Fact-checking the fact-checkers: 'Pants on Fire' partisans
Category: News & Politics
Via: vic-eldred • 3 years ago • 44 commentsBy: Post Editorial Board (New York Post)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Snopes.com describes itself as the "definitive fact-checking site," yet turns out to be a big source of misinformation: Its cofounder has written dozens of plagiarized pieces — many of them attacks on Republican politicos.
It's just the latest example of "fact-checking" serving as a cover for partisan, left-wing opinion.
A BuzzFeed investigation found that Snopes' David Mikkelson has "been lying to the site's tens of millions of readers." Snopes, which has served as a Facebook fact-checker, confirmed that Mikkelson published at least 54 plagiarized articles under various bylines.
His fake alter-ego, Jeff Zarronandia, claimed to be a Pulitzer Prize winner and had bylines "on at least 23 Snopes articles on topics like Donald Trump's financial woes and false rumors about Hillary Clinton."
Snopes has suspended Mikkelson from editorial duties pending "a comprehensive internal investigation." But he's still a company officer and 50 percent shareholder.
And Snopes has other problems. A Thursday piece complained, "Facebook Fails To Stem COVID Denialism Even as Delta Variant Surges," and insisted that a post "misleadingly claimed: 'Delta is a distraction! Get your eyes back on the border!' . . . undermined the severity of the Delta variant surge." That's a fact check, for someone to suggest one news story is worth more attention than another?
Other "fact-checkers" play propagandist, too: PolitiFact, an actual Pulitzer Prize winner, this week rated "False" Texas Sen. Ted Cruz's statement that there is "clear, legal authority" for arrest of those fugitive Texas lawmakers — when the state's Supreme Court unanimously ruled that they could be arrested. The site claims, "While the language uses the word 'arrest,' there's uncertainty about how this term is to be interpreted." What does that even mean? Cruz was clearly right; PolitiFact was just mad about it.
This kind of bias is nothing new. Back in 2011, Mark Hemingway noted in The Weekly Standard that "the media seem oblivious to the distinction between verifying facts and passing judgment on opinions they personally find disagreeable." He cited a university study that found of the 98 statements PolitiFact rated false in a year, 74 were made by Republicans.
Ten years later, media continue to tout PolitiFact, Snopes and countless other "fact-checkers" as gospel. Will Snopes' downfall teach them a lesson they've failed to learn over a decade? We rate that "Unlikely."
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It's called BIAS and it is rampant throughout the dishonest left wing media and that goes double for the organization that claims to be "fairly" rating bias.
Something we have to deal with on a daily basis.
"We shall overcome"
I have been told "Facts have a liberal bias" many times. I guess that means literally a they make up their own facts.
Yup, now we know what those so called facts are: That covid came from a wet market, that police gun down innocent blacks in the street and that the Steele dossier wasn't used to get a FISA warrant.
What lies they got away with!
It was easy as the lemmings in the media kept repeating the same lies over and over. Which they get from Democrat politicians; who are regurgitating them to any brain dead sap that will listen.
How many times did the media site one article as fact that used an unverifiable source during the last 5 years in an effort to damage Trump? If they kept it circulating long enough it became the "truth". Didn't matter that it was all made up; there was no source; or the source was a TDS driven Democratic politician who was lying to push their agenda.
Now the media is ignoring anything damaging to Biden. Hunter Biden gets completely ignored. The border doesn't exist, and there is no illegal immigrant surge. The spike in Covid 19 cases are being blamed on Republican governors, and unvaccinated- even though the current spike coincides with the surge of illegals into this country- many of which were infected with the Delta variant. Afghanistan is Trump's fault- despite Joe overstaying the May 1st withdrawal deadline; not negotiating with the Taliban; ignoring Taliban treaty violations; and having no damn withdrawal plan. Now he has to send in the marines to rescue US personnel; but has the temerity to go on vacation. The media stays respectfully silent. After all it takes a lot of stress and hard work to fuck up things as much as Joe has done.
No one has to make an effort to damage Trump. That happens every time he opens his mouth.
The media will now have their hands full:
"All eyes are on President Biden as he responds to threats facing the U.S. and other countries, including COVID-19 variants, the Taliban's growing stronghold over Afghanistan, the U.S.-Mexico border crisis and inflation.
The spring of 2021 presented an optimistic outlook for the new president's administration as COVID-19 cases dwindled, millions were vaccinated, consumer spending rose and officials planned their move to pull U.S. troops from Afghanistan by Sept. 1.
But new fears are rising among Americans, and critics are condemning some of the president's earliest actions in his first term."
This idiot ran on nothing except that he was the option to Trump. He locked himself in his basement and once elected ruled like Bill Ayers. We are only 8 months in and the American people are already at the end of their rope! The 80 million, whoever they were, hung us all!
Spoken like a true TDS sufferer who believed every last disproven media POS article that was regurgitated over and over.
Then why do so many yahoos do it?????????????
Even some here participate in that shit!
Here's a hint, Americans whose thinking did not align with yours, it happens ... get used to it.
Here's one for you, a lot of them may have aligned with mine, they may not know it yet.
You need to keep your comments less personal.
You need to stop taking things so personally, it's unbecoming to your avatar.
Believe it or not, that's what Ted Kennedy told Robert Bork.
I doubt that we will ever return to there being no or even negligible bias in the media. In the late 1950s, when I was the editor of my university's student newspaper, our model for both format and content was The Christian Science Monitor. Back then it won, year after year, the media award for the LEAST biased news medium, but I've noted that it has leaned left since then. No such award exists any more, for obvious reasons.
I dont really care about "bias-free" news.
That would give us favorable stories about Trump, or the Jan 6th events, white nationalism, and Kayleigh Mc Anany, which is absurd.
What a shock/s
Yes Buzz, it began during the Vietnam War. It was very subtle then. Somewhere around the time of Obama it got extreme to the point that most of America knows it. All the blessings of a free press are erradicated by a media that has been poisoned by the worst ideology in the western world.
You are quite right unbiased journalism may never return. One day it may even be biased from the other direction. All we need is another generation to recognize it.
"biased from the other direction"? Come on Vic. Depending on the source there is bias in BOTH directions. Does it really take a person who is not an American to realize that - or to admit that truth?
I only know of 3 major news outlets that are not skewed left. I consider those three to be honest and objective.
So, therefore, I disagree. It is not a left - right thing. It's just a left thing.
I wouldn't have expected a right-wing conservative American like yourself to have a different opinion. If in fact there is such a mountain of left-wing media as compared to a molehill of right-wing media, one might wonder why.
There is in fact a mountain of left wing mainstream media in America along with their fact checking allies. Fact checkers are open as being enemies of conservatives and religious belief.
No need to wonder Buzz. The university has produced a lot of indocrtinated illiterates. Many didn't go into business, instead they swarmed into to the media & government. Decent Americans have concerned themselves with supporting & raising families. It all happened right under our noses. There is one good thing about Biden's radical policies - they finally got America's attention.
I wouldn't have expected a right-wing conservative American like yourself to have a different opinion.
Are we going to start characterizing each other?
Despite the booshwa Vic and XX will throw here, the idea that the left "media" dominates political discourse is pretty ridiculous.
First of all, right wingers and conservatives like to brag about how traditional media has been surpassed by other sources. Big 3 news ratings are down, The New York Times and Washington Post are "dying" , no one pays any attention to liberal commentators, etc etc.
And of course social media has a huge right wing presence.
People today get news information from a variety of sources, including Facebook and Twitter, where clips from other sources are posted by the thousands every day.
And then there is You Tube. You Tube features many right wing shows and commentators and they literally brag about how their programs are more successful, with more views, than the liberal ones.
The idea that the left controls information to any discernible advantage is a claim that lost relevance years ago.
The definition of GASLIGHTING.
The entire country knows it!
The credibility of fact checkers depends on whether or not what they produce relates to the facts in question.
Anyone can be a fact checker, all it takes is some basic intelligence and the time to do it.
In other words there is no bias in fact checking if it is done properly. The sad truth for conservatives is that facts regularly do not support what they say. We see that play out on NT every day.
Another lying statement. How do expect to win debates, John?
What percentage of Trump's statements do you think are rated "false" or "pants on fire" Vic?
It depends on who does the rating. Clearly you distorted what he said. Of course, the media did it first. That's the point here, John.
It was one of the great distortions.
Fact checkers are just opinion pundits. That some people think they are some sort of font of objectivity is alarming.
You are correct. They are themselves without exception the very definition of bias.
Nonsense, fact checkers are not, and do not claim to be, experts. Fact checkers research statements, often consulting with experts, and provide complete access to the research from which they draw their conclusions. You are free to read the research and dispute it, but I have found that sites like Snopes & Politifact are pretty careful about collecting data. It is not unusual for them to declare that they can't determine veracity from available info; that the statement falls between true & false.
This seed's presentation of the Ted Cruz arrest statement is purposely misleading as I explain in 5 below.
What a disingenuous start to your "rebuttal." I never intimated that they were experts or that they claimed to be. Anyone who pays attention to them knows they aren't. They are, as I actually said, pundits who offer opinions.
t I have found that sites like Snopes & Politifact are pretty careful about collecting data.
Did you even read the article? And, no, they aren't. The number of times they attack conservatives for writing or saying something objectively true, but isn't spun the way liberals want is legion. Often, all they do is spin truths they don't like to make them more palatable to liberals.
t s seed's presentation of the Ted Cruz arrest statement is purposely misleading as I explain in 5 below .
Not at all. The attack on Cruz is a perfect example of a fact checker simply acting as a liberal pundit. The actual legal authority, the Texas Constitution and House Rulebook, clearly supports Cruz's argument, which was validated by the Texas Supreme Court. Poltifact being the good liberal soldier that it is, simply claimed it was false because it found a liberal to say it was. If that's the standard Politfact wants to employ, than any politician who claims the law is on his side is lying if someone, somewhere, claims the law, no matter how clear, should be interpreted differently. But, of course, Politifact would never hold a Democrat to that standard.
Right wingers NEED fact checkers to be biased. Otherwise the right is pretty defenseless.
Fact checkers usually have a good reason for their decisions. The only thing that might be questionable is if they fact check more conservative statements than liberal ones. Then again, that could also depend on who says the most ridiculous things. I think that at this stage a lot of the false shit comes from the loose screws of trumpism.
Read the article so that you might know what the rest of us know. Social media has shut down news stories that would have hurt Joe Biden during the election (The Hunter Biden story was censored), they have classified reasonable commentary as "misinformation" and have allowed real misinformation, such as when the CDC director lied about more children dying of covid that the flu - her own CDC stats contradicted her.
Your GASLIGHTING John!
That doesn't make any sense.
checkers usually have a good reason for their decisions.
Usually, it's to spin the argument to support the democratic party as best it can. You recall, no doubt, the narrative about the "thousands" of lies Trump told that the left promoted tirelessly even though the fact checker himself stated they weren't all lies? Putting aside the irony for a second, even the claim about the supposed misstatements were bogus. I recall an economist examined a sample of Trump's supposed lies about the economy. The economists found that some significant percentage of Trump's lies, were objectively true. Trump quoted a fact, whose accuracy the fact checker didn't dispute, and was called a liar because Trump didn't spin the fact the way the liberal fact checker wanted. That's "fact checking" in a nutshell.
Without claiming that fact checkers are biased, right wingers have very little argument against fact checkers. Rarely can they reasonably claim that the fact checkers are wrong.
Yes you did, pundit: " an expert in a particular subject or field who is frequently called on to give opinions about it to the public". Which is not what fact checkers are. They are researchers, and their research is readily available for dispute if you don't agree with their conclusion.
Yes I did, and I gave my analysis of it in 5 below.
Give some examples of Snopes stating something is false where it is just spin.
Nope. When the Politifact fact check was done (July 16, 2021) there had been no Texas Supreme court ruling, so Cruz's statement that they could be arrested was false. Here's one reason why Politifact said this:
Randall Erben...former legislative director to Abbott -- seems unlikely to be a liberal. Politifact was simply telling the truth, which was that there was no existing authority to arrest the democrats at that time. A lower court prevented the arrests from going through until the Supreme Court ruling which happened in August. The way this seed presented the Ted Cruz story is a perfect example of misleading.
If you bother to read my analysis of this seed below ( 5 ), you will find the seed to be full of obfuscation and misleading/incomplete statements. It is total bullshit.
This seed is bullshit.
This makes it seem like the pseudonym was being used to establish credibility. If you read the bio, the Pulitzer is in numismatics, and you also find that he won the Distinguished Conflagration Award of the American Society of Muleskinners. Clearly this is a joke. Mikkelson used a pseudonym to publish plagiarized stories to get clicks. These had nothing to do with the fact checking. Great obfuscation, much more to come…
Nope, again not a fact check, simply a story about deflection happening on Facebook.
At he time of Politifact's analysis no court had ruled, so it wasn’t “clear..”. From the analysis:
Politifact wasn’t angry about anything, just reporting current information.
Yeah, I’m surprised it’s only 74 too. This is more obfuscation. If your opinion is that the Earth is flat, you are wrong.
Oh my lord, that’s stupid.
In second thought, it’s just clearly dishonest. It’s their readers they think are stupid.
If you're a purveyor of "alternative facts" in the Trumpist universe, of course you're going to claim that fact checkers are biased.
And if you are a purveyor of "fact checks" which really aren't, of course you are willing to scoff at any criticism levied against the "fact checkers".
Any and all newspapers, news programs and fact checkers will get something wrong, the nature of those beasts is human. It is the nature of the partisan beast to then claim all they report is fake. This has been going on for millenia. In 'modern' America it was mutilated by Gingrich just enough for Trump to brutalise it.
Could have told anyone that during the Obama yrs.
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