for “Real Clear Politics”, Kalev Leetaru addressed this issue in an article entitled “Is there Recourse When Fact Checkers Get It Wrong?” Leetaru examined Facebook’s attempts to police it’s social media site
In its fight against “fake news,” Facebook has elevated nearly three dozen of the world’s fact-checking websites to be the ultimate arbitrators of what constitutes “truth” online. In the past, when fact checkers made mistakes, there was little consequence to their errors – one could choose to simply ignore those fact checkers that strayed too far from evidence-based verification. In the Facebook era, however, those fact checkers now have the ability to banish any statement or evidence they believe to be false and even to effectively blacklist outlets they disagree with. This raises an obvious question: Are there checks and balances to this awesome power – any recourse when fact checkers get things wrong?
The article continued
The short answer is no, as Facebook says it defers exclusively to fact checkers and won’t intervene to prevent a fact checker’s contested verdict from suppressing a story’s visibility or demonetizing a news outlet.
“Investor’s Business Daily” also addressed this problem in an Editorial entitled “Who is Checking the Fact Checkers?” The article remarked that
The problem is that fact checkers themselves can be unreliable sources for what’s true or not. Fact checkers make their own mistakes. They sometimes change ratings based on new information. Or they make determinations based on arbitrary standards that can change from one review to the next.
As bad as this sounds for users of Facebook and other social media sites that employ fact checkers, it gets even worst when political bias enters the picture. Barbara Joanne Lewis addressed this point while penning an article for the website capitalresearch.org
Both of the nation’s most prominent fact-checking organizations—FactCheck.org and PolitiFact—tilt to the political left, which makes them representative of the majority of journalists who also lean to port. Both of these groups go far beyond what they say they do, claiming to fact-check subjective things like political rhetoric that are not susceptible to fact-checking.
Given the amount of people who are smart and savvy enough to recognize that far left fact checking organizations are going to push a far left agenda, this concern with fact checking bias might be looked at as “making a mountain out of a molehill” and not be considered a problem as most can see past the nonsense that passes for fact on these sites. Lewis’ article goes on to clarify the concerns about fact checking sites and states that in fact:
The public trusts the fact-checkers about as much as they trust politicians. A Rasmussen poll before Election Day found that 29 percent of likely voters believe the media’s fact-checking of political candidates, while 62 percent think the media just “skew the facts to help candidates they support.”
Those statistics would seem to indicate that the media organizations (such as the Chinese News Network – aka – CNN) and others that utilize fact checks are basically wasting their time and resources, but are they? Using the statistics from the above quote (which by the way was referencing the 2016 Presidential election, which is sometimes referred to as the “fact checker election”) it appears that 29 percent of registered voter’s believe the fact-checking in question, and 29 percent is in fact a whole lot of damned voters.
Given our current (to put it mildly) inflammatory political climate, the fact checking of the President has risen to the point of being utterly ridiculous, whereas in the past it was just kind of ridiculous.
Liberal’s and the Liberal media HATE the President, and sure seem to hate America. Why else would it appear as if these utterly contemptible human beings root for the failure of our President and the utter destruction of our country? It’s almost as if they (the media) half expect Hilary Clinton to come riding in on a white horse to save us all – only they forget that Hilary sold the horse in question and dropped off the proceeds from the sale (along with a significant “thank you” check from some country like China) into another new and even more terrible iteration of her foundation, there is also the additional caveat that Hilary has no interest in saving anyone but Hilary and anyone who believes otherwise SERIOUSLY needs to be fact checked.
Sadly many “fact checkers” fail to disclose their political bias, and as we all know there ain’t no bias like left wing bias on a fact checking site.
The Conservative website “Newsbusters.org” remarked upon this issue writing about fact checking in general that:
In theory, this is admirable. In practice, it has proven to be simply another opportunity for the media to push their leftist agenda.
Fact checking groups — such as PolitiFact — routinely cast judgments while failing to disclose their own left-wing bias. Their allies in the media try to cast these groups as neutral third parties when, in fact, they are card-carrying members of the liberal echo chamber.
That seems about right. The article on the “Media Research Center’s” website “newsbusters.org” contained several example of the more egregious failures of fact checking organizations
First up we have an Associated Press story fact checking the President in regards to remarks he (the President) made that suicide would increase
Next in line is the Washington Post’s efforts to fact check Dr. Fauci concerning remarks he had made about the effectiveness of the Chinese travel ban
The list goes on and on and on and…well you get the picture. The article can be found at https://www.newsbusters.org/fact-checkers and it deserves a complete reed to get a good overview of what happens when fact checkers lie – or at least embellish
Fast forward to this week and what do we have? CBS News (an organization that is apparently in some type of weird competition with ABC News to see which network can pass off the most utter bulls…. err, nonsense as fact), posted a video of some poor deranged woman portraying herself as a nurse crying herself silly while informing America and the world that she had quit her job as a nurse because the hospital she worked for (which was never disclosed in the video) wouldn’t allow her to wear a mask.
How bad is CBS News you may ask? Well CBS is so bad that as of three full days after this video was first tweeted out by CBS the tweet in question is still up. This video is fake for any number of reasons, one being that the “nurse” in question hasn’t worked at the hospital in over a year and it’s also worth noting that she suffers from bi-polar disorder and depression, something that a little whats that word again? Oh yeah, “research” may have uncovered. CBS may not have time to actually check out the facts of the article, but rather (in a “Facts, we don’t need no stinking facts!” moment) choose to add background music to the posting and put it up on Twitter because, well “journalism”
Apparently Basic Journalism 101 no longer covers the four W’s (Who, What, When and Why – three of which are NOT provided in this video), but is rather mired in the four O’s as in Orange Man Bad, Orange Man, Bad, Orange Mad Bad and of course Orange Man Bad
In an article prepared by “Townhall News” senior editor Matt Vespa while speaking about the apparently insane CBS “Journalists” who posted such a blatantly dishonest video reinforces the “Orange Man Bad” theory, explaining that:
These clowns are now peddling Chinese communist propaganda; does anyone really think China hasn’t seen any more Wuhan coronavirus deaths? Does anyone really believe that? It doesn’t matter. It makes Trump look bad, so share it. For CBS News, they decided to go for the gold, peddling a story about a nurse, Imaras Veras, who claims to have quit her job because of the lack of personal protection equipment in the hospitals and how America is unprepared.
So where are the fact checkers responsible for fact checking CBS News? It’s worth noting that in their click crazy obsession this stalwart news organization (just kidding) was surpassed by another “news” organization (this one of firing range fame) that once again mired itself in a fact challenged story regarding who knew what when about Coronavirus. ABC News claimed that the Defense Intelligence Agency warned about a virus that might attack America back in November. {NOTE: If your wondering WHO the DIA reports to, check out this extremely information article } This bit of oh, lets go with “poor” journalistic effort on the part of ABC News caused the DIA to issue a very rare response as reported on by Twitchy.com. The referenced article on Twitchy re posted a tweet showing the DIA’s denial of ABC New’s ‘scoop’
Perhaps CBS and NBC can begin fact checking one another, at the very least that should provide the American public with some amusement (which is far more than the public gets now). But truthfully at this point there is only one question to ask ABC, CBS and all the other “news” (Wow, it sure takes a lot of quotation marks to get through a story nowadays) organizations that re post and otherwise disseminate this drivel, and that question is
How hard is it to convert Yuan to Dollars?
