Facts Have a Well-Known Liberal Bias
There are two central facts about 21st-century U.S. politics. First, we suffer from asymmetric polarization: the Republican Party has become an extremist institution with little respect for traditional norms of any kind. Second, mainstream media – still the source of most political information for the great majority of Americans – haven’t been able to come to grips with this reality. Even in the age of Trump, they try desperately to be “balanced”, which in practice means bending over backwards to say undeserved nice things about Republicans and take undeserved swipes at Democrats.
Paul Ryan, the speaker of the House, in October>
Gabriella Demczuk for The New York Times
This dynamic played a crucial role in last year’s election; it’s one of the reasons major news organizations devoted more time to Hillary Clinton’s emails than to all policy issues combined. But it has been going on for years. It’s the whole story of Paul Ryan’s career: journalists trying to be centrists desperately wanted to show their neutrality by praising a Serious, Honest, Conservative, and promoted Ryan into that role even though it was obvious from the beginning that he was a con man.
And it’s still playing out, as we can see from what looks like a looming debacle in Facebook’s efforts to institute fact-checking.
Facebook wanted responsible fact-checking organizations to partner with, and several such organizations exist. But all of these organizations are constantly attacked by the right as having a left-wing bias – so it added The Weekly Standard, even though it clearly failed to meet internationally accepted standards for that role.
So what’s the basis for claims that, say, PolitiFact is biased? Hey, The Weekly Standard itself has explained the criteria:
Surveys done by the University of Minnesota and George Mason University have shown that the supposedly impartial “fact checking” news organization rates Republican claims as false three times as often as Democratic claims and twice as much, respectively.
Notice the implicit assumption here – namely, that impartial fact-checking would find an equal number of false claims from each party. But what if – bear with me a minute – Republicans actually make more false claims than Democrats?
Take a not at all arbitrary example: tax policy. The GOP is deeply committed to the proposition that tax cuts pay for themselves, a view that has no support whatsoever from professional economists. Can you find any comparable insistence on a view experts consider false on the Democratic side?
Similarly, the GOP is deeply committed to climate change denial, despite the overwhelming consensus of scientists that anthropogenic climate change is real and dangerous. Again, where’s the Democratic counterpart?
There are, of course, individual liberals who say things that aren’t true, on all sorts of issues. But huge falsehoods by major party figures – where by falsehood I mean something demonstrably false, not a view you disagree with – are far more common on the right than the left.
It’s interesting and important to understand where this difference comes from. It’s also something of a puzzle. True, the parties are very different institutions – the GOP has historically been hierarchical, with top-down direction and monolithic doctrine, while Democrats have always been a loose-jointed coalition. But these days the GOP looks pretty chaotic – yet the insurgent forces seem to be pushing it even further away from any respect for facts.
Whatever the deep explanation, however, the parties are not the same. And trying to pretend that they are the same isn’t just foolish, it’s deeply destructive. Indeed, it’s one important reason Donald Trump sits in the White House.
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by Paul Krugman
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This is a variant of the "both sides do it" cop-out.
Very few human activities are binary (yes / no, hot / cold, on / off, ...). Almost all are sliding scales (1 to 10, "very little" to "a lot", tiny to huge, ...). Reducing a sliding scale to binary is profoundly false.
Person A lies 90% of the time. Person B lies 10% of the time. The sentence "They both lie!" is "strictly" true, but very very wrong if the objective is to describe reality.
"All Presidents have lied" is probably a true statement. Strictly true. And entirely false as a description of American history. There has never been a President who has lied anywhere as frequently and as egregiously as Donald Trump.
The pundits who dance the "both sides do it" dance are either incompetent, hypocritical, or both.
Ahh yes, Republican false equivalency arguments. If it wasn't for blatant hypocrisy, the gang of corporate thugs would have no argument to make at all. After projecting fake outrage for 8 solid years about Obama being:
unqualified
inexperienced
divisive
stupid
ignorant
laughed at and disrespected by world
narcissistic
a megalomaniac
arrogant
a president who golfs too much
like a dictator
etc, etc, etc
they put Donald fucking Trump in the White House! I mean what are we supposed to do, seriously debate the merits of having a totally idiotic and insane piece of dirt like Trump for a president?? Sorry righties, you are no longer worth taking seriously, not after defending Trump. Anyone who defends this abomination of an administration is an ignorant fool, period. Both sides are NOT the same, not even close.
It constantly amazes me that the people who nominated Clinton and still believe CNN is the "most trusted name in news" has the nerve to call anybody dishonest.
Both are incredibly honest in comparison to President Trump. What amazes me is after 8 straight years of howling and moaning about what a 'liar' President Obama was, the right wing dingbats are perfectly ok with an actual pathological liar taking his place.
As long as the economy is going well, illegals are being kept out and the left keeps going insane Trump can make up all the silly lies he wants.
He's watching a very different "mainstream media" than I am.
I'm watching one full of people who can barely hide their disgust and are having difficulty maintaining their professionalism. I'm seeing a mainstream media increasingly populated with younger (cheaper) writers, who don't understand the idea of impartiality.