I love fact-checking websites like Politifact and factcheck.org and am sad that more folks don't. Some people seem to treat them as great annoyances or even weapons in some conspiracy to rewrite history. I keep imagining a scenario that goes something like this…
- Someone has long had a hate on for Whoopi Goldberg. He doesn't like her comedy or doesn't like her face or doesn't like something she said or doesn't like black women named Whoopi or something…
- Someone else posts on the web a story that says Ms. Goldberg was "humiliated, handcuffed and dragged out of the TV studio," arrested for operating an illegal puppy mill." The originator of this story probably doesn't believe this for a minute. I mean, he knows it came from his imagination. Maybe he wants to see how many suckers he can get to believe it. Maybe he just wants the clicks on his site. As I related here, I was once asked to write for a movie gossip magazine by an editor who didn't care if her headlines were true, just so long as they caused people to buy the magazine.
- But that Whoopi hater loves the story. He clicks. He spreads his joy to others.
- A fact-checking site debunks the story pretty thoroughly but then — and this is the amazing part to me —
- The Whoopi-hater doesn't retract or decide he was hoaxed. He likes the story too much for that. He still believes it because he's fantasized a lot of things about Ms. Goldberg and decided that she's just the kind of despicable human who would run an illegal puppy mill.
- So any source that says it ain't so has to be lying, covering-up, part of the conspiracy to hide the truth, etc.
Too often these days, we see situations that are like the old joke line, "My mind is made up. Don't confuse me with facts!" I suppose people have always been this stubborn but the increase of online social media and "news" channels like Fox News have given these people a greater, louder voice. I don't like it when reality has to be sacrificed in the quest for some supposed greater good.
I occasionally have a few beefs with fact-checking sites, one being that they sometimes seem to not differentiate between bad phraseology or merely being wrong and a deliberate lie. Another is the idea that we can "score" lies like this…
That's the one on Trump and it usually gets touted as saying something like, "84% of all Trump statements" are either Half True, Mostly False, False or "Pants on Fire." No, it doesn't. It's a measure of the Trump statements that Politifact chose to examine. Last week when Trump said "I love chocolate ice cream," they didn't score that.
The man makes 77-minute speeches and in a 77-minute speech, he probably says several hundred things one could evaluate as fact or fiction. They choose to evaluate five or ten of them…the ones most likely to turn out to be untrue. The final score has a lot to do with which ones they decide are worth an analysis.
This is not to say I don't think Donald Trump lies his ass off every chance he gets. I'm just suggesting the measuring system is being represented as something it's not.
Also, all untrue statements are not equal. Politifact just cited columnist David Frum for saying, "No president in history has imposed larger personal lifestyle costs on the taxpayer than Donald Trump." They say that's Mostly False because all the data on that isn't in yet. Politifact adds, "Although Frum didn't include this qualifier, he might have meant at this point in Trump's presidency. Trump does seem on pace to outstrip previous presidential spending by the end of his term."
In other words, it's looking like Frum will be proven right but he hasn't been yet. That's a lot different from the other kinds of things Politifact rates as Mostly False, like Trump claiming there are things in a health bill that aren't in there or saying "Gas prices are the lowest in the U.S. in over ten years!" when they aren't.
All that said, I'm glad we have these fact-checking sites and I haven't seen one yet that didn't strike me as a lot more accurate than the people they cover. My problem isn't really with them. It's that too many people in this country don't want to believe what they don't want to believe.