Mainstream and Social Media and Their Fact Checkers 1

This is a dubious award if there ever was one.  Quote: "The liar of the year is PolitiFact. PolitiFact's lie of the year is "Lies about the Jan. 6 Capitol attack and its significance." But it was PolitiFact's version of the January 6 protest inside the Capitol that was the big, fat lie. PolitiFact has a lengthy history of lying to serve the Marxists and Maoists in Washington. In 2008, it vouched for Obama's ridiculous claim that you can keep your health plan. Obamacare was designed to kill or make extremely expensive individual health insurance plans. Only after his election, passage of Obamacare, and his re-election did PolitiFact admit Obama lied. Repeatedly. In 2013, PolitiFact named it its lie of the year. That itself was a lie. He did not say it in 2013. He said it in 2008 when PolitiFact assured one and all that it was true, true, true. 

Forbes -- hardly a conservative publication -- said in 2013, "Pants On Fire: PolitiFact Tries To Hide That It Rated 'True' in 2008 Obamacare's 'Keep Your Health Plan' Promise." How can any lie top that? PolitiFact did.

        In 2017, PolitiFact's lie of the year was, "Russian election interference is a 'made-up story.'" But the Russian story was a cockamamie story made up by Hillary's campaign. 4 years later, John Durham's investigation has clearly shown this to be true. Yet PolitiFact continues to call it a lie. That was not the only lie PolitiFact told that year. It called President Trump a liar for saying Obama used the FBI to spy on him and his campaign. It quoted Comey, who lied to Congress and said, "With respect to the president's tweets about alleged wiretapping directed at him by the prior administration, I have no information that supports those tweets and we have looked carefully inside the FBI.  "The Department of Justice has asked me to share with you that the answer is the same for the Department of Justice and all its components. The department has no information that supports those tweets." Comey signed the FISA applications to authorize the domestic spying. Transcripts from that wiretapping were given to the New York Times which indeed called it wiretapping in a front-page story on Inauguration Day. PolitiFact aided and abetted his perjury.

       This year, PolitiFact went full-blown Pinocchio as it misrepresented the protest at the Capitol. It began its tall tale, "Shortly after 2 p.m. on Jan. 6, supporters of President Donald J. Trump breached the U.S. Capitol, turning the seat of American democracy into the scene of an unforgettable crime." Crime scene? Really? Was it a crime scene when protesters stormed the Senate building when Kavanaugh was up for the Supreme Court?  The fairy tale said, "After marching down Pennsylvania Avenue at Trump’s urging, the rioters had overwhelmed police surrounding the Capitol. They pushed past them, stripped them of their weapons, dragged them to the ground, sprayed them with chemical irritants, beat them, bludgeoned them, or tased them." None of that happened. The early reports were wrong. In fact, police killed one unarmed protester -- Ashli Babbitt. PolitiFact did not say her name. Not once.  It is bizarre. But then again, so was saying Obama did not lie about keeping your health plan. PolitFact is the best example I know of what is wrong with American Journalism in the 21st century. It lies repeatedly and with no shame.     Don Surber: The liar of the year is PolitiFact

Most so called fact checkers are left wing propaganda agents challenging everything that does not fit one of the political left's far too many false narratives. This illustrates the point. Quote: "The facts they check - the perilous implications of fact-checks going wrong. On the face of it, it sounded preposterous - Senator Tom Cotton tweeted on March 8 that "every Democrat voted to send checks to prisoners," including "the Boston Bomber," Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. This claim - that prisoners were getting COVID stimulus checks - and others like it were fact-checked by The Washington Post's Glenn Kessler the very next day. These "hyped-up claims about who's getting stimulus checks," Kessler wrote, was "scaremongering" and "very unlikely to happen." Cotton was awarded two "Pinocchios" for the supposed lie. Then came the news earlier this month that presented a bit of a problem for Kessler and his fact-checking bonafides - we learned that Tsarnaev did in fact receive a COVID stimulus check. The new information forced a correction of sorts to the fact-check, with Kessler tweeting out that the "Pinocchio rating" had been "adjusted":  Yes, now it was just one Pinocchio for Cotton - for lacking context.
        If this were an isolated incident, perhaps we could dismiss it as a rare miss for the fact-check industry which prides itself on definitive truth on matters of fact and fiction. But sadly, it's not. No, it's not even the first time The Washington Post has had to correct a fact-check of Cotton. In February 2020, the Post's fact-checkers published a fact-check claiming Cotton had been repeating a "debunked conspiracy theory" about the origins of COVID - namely that it may have originated in a lab in Wuhan. They have since updated it to say it's a "fringe theory," although as we know now, it isn't fringe at all. Of course The Washington Post wasn't alone in failed fact-checks of Cotton's COVID origin comments - here's CNN's attempt.
       It's bad when it's a reporter getting a story wrong. But when it's a fact-checker getting a fact-check wrong, the implications are catastrophic for trust in the media. These journalists hold themselves up as the final say on the truth - when it's revealed to be false, the reverberations are vast.It's easy to say the fact-checkers get stories wrong when it comes to Republicans, but that's too simplistic. I find the whole need to fact-check bizarre. Out of the entire overheated voting rights speech from President Biden last week, Kessler chose to fact-check an aside about getting arrested 70 years ago, awarding it the dreaded quadruple Pinocchio. While it probably didn't happen, it's impossible to know for sure. And also, who cares?
       CNN's Daniel Dale, who made a career out of fact-checking President Trump, hasn't turned his sights onto President Biden in more than six weeks. Instead he's busy yesterday fact-checking claims from Republican politicians who were trying to make a point about voter ID that you actually don't need a photo ID to "buy milk" in D.C. This is "false," he writes. No, you just need to show a photo ID in D.C. to go to "restaurants, bars, food halls and food courts, nightclubs, breweries, entertainment venues, exercise facilities and meeting facilities." So glad we could devote our fact-checking resources to this important distinction.

       Fact-checks have become a fetish for many in the media, and their superfans on Twitter. But these fact-check fails undermine their very purpose - and make the audience more distrustful of the press."     The facts they check (mailchi.mp)

The ethics and morality problems of left-wing mainstream media personalities speaks volumes as to why we should never listen to or watch their left-wing oriented drivel. Far too many of them suffer from immorality and lack of ethics which  are in the toilet. Quote: " On Wednesday, CNN’s CEO Jeff Zucker resigned amid a CNN investigation into a potentially inappropriate relationship the former CNN chief had. As part of the investigation into Chris Cuomo’s tenure at CNN, I was asked about a consensual relationship with my closest colleague, someone I have worked with for more than 20 years. I acknowledged the relationship evolved in recent years. I was required to disclose it when it began but I didn’t. I was wrong. As a result, I am resigning today. I came to CNN on January 28, 2013. Together, we had nine great years. I certainly wish my tenure here had ended differently. But it was an amazing run. And I loved every minute."     Jeff Zucker Leaves CNN (americanbriefing.com)