Something’s been bugging me about the prevailing meme rattling around the mediasphere and interwebs lately. Yes, we’ve all had a good laugh about the Romney campaign announcing "We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers " and about the FoxNews blogger talking about the media hiring “fact-checkers” to vet Paul Ryan’s speech and pushback on various blogs about “factchecking the factcheckers”.
Then it hit me. What if this is more than just the GOP not really caring whether or not their message is accurate? What if this is the new Rovian strategy to use the Democrat’s strengths against them?
Consider this:
First you set the debate: Declare opposition to “fact-checkers”. Get everyone talking about how the GOP are against fact-checkers. Be sure to refer to “fact-checkers” in the most scornful way possible.
Next: Have your Vice Presidential candidate give a speech filled with obvious falsehoods.
Next: Use that speech to get everyone talking about “fact-checkers”, including your pet liberal FoxNews blogger. Make sure that the words “fact-checkers” get repeated in as many contexts as possible.
Next: Kick off the “fact-checking the fact-checkers” campaign. Imply by any means possible that the people fact-checking you are both doing so for partisan reasons (rather than because you’re blatantly lying) and are lying themselves, or at least not rigorously checking their own facts.
Result: “Fact-checker” becomes a dirty word. Anyone who calls you out for lying gets labelled a “fact-checker” and the debate becomes about the term rather than about the lie you told. You continue to get to say anything you want because your supporters don’t care and your opponents have been put on the defensive merely for pointing out that you were lying.
Um, I can tell you that one of my “Facebook Friends” pushed back when I posted a Fox News article calling Ryan a liar. That person is a confirmed “FoxNews Only” person and I was shocked when she accused the FoxNews article of being leftist. (I personally never watch FoxNews and only rarely end up on their site)
So, as convoluted as your theory sounds, I bet it would work.
I doubt it; as Politifact’s staff dryly pointed out, the Romney campaign’s aversion to fact-checkers would be a bit easier to swallow if they did not continue to refer to various fact-checkers themselves in their ads that call out Obama’s statements.
In other words, the campaign only seems to object to being fact-checked, not to fact-checkers.
If it’s an intentional strategy, it fits Fox/talk radio much more than the GOP itself (disregard the fine line between the two).
Fox/Talk has been pushing the us-them mentality for years. You can’t trust them, you need to get your news from us. This is a natural extension of it.
Given the Colberts it takes to pull this off, bypassing whatever hypocrisy seems to surface is par for the course. In this case, it’s exactly in line with the strategy. Note that the strategy wouldn’t be “look, no fact checking is worth it,” it’s “look, when they fact check, it’s spin, when we fact check, it’s truth.” Or, “when they fact-checked my opponsent, they were correct and couldn’t hep but be faced with facts, but when they fact-checked me, it was partisan spin.”
Look at the antagonism Fox et al have towards “mainstream” media (was MSM a Fox or a Rush invention?) and you’ll see how this is sound strategy.
Actual quote from Newt Gingrich on Morning Joe a couple of days ago: “Liberals lie better than conservatives tell the truth.”
I’m not exactly sure what he was getting at, since I started yelling and throwing food at my TeeVee at that point, but it seems apropos to this thread.
In fairness, when I looked at the headlines for all of the articles written by the Fox News employee who wrote the one you’re referring to, it seemed apparent she must be one of Fox’s resident liberals. All of her articles are critical of the GOP.
I get that I’m both preaching to the choir, shouting against the river, and a few other mixed metaphors here, but I’m going to say it anyway.
There’s one, and only one, way to disprove a fact-checker. It’s not to say “they’re a leftist site.” It’s not to say “they come in with known biases.” It is this: present alternate facts which disprove the fact-checker’s assertions. If you cannot do this, you cannot complain about the fact checker.
Pushback against the fact-checkers is perfectly healthy so long as it takes the form of *factual *pushback. For example, I think the pushback on the Janesville plant has been by and large pretty fair, regardless of which side you think is correct. And I think the Dems pushback on “End Medicare as we know it” being called a lie was perfectly legitimate.
The bigger problem is dismissing the fact-checkers as biased and therefore not worthy of addressing. It used to be that entities like the CBO or various NGOs made up of both Republicans and Democrats could generally be relied upon as neutral sources whose claims could not be just dismissed as bias. But now it doesn’t really matter who you cite the GOP will just claim that it’s liberal conspiracy. I think that’s a related, but distinct and bigger problem than the pushback against fact-checkers.
I don’t really have a problem with saying “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.” You can read that as saying we’re going to disregard factual accuracy (which I think Romney is largely doing), but I think the more natural reading is that they’re not doing to defer to the truth as dictated by a couple of journalists who spend a few days investigating a complex issue. Fact-checkers have the advantage of having less of an interest in the outcome of the election, but often have worse information that the campaigns on the facts, and always worse information about the intentions of the speaker.
I don’t think the fact checkers have been biased, but they have made wrong calls, like any umpire. Unlike a sporting event however, campaigns don’t have to acknowledge the calls of the umps. If they are sure they are right, they are free to continue pushing whatever facts they deem fit.
And while the Democrats may not have declared war on the fact checkers, fact checks declaring them to be lying or false don’t stop them anymore than it stops Republicans.
Which examples can you point to of substantive Democratic “lies”, other than the laughable PolitiFact one about ending Medicare, an example that has strongly helped to delegitimize fact-checkers in general?
I generally agree with the sentiments above, but do want to point out that there’s an aspect of the fact-checker milieu that is not susceptible to factual refutation.
Other methods of counting, they go on to say, makes the comparison even less favorable to Obama.
In other words, it’s clearly and unambiguously false.
So I guess I’m OK with it being rated “False.”
Then we have this one, from the NRA: “Obama admits he’s coming for our guns, telling Sarah Brady, ‘We are working on (gun control), but under the radar.’”
They go on to say they contacted Brady and she disputes the accuracy of the quote. Their ruling:
I think there’s a case to be made that the NRA simply relied on the article, and what they wrote was not a huge leap away from the article. But I can agree that a careful rhetor would have made sure of the facts, and it’s fair to call this a lie, although not as unambiguous a lie as the Cutter claim above.
Yet Politifact rates this one “Pants on Fire,” a worse rating than Cutter’s.
First, they show how superficial the fact-checking process can be. The claim that Cutter’s statement is a lie is based on the premise that she arbitrarily measured from the bottom of the recession to 27 months after that point. Politifact takes that premise–which they’ve merely inferred–and runs with, applying it to Reagan to show it to be false. But an equally plausible premise is that a President’s responsibility for the state of the economy–to the extent he has any–should only start from the date when the policies he enacted were expected to bear fruit to the date when you’re currently talking about the state of the recovery. If you measured Reagan’s numbers from a point one year after taking office (March of '82 instead of December of '82) to the end of his term, it would have been a fairer comparison. (Though I don’t know if she’d still be right or not.)
And second, they show how trying to assess not only falsity but intent is a sucker’s game. Absent actual investigation into the speaker’s intentions, it rests entirely on speculation.
Obviously, to the extent that fact-checkers shift the discourse toward actual factual debates like this, they are a great benefit. But we ought not consider them more than providing another useful perspective to consider.
When fact checkers stray away from verifiable facts and start relying on arbitrary subjective decisions then their usefulness and credibility are diminished.
Blowing something like the details of the Janesville GM plant is unacceptable. It is a simple factual issue which was reported contemporaneously in the local media. GM was a major employer in the area and such closings do not happen unnoticed. And when the last vehicle rolls off the assembly line and the workers are sent home the economic shock waves reverberate through the community.
When fact checkers start weighing in on whether a cut to the rate of growth of spending on a particular program counts as a cut or not then they are straying into the realm of political debate where answers are not clean cut.
Obama proposes a “cut” to Medicare, which is to say a reduction in the rate of growth of Medicare spending. That savings is being achieved by making real cuts to physician reimbursement under Medicare. Spending is still going up, just not as fast.
Ryan refers to this as Obama cutting Medicare - gross simplification. Fact checkers declare this false. More accurately the truth is one of those weasely political truths, in the political parlance a budgetary “cut” can be a smaller increase than was previously anticipated. And its an entire issue where the reputation and impartiality of fact checkers would be better served by laying out facts and not providing simplified explanations.
Did you notice how few of us on the left ever cite Politifact any more? Wonder why that is? Think on it for a while, if you still don’t get it, we’re here for you.
I don’t think the part of their analysis you posted is responsive to my point. I’m saying that if Cutter had an implicit premise about when the measurement should start, the most charitable implicit premise is that it starts about a year after inauguration. That isn’t what Politifact goes on to calculate.
