Few things are more bothersome than that rare instance when fact checkers disagree. Our column last week, in which we awarded Three Pinocchios to Carney for citing a MarketWatch column on Obama’s spending patterns, stood in contrast to PolitiFact awarding a “Mostly True” to a Facebook post based on the MarketWatch column.
After that pompous throat-clearing, Kessler doesn’t change his mind, of course. The reason is the question of “Obama’s spending patterns” is as big as all outdoors, comprising hundreds of “facts” that can be checked, leading to an overall conclusion that depends on how you arrange those facts. Assigning some reductive measurement (like Pinnochios) to something that broad is impossible, as is clearly shown by the two leading fact checkers giving one statement about it essentially opposite ratings.
Some of you disagreed with my view that saying that birtherism was “long discredited” or “long debunked” isn’t good enough, but I think that’s a real symptom of one of the major issues in journalism that fact checking has done nothing to change. Being “discredited” or “debunked” are different ways of saying that a statement isn’t believed by the community, but it’s not a categorical statement that something is false. The statement “the sun rose in the west this morning” doesn’t need to be “debunked” or “discredited’–it’s plainly, verifiably false. If the fact checking movement in journalism were having any real impact, wouldn’t journalists just say that birtherism is, similarly, “false”? It’s a simple, discrete and verifiable fact that Barack Obama was born in Hawaii. Yet four years after the fact checkers called out the birthers, journalists just can’t say that Donald Trump made a false accusation about Obama’s place of birth. It’s a “long-discredited accusation” in the Times and a “long-debunked contention” in the Post. I don’t know where to look to find better examples of the total failure of the fact checking project.
amk
Telling the truth is a conflict of interest for corporate media. It’s that simple.
c u n d gulag
They’re afraid if they use the “L-word,” they’ll never get a job at FOX when their own TV “news” careers start to go down the shitter faster than a lead-coated turd.
It’s a “LIE!”
A “L-I-E!” you feckin’ stooooooopid feckless motherfeckers!
A “LIE!”
Say it, say it, you cowardly beeeeeeyotches!!!
wvng
@c u n d gulag: I’ll bet that George Tierney, Jr, of Greenville, South Carolina doesn’t think it is a lie. In SC, only that black President is a liar.
Baud
Harsh words such as “false” and “lie” are reserved for Democrats who misspeak. It would be confusing to use them when talking about Republicans.
Villago Delenda Est
Both sides do it.
There. I said it.
A piano needs to drop on Kessler. And not one of those soft Warner Brothers pianos.
Ash Can
I’ll buy the “discredited” bit, but to “debunk” something does mean to expose it as being false, so I have no quibble with that term.
The larger problem is that, as Politifact has proven and this post shows, these newspaper fact-checkers are all inherently suspect. They’re big-name, they’re in-house, they’re anything but independent. This “fact-checking” movement is more about the fact-checkers, and their papers, than about getting facts straight. Unless and until these papers drop this charade and rely on independent, outside fact-checkers who have no agenda other than establishing the veracity of what’s said in the papers, there’s no reason to regard their “fact-checking” as anything more than just another op-ed.
rlrr
“Facts are meaningless. You can use facts to prove anything that’s even remotely true.”
— Homer J. Simpson
mistermix
@Ash Can: I take your point on “debunk” but “false” is shorter and clearer than “long debunked” so there’s a reason they don’t say it.
satanicpanic
If something is “long debunked” it’s really a admission of failure by newspapers for them to still be reporting on it.
geg6
@mistermix:
That’s how I see it, too. My mother was a print journalist. A good journalist should be all about being as succinct as possible. Just the facts and all that. Using words and phrases like “long debunked” or “discredited” tell me you are dancing around an issue you really don’t want to make clear to your audience. They leave a reader with just a little ambiguity and that tiny opening is enough for the Birthers and their enablers.
Wag
@mistermix:
“Long debunked” sound fancy and erudite. False is plebeian. Lie is just too common to even contemplate.
jayackroyd
Shouldn’t every instance of “Grand Bargain” be followed by a “to be sure, any reduction in social security benefits cannot possibly be offset in any reasonable way by concessions by the GOP.”?
In fact, shouldn’t the fact checkers be checking the “grand bargain” in general? What bargain? What is on offer in return for reneging on the Greenspan commission’s deal with the baby boomers? How can there possibly be any “bargain” that takes away a working life spent prepaying the cost of retirement benefits?
daveNYC
@c u n d gulag: And say it like Sam Kinison would.
wonkie
I think that “debunked” means “proven to be false” and is a strong, clear statement.
That said, you are correct that the so-called journalists of our corporate media don’t respect facts or report them, even the fact is obvious, just as they don’t accurately lable falsegoods until they feel safe doing so.
MattF
You hold the quaint notion that it matters whether something is true or false. And that, somehow, newspapers are in the business of distinguishing ‘T’ from ‘F’. Ha ha.
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
you all act as if journalists, their employers, shareholders and sponsors by and large want to run naked through the woods, hit the clearing and stand naked in the blazing sunlight of liberty. the truth is an exclusive club, and those that have access to it, by the time they get access to it, are invested in their own entitlement to it, and the rest is just imitative behavior by wannabes unknowingly doing their bidding.
of course the truth club only ends up being a bunch of little clubs that don’t really talk to each other well.
Aardvark Cheeselog
@Marcellus Shale, Public Dick: That is an excellent take on a subversive old song, thanks.
JasonF
The United States is comprised of many regions — New England, the South, the Mid-Atlantic, the Rockies, and so on. One of those regions — typically defined to include California, Oregon, Nevada, and Washington state — is known as “the West.” The sun did, in fact, rise there this morning, as it did all throughout the country. Therefore, I find the claim that the sun rose in the west to be “mostly true.”
pete
@JasonF: Excellent
Betty Cracker
@Ash Can:
Amen. At the very least, they should drop the rating gimmick, which is where much of the editorializing comes in. But of course they won’t because it’s all about the gimmick anyway.
Suffern ACE
@jayackroyd: I’ll believe Boomers and Silent generation voters actually care about protecting themselves when they stop electing the film flam men they’ve been doing for 30 years.
mistermix
@JasonF: Ah, where would we be without the fallacy of equivocation.
cokane
I think people like the NYT think “long-discredited” and “debunked” is stronger than saying it’s “false.”
Marc
@jayackroyd: “What is on offer in return for reneging on the Greenspan commission’s deal with the baby boomers?”
Oh, they’ll protect the Boomers (at least those born before 1960). It’s the rest of us who’ll get fucked over.
FlipYrWhig
@cokane: I think they’re supposed to mean “false, and proven so long ago.” But it’s true that rhetorically it seems to go from an accusation to something-all-thinking-people-shake-their-heads-at without much lingering over the part where falsehood is stated clearly.
chrome agnomen
@Suffern ACE:
every generation does this, but some just can’t help punching hippies, can they?
FlipYrWhig
@Marc: Seriously. Maybe the hard-left “heighten the contradictions” model should apply here. Instead of people saying maybe a Romney election would cause the country to hit bottom and make some fundamental changes, maybe the premise ought to be that inflicting some specific pain on the elderly reactionaries who warp our politics would force them to see the light. Honestly, it gets hard for me to knock myself out to prevent Grandma from eating cat food when Grandma watches Fox News all day and votes Republican to stop the peril of rampaging Negroes and soc1alism.
liberal
Dana Milbank (for once) had an awesome column yesterday or the day before, where he basically jumped on the “How do we know Mitt Romney isn’t a unicorn?” bandwagon.
liberal
@FlipYrWhig:
It’s pretty simple. Just insist that the Ryan-esque changes to Medicare apply immediately to everyone, including those in the program, none of this “it won’t affect anyone over 54” shit.
liberal
Weak tea. If you don’t like discredited/debunked, “false” doesn’t go far enough.
Say “they lie”.
jayackroyd
@Marc:
No, they won’t. My cohort, 1958, is the largest post 1947 cohort, and they are targeting 1959 as the cutoff date (“under 55”).
But that doesn’t fucking matter. We already MADE the deal.
http://1.usa.gov/KgCzx9
Anyone calling reneging on that deal a “bargain” grand or otherwise is flat out lying. And we feed that meme by referring to plans to gut social security by using that phrase.
jayackroyd
@Suffern ACE:
You mean like Pelosi? Obama?
Stuck in the Funhouse
When it comes to voting history, you really need to split the boomers between older ones, and those born later in that group.
Though Boomers, all of them, did vote slightly more for Obama in 08.
And as well, Gen Xers have been dependable GOP voters for a while now.
dww44
@Stuck in the Funhouse: I agree and have anecdotal observations why this is apparently true:
All of these younger citizens largely grew up in a post-integration world, where those who could afford it fled to private schools, many of which were religious based with all the negatives that that implies. I am amazed by the amount of overt “religiosity” I see around me. No healthy skepticism on their part at all. I remember a couple of incidents around the 2004 election where parents told me their older children could NOT comprehend a Republican NOT winning. This is, of course, in a quite overwhelmingly red state.
Mnemosyne
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
Yep. My brother was born in one of the very last years of the Boom (1963) and he frickin’ worships Ronald Reagan. G and I are Gen Xers and both strong Democrats, but a lot of people we know of our generation are at a minimum libertarian.
The good news is, quite a few of the Gen Xers I know came around during the Bush years, at least here in liberal California, and are now Democrats. I guess they were still young enough to watch the clusterfuck and say, “Well, that was a bad idea.”
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Mnemosyne:
I was just inside the older boomer tent, with formative years during high school squarely in the darkest period of Vietnam, 68 to 71. A few of my old friends from HS are now republican voters, but none of them are stone wingnuts, that I know of. Make love, not war. We took that seriously, as well as a keen knack for scoring the bestest reefer around. :)
geg6
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
I went and clicked and I have to say that I’m a little surprised by that. Not about Xers, but later Boomers. I (and Obama) and all my friends and some relatives fall into that demographic (born 1957 up to 1964) and my personal and completely anecdote-based opinion is that we are more liberal than the older Boomers we know (mostly older siblings). I know a much, much higher percentage of older Boomers who are Teabaggers, for instance. I don’t know anyone my age who is.
It was that older crowd who became those dreaded Reagan Dems. Fewer of them went to college (the steel mills were still going strong for them; not so much by the time we graduated high school so we went to college instead). And even after the Reagan years ruined their lives, they are still voting GOPer.
danimal
@chrome agnomen: A new Pundit’s Dilemna: Will they still punch hippies when there are no more hippies to punch?
Roger Moore
@danimal:
I figure the pundits who love punching hippies so much will be dying off at about the same time, so the hippie punching will die with them. The next generation of pundits will have to find a new punching bag.
Stuck in the Funhouse
@geg6:
There are always anomalies to overall national stats on generations and voting behavior, based on regional differences in long term pol affiliations. The Reagan Democrat was largely a midwest and southern result, with a concentration of labor dems who are social conservatives and maybe more conventional patriotism. But when you think of the effect and numbers nationally, it makes sense that those older boomers who came of age during the late 60’s and Vietnam, with all the other social change going on, would have different experiences and pol reactions, than those that came of age in the late 70’s and disco, to dovetail with the Genxers, and the country swinging to the right with Reagan.
Brachiator
@mistermix:
I suppose that a good journalist might be more confrontational with Romney or any surrogate who spouts this, but birtherism is immune to fact checking.
It’s more like a conspiracy theory, belief in UFOs or alien abduction or psychics or JFK conspiracy theories. It is a belief that is patently absurd, and based on the believer’s fears and anxieties, not on anything remotely real. You can’t fact check something like this.
In a sane world, debunking crap like this would be left to Snopes, not to the Washington Press Corp.
middlewest
@JasonF: I hope people remember this one at the yearly awards.
gaz
@MattF:
No shit, right? Even when that douchewhistle ombudsman Brisbane of the NYT said as much flat out in that “Truth Vigilante” disaster that some people would call a column. (I suspect the original draft of which was written in crayon).
liberal
@Brachiator:
Yeah, and it’s pretty much unfalsifiable, as you can see from the birthers’ reaction to the evidence about the birth announcement published in the Hawaii paper.
Brachiator
@FlipYrWhig:
The problem is, of course, that a Republican victory might see pain inflicted far and wide.
FlipYrWhig
@Brachiator: oh, I know. But it really is painful to see all kinds of effort expended to put in place responsible, generous social-welfare programs for older people, then to watch a lot of the selfsame older people vote for the other guys because we’re too profligate to everyone else.
Heliopause
I’ll say it again; journalists who assign “pinocchios” or “pants on fire” to complex policy issues need to be removed from the gene pool, not tasked with discovering facts.
Nicholas
The other implication of using ‘debunked’ or ‘discredited’ is that the user should be able to point to an article or research that did so — with the implication being that prior to that time, the point in question was arguable, reasonable, or possible. Journalists who suggest that controversy over Obama’s place of birth has been debunked are suggesting that there was a time when holding such beliefs was legitimate; they should be asked to identify when this was.