Brian C. Joondeph asks important questions about the fact-checkers:
American media have abandoned their primary job of reporting the news. Gone are the days of telling readers and viewers the who, what, where, when, and why. Now it’s telling the audience what to think, after filtering the news story through layers of bias and activism.
The latest trick is “fact-checking” President Trump in “real time.” I don’t recall any mainstream news networks fact-checking Barack Obama. In anticipation of Trump’s first Oval Office address, and immediately following, the anti-Trump resistance media went into fact-check mode.
There was this CNN: “Fact-checking Trump’s immigration speech.”
NPR jumped in with “FACT CHECK: Trump’s Oval Office Pitch for A Border Wall,” followed by the New York Times: “Trump’s Speech to the Nation: Fact Checks and Background.” And then Politico: “Fact check: Trump’s speech on border crisis.”
A CNN crank even encouraged fact-checkers to prepare for Trump’s eight-minute speech as they would for a triathlon, with proper nutrition and rest.
It’s as though all the major media organizations read from the same playbook. Perhaps they do. A few years ago, “[a]n off-the-record online meeting space called JournoList” was revealed. The same sort of thing likely still does exist in some other name or form, allowing such immediate coordinated attacks by news organization that are ostensibly in competition with each other. Yet their reporting and headlines are so coordinated as to suggest a form of collusion or conspiracy. Maybe Robert Mueller can investigate this.
Some degree of fact-checking is reasonable, if it’s applied equally to leaders of both political parties, but not when it becomes the entire story. Before President Trump even uttered a word, the fact-checkers were lined up, ready to provide real-time rebuttals to every word Trump uttered.
But who fact-checks the fact-checkers? Why are we supposed to believe CNN or MSNBC and their supposed fact-checkers? These are the same media organizations that ignored the blatant lies about the Benghazi video or “hands up, don’t shoot.” They refused to fact-check “if you like your insurance and doctor, you can keep them.” They doctored George Zimmerman’s 911 call to make him sound like a racist.
Read more: American Thinker
