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Exclusive — Brent Bozell & Tim Graham: Fact-Check the ‘Fact-Checkers’ PolitiFact and Snopes BIAS Against Conservatives
2019 Jul 27, 4:54pm 473 views 1 comment
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WillPowers
2019 Jul 27, 4:54pm
WillPowers
2019 Jul 27, 4:54pm
PolitiFact
In a four-month study period, the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University found PolitiFact rated 32 percent of Republican claims as “false” or “Pants on Fire,” compared to 11 percent of Democratic claims – a 3 to 1 margin. Conversely, Politifact rated 22 percent of Democratic claims as “entirely true” compared to 11 percent of Republican claims – a 2 to 1 margin.
A majority of Democratic statements (54 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely true, compared to only 18 percent of Republican statements. By contrast, a majority of Republican statements (52 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely false, compared to just 24 percent of Democratic arguments.
Do we detect a trend?
Liberals can argue that they shouldn’t have to observe some quota that everyone is equally truthful, and should be able to call balls and strikes as they see them. But there is an overwhelming, ongoing pattern of tagging the right-wingers as cheaters on these websites. The umpires have it rigged.
It’s not just the quality of the fact-checking, but the quantity. Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren were both elected to the Senate in 2012. Cruz was assessed for truth on 114 occasions by PolitiFact through 2016, but Warren? Only four, and not a single False or “Pants on Fire.” And for the record, PolitiFact never evaluated Warren on the “Truth-o-Meter” when she claimed to be part-Cherokee Indian.
The Washington Post “Fact Checker” project, run by former State Department correspondent Glenn Kessler, is best known for piling up an impressive-sounding anti-Trump number. On September 13, 2018, the Post announced Trump had uttered 5,001 “false or misleading” statements since announcing for president.
To characterize their findings, they pointed to a single day, September 7: “In that single day, he publicly made 125 false or misleading statements – in a period of time that totaled only about 120 minutes. It was a new single-day high. The day before, the president made 74 false or misleading claims, many at a campaign rally in Montana…. Trump’s tsunami of untruths helped push the count in The Fact Checker’s database past 5,000 on the 601st day of his presidency. That’s an average of 8.3 Trumpian claims a day, but in the past nine days – since our last update – the president has averaged 32 claims a day.”
Some of these “misleading” statements read like uncharitable liberal nitpicking. On September 11, 2018, the president tweeted “Small Business Optimism Soars to Highest Level Ever | Breitbart.” The Post then just suggests that poll is worthless. “Trump is citing a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative group. The group’s small business optimism index broke a 35-year record in August. The survey was mailed to a sample of 5,000 members or small businesses, and from that pool, the NFIB got 680 ‘usable responses.’ The response rate was a relatively low 13 percent and it’s not clear that this survey gives a full picture of small business optimism.”
So the NFIB, arguably the most respected small business association in America, took a poll and found that small businesses are optimistic about the future.
But Trump had no right to say so.
Kessler demonstrated how “fact checkers” have an irritating habit of verifying Trump’s facts, and then mercilessly mangling them with “context” to undo those facts. Kessler argued: “Mueller is a registered Republican, as is Rosenstein, who appointed him. Publicly available voter registration information shows that 13 of the 17 members of Mueller’s team have previously registered as Democrats, while four had no affiliation or their affiliation could not be found, the Washington Post reported. Nine of the 17 made political donations to Democrats, their contributions totaling more than $57,000. The majority came from one person, who also contributed to Republicans. Six donated to Clinton.”
So Kessler confirmed that the Mueller team has 13 Democrats, some big Hillary supporters and donors, and zero Republicans, and zero Trump donors. Moreover, Rosenstein isn’t on the “team” – he appointed Mueller.
Kessler uses a Pinocchio system for rating lies. Getting “two Pinocchios” isn’t so bad, but try saying that to anyone who gets that award. “Four Pinocchios” is the Pants on Fire rating. During the campaign, Kessler reported “Trump earned significant more four-Pinocchio ratings than Clinton – 59 to 7, …The numbers don’t lie.”
Of course they do.
They never showed a similar aggression when Barack Obama unloaded his whoppers. How about when Obama proclaimed at a closed-door session in Boston, “We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us.” Forget “Fast & Furious;” Benghazi and all of its attendant and astonishing lies, the millions of taxpayer dollars that appeared at Solyndra; the IRS smothering Tea Party groups; the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play shakedown north of hundreds of millions of dollars; or the Uranium One sale to Russia. We could go on and on. The liberal “fact-checkers” like Kessler routinely ignored all of that. Obama got away with a bold-faced lie – because he knew they’d never call him out. Kessler’s self-impressed slogan is “The Truth Behind the Rhetoric.” It doesn’t get better than that.
EXCERPT from: Fact-Check the ‘Fact-Checkers’
SEE: https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/07/27/exclusive-brent-bozell-tim-graham-fact-check-the-fact-checkers/
In a four-month study period, the Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University found PolitiFact rated 32 percent of Republican claims as “false” or “Pants on Fire,” compared to 11 percent of Democratic claims – a 3 to 1 margin. Conversely, Politifact rated 22 percent of Democratic claims as “entirely true” compared to 11 percent of Republican claims – a 2 to 1 margin.
A majority of Democratic statements (54 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely true, compared to only 18 percent of Republican statements. By contrast, a majority of Republican statements (52 percent) were rated as mostly or entirely false, compared to just 24 percent of Democratic arguments.
Do we detect a trend?
Liberals can argue that they shouldn’t have to observe some quota that everyone is equally truthful, and should be able to call balls and strikes as they see them. But there is an overwhelming, ongoing pattern of tagging the right-wingers as cheaters on these websites. The umpires have it rigged.
It’s not just the quality of the fact-checking, but the quantity. Ted Cruz and Elizabeth Warren were both elected to the Senate in 2012. Cruz was assessed for truth on 114 occasions by PolitiFact through 2016, but Warren? Only four, and not a single False or “Pants on Fire.” And for the record, PolitiFact never evaluated Warren on the “Truth-o-Meter” when she claimed to be part-Cherokee Indian.
The Washington Post “Fact Checker” project, run by former State Department correspondent Glenn Kessler, is best known for piling up an impressive-sounding anti-Trump number. On September 13, 2018, the Post announced Trump had uttered 5,001 “false or misleading” statements since announcing for president.
To characterize their findings, they pointed to a single day, September 7: “In that single day, he publicly made 125 false or misleading statements – in a period of time that totaled only about 120 minutes. It was a new single-day high. The day before, the president made 74 false or misleading claims, many at a campaign rally in Montana…. Trump’s tsunami of untruths helped push the count in The Fact Checker’s database past 5,000 on the 601st day of his presidency. That’s an average of 8.3 Trumpian claims a day, but in the past nine days – since our last update – the president has averaged 32 claims a day.”
Some of these “misleading” statements read like uncharitable liberal nitpicking. On September 11, 2018, the president tweeted “Small Business Optimism Soars to Highest Level Ever | Breitbart.” The Post then just suggests that poll is worthless. “Trump is citing a survey by the National Federation of Independent Business, a conservative group. The group’s small business optimism index broke a 35-year record in August. The survey was mailed to a sample of 5,000 members or small businesses, and from that pool, the NFIB got 680 ‘usable responses.’ The response rate was a relatively low 13 percent and it’s not clear that this survey gives a full picture of small business optimism.”
So the NFIB, arguably the most respected small business association in America, took a poll and found that small businesses are optimistic about the future.
But Trump had no right to say so.
Kessler demonstrated how “fact checkers” have an irritating habit of verifying Trump’s facts, and then mercilessly mangling them with “context” to undo those facts. Kessler argued: “Mueller is a registered Republican, as is Rosenstein, who appointed him. Publicly available voter registration information shows that 13 of the 17 members of Mueller’s team have previously registered as Democrats, while four had no affiliation or their affiliation could not be found, the Washington Post reported. Nine of the 17 made political donations to Democrats, their contributions totaling more than $57,000. The majority came from one person, who also contributed to Republicans. Six donated to Clinton.”
So Kessler confirmed that the Mueller team has 13 Democrats, some big Hillary supporters and donors, and zero Republicans, and zero Trump donors. Moreover, Rosenstein isn’t on the “team” – he appointed Mueller.
Kessler uses a Pinocchio system for rating lies. Getting “two Pinocchios” isn’t so bad, but try saying that to anyone who gets that award. “Four Pinocchios” is the Pants on Fire rating. During the campaign, Kessler reported “Trump earned significant more four-Pinocchio ratings than Clinton – 59 to 7, …The numbers don’t lie.”
Of course they do.
They never showed a similar aggression when Barack Obama unloaded his whoppers. How about when Obama proclaimed at a closed-door session in Boston, “We didn’t have a scandal that embarrassed us.” Forget “Fast & Furious;” Benghazi and all of its attendant and astonishing lies, the millions of taxpayer dollars that appeared at Solyndra; the IRS smothering Tea Party groups; the Clinton Foundation’s pay-to-play shakedown north of hundreds of millions of dollars; or the Uranium One sale to Russia. We could go on and on. The liberal “fact-checkers” like Kessler routinely ignored all of that. Obama got away with a bold-faced lie – because he knew they’d never call him out. Kessler’s self-impressed slogan is “The Truth Behind the Rhetoric.” It doesn’t get better than that.
EXCERPT from: Fact-Check the ‘Fact-Checkers’
SEE: https://www.breitbart.com/the-media/2019/07/27/exclusive-brent-bozell-tim-graham-fact-check-the-fact-checkers/
“In order to aid the news station in preparing stories for consumption,” the story began, “popular news media organization CNN purchased an industrial-sized washing machine to help its journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication.”
Now, who really believes you put news stories in a washing machine? The fact checker at Snopes, that’s who. Snopes felt the urgent need to call this out as “FALSE.” Dear reader, we promise we aren’t making this up. Their humor-deprived headline was “Did CNN Purchase an Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News?” The subhead: “The news media organization reportedly invested in mechanical assistance to help their journalists and news anchors spin the news before publication.”
Snopes co-founder David Mikkelson claimed he had found people dumb enough to take The Babylon Bee piece literally, and enough of them to warrant his expert analysis.
Guess what happened next? Because Facebook uses Snopes as one of its fake-news flagging sites, The Babylon Bee’s owner Adam Ford received a little note that an “independent fact checker” found “disputed” information in his group’s humor. Facebook warned that “Repeat offenders will see their distribution reduced and their ability to monetize and advertise removed.”
We found out for ourselves how Snopes tilts to the Left during the 2016 campaign. After national media outlets made a big deal out of racist David Duke endorsing Donald Trump, conservative journalist and Trump supporter Jeffrey Lord posted a blog on NewsBusters pointing out that those same reporters hadn’t noted that the Communist Party USA was urging a vote for Hillary.
Mayday! Mayday! The Snopes headline harrumphed: “Did the Communist Party of the USA Endorse Hillary Clinton?”
They decried Lord’s NewsBusters article as “FALSE,” claiming that “CPUSA did issue a statement urging members to vote against Trump, even if they didn’t particularly care for Clinton. The group did not, however, formally endorse Clinton, Sanders, or any other candidate in the 8 November 2016 presidential election.”