Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images
“Fact-checking” is like “fake news”: Something that is now entirely in the eye of the beholder.
At the vice presidential debate this week, the CBS moderators once again tried to show that they were the fair and impartial people in the room
Except that — as with the Trump-Harris debate — they only seemed interested in fact-checking in one direction. Against the Republican.
On Tuesday night the subject of Springfield, Ohio, once again came up. And once again Springfield revealed one of the big problems of this media era.
CBS’s Margaret Brennan decided to fact check something that JD Vance said and immediately relayed a piece of false information herself.
Following Vance’s point about the number of illegal migrants Brennan announced authoritatively that Springfield does in fact have “a large number of Haitian migrants” but that they have “legal status [and] Temporary Protected Status.”
It was then down to Vance to fact-check the fact-checker by pointing out — correctly — that what Brennan had just described was actually a “pathway” opened up by Kamala Harris explicitly to fudge the true levels of illegal immigration.
Without his correction viewers could easily have come away with the idea that there are no problems in places like Springfield because the stories of illegal migrants are untrue and what Ohio actually has is just a large collection of people with “legal status” in the United States.
At least Vance got a chance (albeit very interrupted) to correct his interviewer. When Kamala Harris used the Presidential debate to make a set of verifiably claims, her ABC hosts repeatedly let her get away with it.
For instance, they must have known that the big Democrat boogey-man “Project 2025” has nothing to do with Donald Trump or his campaign.
But they let Harris make her claims anyway, safe in the knowledge that her ABC hosts would let her get away with it.
Yet this is such a counter-productive way to operate. It is one thing to show that Donald Trump was exaggerating or wrong when he talked about Haitian immigrants eating dogs and cats.
It is quite another to go so far the other way that you end up pretending that places like Springfield do not in fact have found it impossible to assimilate numbers of illegal migrants living in their communities.
Look around the media and you see the same problem everywhere. Much of the media will tell you that they regard their job as being to decide what is true and what is false. But the problem is that most of them aren’t any good at the task they set themselves.
In Britain the national broadcaster — the BBC — recently set up a special department called “BBC Verify” which is meant to “fact-check” content across the media. But they can’t even get the BBC’s own facts right.
On issue after issue — foreign and domestic — “BBC Verify” has overseen verifiably untrue stories.
I understand the panic in these media institutions.
It is true that since the arrival of social media the role of the media as the “gatekeepers” of what is true has fallen away.
On platforms like X anybody can point to a piece of false information put out on the main news channels.
At the same time, the eruption of a whole new set of media platforms has diluted the power of the gatekeepers.
But the truth is that the new landscape is not so impossible to walk across as the BBC, ABC and others seem to think.
The public are wiser than they know.
For instance a story can be “fake” not just because it is untrue, but because it is a story which is either published or not published in order to suit a particular narrative.
Take yesterday’s front-page story in the New York Post about Doug Emhoff. You would have thought that a story about the potential “first husband” assaulting an ex-girlfriend would be the sort of story that would interest all of the media.
But many papers and channels are rooting for Vice President Harris and her husband, and so a strange veil of silence has been cast over the story by Democrat-supporting media.
If there was a time in the past where papers could successfully snuff out such a story that time is past.
Today readers can find it anyway. But as they do so the media who won’t cover it look more and more transparent. And ever less trustworthy.
It is the same with the latest October surprise, with the unsealing of new evidence in the federal election case against Trump.
When Judge Tanya Chutkan takes the unprecedented move of making public filings by prosecutors about whether a case should go forward are the public actually persuaded by the anti-Trump media snapping into line?
Giving Kamala Harris her newest line of attack? Or do the public in fact see through this? Knowing that this is just the sort of trick they were expecting in the month before the election?
I think it is the latter.
You used to know where you were with certain media. Today, with some papers, you still do.
For instance, if you pick up this paper you do so in the knowledge that the New York Post does not like crime and would prefer it not to run rampant in our city.
But not all the media are so open about their views. And the ones that pretend to be “unbiased” or “impartial” are in fact the most biased and partial of the lot.
A reminder of who enemy is
Good news stories are hard to come by today. But the rescue of Fawzia Amin Sido this week is one.
At the age of 11, ten years ago, the Yazidi girl was taken as a slave by ISIS in Iraq. There she was “bought” by a member of Hamas-ISIS and taken to Gaza as his “wife.”
Since her rescue by the Israeli Defense Forces in Gaza she has been reunited with her family.
How many students in North America know about such cases? Or even know who the Yazidi people are? Very few I would think.
Another Yazidi survivor of ISIS sexual slavery had her campus lectures cancelled a couple of years ago. Out of fears that telling her story might “foster Islamophobia.” Interesting the priorities some institutions have.