One of the Worst Liberal “Fact-Checkers” is Finally Gone

T. Becket Adams had an amusing column Tuesday that was absolutely spot on. The headline was “Death to the ‘fact check’”.

Here is the lead:

If we’re eliminating whole categories of journalism — which certainly seems to be the case for sports reporting — can we also do away with the “fact check” genre?

It has always been a silly gimmick, the idea that there should be a separate vertical dedicated solely to fact-checking (checking the facts is already the main goal of journalism). But even as ill-conceived as the concept is, nothing could have prepared us for how farcical the genre would eventually become.

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I’ve written dozens of columns on the pseudo-science of “fact checking.” Popularized by the Washington Post’s [recently departed] Glenn Kessler, Kessler would pronounce how accurate a statement was based on [his] scale of one to four Pinocchios. If you got four, well, how dare you show your face in polite company.

The contrast between his oh-so-tender treatment of former President Joe Biden and Kessler’s no-prisoners-taken assault on President Donald Trump was captured beautifully by Jordan Boyd:

When it came to counting the cost of serial liar President Joe Biden’s gaffes and untruths, though, Kessler refused. Instead, he complained that he had “not seen evidence” of the lies and flip-flops spewed by Biden and his team.

Kessler didn’t simply ignore the Democrat administration’s tangled web of deceptions. He actively defended the Biden White House’s whoppers….

Adams’s column illustrated how the Legacy Media’s gleefully snippy, looking-for-the-tiniest-errors treatment of President Trump’s State of the Union Address was enough to give pettifoggery a bad name.

“The revolution that began in 1776 has not ended,” Trump said. “It still continues because the flame of liberty and independence still burns in the heart of every American patriot, and our future will be bigger, better, brighter, bolder, and more glorious than ever before.”

Associated Press fact-checkers were on it.

“To be clear,” the AP fact-check reads, “the American Revolution started the previous year, on April 19, 1775. The colonies declared independence in 1776. It ended Sept. 3, 1783.”

It’s as if we’re trying to make the public hate us.

Trump also used his speech last week to praise the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team, which had just won the gold medal for the first time since the year that audiences asked, “Who shot J.R.?”

“I’ve never seen a goaltender play as well as goalie Connor Hellebuyck,” said the president. “Think of it, 46 shots on goal.”

This isn’t quite right. Canada took 42 shots against Team U.S.A., and Hellebuyck stopped 41 of them. It’s a minor point, but the New York Times was not about to let it slide.

“This is exaggerated,” the Times reported, adding, “OK, this is definitely a pedantic fact check.”

You don’t say.

Adams’ list goes on and on. The Legacy Media eagerly sought out—manufactured—evidence of incipient “totalitarianism” only to subsequently issue a “clarification” and then add another clarification which, for example, stated “Update: The rating on this article has been changed to ‘inconclusive.’”

The obvious point is that “clarifications” consist of only a tiny paragraph of two which only one in a thousand people who saw/read the first lie will ever see.

Last July when Kessler announced that he was accepting a buyout, nobody summed it up better than HOTAIR’s David Strom

Kessler has had an outsized impact on American politics, being a member of the elite class that determines what Narrative can be told. He literally claimed to establish what was fact and what was fiction, and his mission has been promoting the fiction that Democrats own the facts. … Kessler was a poster boy for the regime propagandists. There wasn’t a false narrative pushed out by the left that Kessler didn’t parrot, and there wasn’t a fact that helped Republicans–especially Donald Trump–that he wouldn’t “debunk.”

LifeNews.com Note: Dave Andrusko is the editor of National Right to Life News and an author and editor of several books on abortion topics. He frequently writes Today’s News and Views — an online opinion column on pro-life issues.

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