The best thing about Rachel Maddow is not that I agree with her (though I almost always do) but it’s that I trust her. She fact checks herself better than her detractors do.
I can recall exactly two instances where someone questioned her veracity online and I had to examine the evidence.
Once was in this very forum where in the sprawling Is Fox News really all that bad? thread where Fox News Fanboys liked to come in and contrast her as the opposite of Fox News with regard to bias.
They get shouted down that it’s not the bias that makes Fox News bad, it’s the lies. But this was posted:
The fact was that none of this was true. As Gerald II was told by TonySinclair (among others), “She didn’t say the blogger made up the fact that Fast and Furious existed, she said he made up the story that the motivation behind it was to undermine the Second Amendment.” and that “She said that it was a continuation of a Bush strategy of selling guns to criminals in the hopes of tracing them to druglords.” All of which is true.
This argument was a complaint made by Right Wingers at the time but what Maddow actually reported was in no way erroneous.
The other time was more recently on my Facebook page when claimed that Maddow was a liar. I asked for evidence and he linked (without watching, based on my subsequent conversation with him) to a YouTube video.
The video was made by Infowars - the group of tin-foil-hatted never-met-a-conspiracy-he-didn’t-invent Alex Jones. In it, it showed a report by Maddow did when the Republicans in Congress shut down the government and there was much ado about how veterans were unable to go to closed memorials and a few scuffles between the police and veterans.
I watched it. They had no issue with anything she said. They took issue with the video she chose - apparently she used video of protesters being aggressive towards the police because they said that the police started it.
I found their argument unpersuasive because Maddow did in fact show a lot of video footage of the police being aggressive and honestly, if we are going to decide which group is more likely to present false or unrepresentative “raw” video footage, Maddow or Alex Jones, past record makes me pretty confident which one is more likely full of shit.
Just this past Friday, Maddow gave more mainstream news coverage to what Boko Haram is doing in Nigeria, Mali and other African nations than I have seen to date, and it’s long overdue.
So if we’re pitting Rachel Maddow, I will respectfully decline to participate. But the people who don’t like her? Can we pit them instead? 