I don’t necessarily agree with Shodan’s claim that it’s all due to the liberal-leaning MSM. I think it’s certainly explicable just by rushed deadlines and basic incompetence. But I can’t prove that one way or the other.
What they need to do with fact checking is make the caveats more clear, the way Cecil does in his columns. Disagreeing with proven facts is just cause for ridicule. Disagreeing with expert predictions is not. It’s going out on a limb, but it’s not “false”.
I’d say that this falls under fact checking, because Jeb’s 4% amounts to fantasy.
I can promise unlimited sunny days during my administration if I’m elected president, but just because there is a statistical chance that it’ll happen, doesn’t mean I’m not full of shit for saying it.
In this case, Jeb’s opinion is marvelously unlikely. If he didn’t want horseshit to be called on it, he shouldn’t have assigned a number.
“This dick salve will add two inches in two days. But that’s just my opinion, man.”
ACA is not actually fully in effect though. The employer mandate doesn’t go into effect until this current signup period, and given that it’s an election year, what do you think the odds are that the PResident will actually allow it to take effect?
If you restrict fact checking to the literal checking of facts, true. But for the most part political discourse is fact-free, and if fact checking organizations did this they would have a lot of time on their hands. The province of fact checking has now grown to cover absurd claims - and this is not a party-oriented thing.
If fact checkers said that the claims they were checking were facts, and that their response was absolutely factual, there would be a problem. But your examples indicate that they don’t. If Bush had said that most economists agreed with him then the response would be that this “fact” was not true - but Bush is way too smart to make any such claim.
The fact checkers report on the assessments of economists. Bush’s comment has to be considered in the now common Republican strategy of treating their failed predictions as if they came true.
Do you think that a claim that ACA is a horrible failure can or cannot be fact checked?
When liberals make absurd claims, and fact checkers call them on it, I’m all for it also.
If some candidate claims that increasing the minimum wage to $15 will significantly cut unemployment, I’m happy that a fact checker says that while the impact on employment is not clear, there is no evidence that such a move will significantly decrease it. Those aren’t facts either, but it is a valid response. So is mentioning if there are a significant number of economists who think that this will increase unemployment.
Here’s one case where Politifact succumbed to political bullshit:
Carson deserves a “Half True” for this one. He says we promised to protect Ukraine as a condition of them giving up their nukes. That’s not totally true, because we never made them part of NATO or anything. But Poiltifact treats the word “assurances”(as distinguished from “guarantee”), as basically meaningless. But it’s not.
Assurance:
a positive declaration intended to give confidence; a promise
Now I understand that Carson isn’t a politician or a lawyer, so words mean things to him. No reason for Politifact to recognize bullshit as fact, even if it’s accepted beltway bullshit.
Fact Checker needs to do better than just flip us off with a “most economists say” line. If 95% of them say so, well OK, but if only 55% say so, not OK, and either way it would be nice for a link that tries to explain the reasoning in a form that the unwashed masses might be able to comprehend.
My favorite was in 2012 when the AP “fact-checked” a statement Bill Clinton made about Mitt Romney by stating that Bill lied about Monica so shouldn’t talk about anybody else.
I hate bad fact-checking. For that matter, I hate most fact-checking because it’s gotten so bad. I think Rachel Maddow used to have a segment about how lousy a job that Politifact was doing. They’d basically say that everything individually was true and then claim that the whole thing was a half-truth or worse.
They fact-check because it’s easier than doing real reporting or analysis. I ignore it because they’re all so bad at it.