“Writers have been bowing to the ‘fact checkers’ as submissively as
Barack Obama upon meeting some anti-American dictator,” the Wall Street Journal’s James Taranto quipped in a devastating take-down of the rise of the news media’s so-called “fact checkers.”
In “The Pinocchio Press: The bizarre rise of ‘fact checking’ propagandists” posted on Tuesday, the author of the daily “Best of the Web Today” noted “the usual conservative complaint about all this ‘fact checking’ is the same as the conservative complaint about the MSM’s product in general: that it is overwhelmingly biased toward the left.” But, he concluded, “the form amplifies the bias. It gives journalists much freer rein to express their opinions by allowing them to pretend to be rendering authoritative judgments about the facts.”
“The result,” he thoroughly documented, “is shoddy arguments and shoddier journalism.”
Taranto suggested “perhaps the reason other journalists are so deferential toward the ‘fact checkers’ is that these fact checkers, unlike the traditional ones, don’t check the facts of journalists but of politicians.”
Running through some examples from the week before, Taranto demonstrated how “the quality of their work is generally quite poor.” An excerpt from Taranto's persuasive September 4 post:
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2012/09/08/taranto-discredits-media-fact-checkers-shows-how-they-amplify-media-s-l#ixzz25vWzLlJT
In “The Pinocchio Press: The bizarre rise of ‘fact checking’ propagandists” posted on Tuesday, the author of the daily “Best of the Web Today” noted “the usual conservative complaint about all this ‘fact checking’ is the same as the conservative complaint about the MSM’s product in general: that it is overwhelmingly biased toward the left.” But, he concluded, “the form amplifies the bias. It gives journalists much freer rein to express their opinions by allowing them to pretend to be rendering authoritative judgments about the facts.”
“The result,” he thoroughly documented, “is shoddy arguments and shoddier journalism.”
Taranto suggested “perhaps the reason other journalists are so deferential toward the ‘fact checkers’ is that these fact checkers, unlike the traditional ones, don’t check the facts of journalists but of politicians.”
Running through some examples from the week before, Taranto demonstrated how “the quality of their work is generally quite poor.” An excerpt from Taranto's persuasive September 4 post:
“The MSM’s [‘mainstream’ media’s] fact-checkers often don’t know what they’re talking about,” notes Mickey Kaus, who cites an example on a subject he knows well:
The oft-cited CNN-“fact check” of Romney’s welfare ad makes a big deal of HHS secretary [Kathleen] Sebelius’ pledge that she will only grant waivers to states that “commit that their proposals will move at least 20% more people from welfare to work.” CNN swallows this 20% Rule whole in the course of declaring Romney’s objection “wrong”:
Read more: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/brent-baker/2012/09/08/taranto-discredits-media-fact-checkers-shows-how-they-amplify-media-s-l#ixzz25vWzLlJT
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