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The Truth à La Carte
Infestation
Lou Jacobson (.@loujacobson) and .@PolitiFact descend
into self-parody
One of the many chancres on the genitalia of American journalism is the
“fact check” scam. This is where reporters, who generally aren’t
terribly well educated about anything, take it upon themselves to act
as a truth squad to uncover falsehoods by political figures. Virtually
without fail, even the simplest statements by Republicans are
false.
Back in 2012, I grew sofrustrated with the casual dishonesty of the
Washington Post’s “fact
checker”, Glenn Kessler, that I threatened, quite seriously, to ban
anyone who quoted any of the media fact checkers in a comment:
The Pinocchio Test
We cannot fault the RNC’s math, as the numbers add up. But at this
point this figure doesn’t mean very much. It may simply a function of a
coincidence of timing — a brief blip that could have little to do with
“Obama’s job market.”
If trends hold up over the next few months, then the RNC might have a
better case. But at this point we will give this statistic our rarely
used label:
TRUE BUT FALSE
But Kessler is not the worst. That title goes to the bunch of stooges
and ignoramuses who populate the staff of PolitiFact.com, a spawn of
the Tampa Bay Times.
Try these for examples.
PolitiFact rated a Rick Perry claim false after proving it was, in
fact, true. [ Etc ..]
Ca. 1998; In a post on Free
Republic, about hilarious television bloopers, I offered the Newlywed Game answer [That would be in the butt, Bob] a
women gave to Bob Eubank's question "where
is the weirdest place she'd ever made whoopee? " A reader
commented that Snopes
said this never happened. I wrote Snopes, saying that I had
actually
watched the episode, and could verify that it was true. Snopes
actually e-mailed me back, saying that,
sorry, it was urban legend.
They had called me, at best, a 'teller of tales; at worst a liar.
So,
I began monitoring Snopes, and correcting errors with sourced
rebuttals. I finally received a
I
have recently discovered that Snopes.com is owned by a flaming
California liberals [David and Barbara Mikkelson who are] an the
tank
for Obama. There are many things they have listed on their site as a
hoax and yet you can go to You tube yourself and find the video of
Obama actually saying these things. So you see, you cannot and should
not trust Snopes.com,
ever for anything that remotely resembles truth! I don’t even trust
them to tell me if email chains are hoaxes anymore. Alamo
City Pundidt- 2010
scathing e-mail from the Snopes Hdqrs
(I had no idea that it was run out of someone's kitchen) telling me to
fuck off. Later on, after I found a source for "in the butt,"
I sent it. Snopes didn't correct it until much later, and I
received
no apology. It dawned on me that this preeminent fact checker had
a
public responsibility to be accurate. I was offended.
Little did I imagine.
Sometime later the fact-check dam burst when Leftist political sites,
most notably the George Soros's funded Moveon.Org,
began gaming Google by internally tagging articles with things
like
"George Bush used Heroin" (for example). Every time the Google bot
scanned them, that invisible tag was picked up and before you know it,
anyone searching, say, "Republicans;
Drugs" would find George Bush leading
the list. This is very much a simplified example, but you get the
drift. Eventually Google caught on, and threatened to ban sites
who
used that tactic, but the horse was out of the barn, and the "Moveons"
were able to update their methodology and stay ahead of the game..
We have by now entered the stage where truth is what you want it to
be. So, e.g., when I see someone I know cite something on, say
Facebook,
that's inaccurate, any attempt to refute it will get me banned.
So, that's where we are. How do you fix that? I
have no idea. Do you? |
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