Why Fact Checkers Mangle Facts To Provide Donald Trump Cover
Yet more journalists embrace pedantry, fallacious logic, and outright misinformation to insulate Trump from accurate Democratic attacks.
Imagine you’re a Democratic official or party strategist interested in next-day coverage of the first night of the Democratic convention, and your browsing turned up mainstream news updates claiming, among other things:
It’s wrong for Democrats to note that Donald Trump won’t accept the results of the 2024 election—because actually Trump has only refused to say he will accept the results (though he’s consistently said he can only lose if Democrats cheat).1
Democrats are wrong to claim Trump thinks women who get abortions should be punished, because, despite overturning Roe v. Wade, Trump has only ever called for women to face punishment for abortion one time, then quickly walked it back.2
Democrats aren’t being honest when they say Trump wrote love letters to North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, because he only ever claimed to have received love letters from Kim Jong Un.3
It’s “mostly false” for Joe Biden to claim Trump wants to cut Medicare, because he has “pledged” on the campaign trail not to cut the program.4
It’s “misleading” for Biden to claim Trump increased the national debt more than any other president over four years, because other presidents who served eight years increased the debt more than Trump.5
It’s an “exaggerat[ion]” to claim “Trump told us to inject bleach into our bodies” to fight COVID-19, because he mused about a generic “disinfectant” rather than “bleach.”6
Would you think political news media was trying to inform the citizenry in a fair-minded way? Or would you conclude that these reporters and fact checkers were desperate to avoid acknowledging that Democrats’ withering portrayal of Trump and his disqualifying conduct is basically correct?
CHECK INTO FASC
These are all real examples, culled from real-time and post facto mainstream news coverage of Monday night’s festivities.
The first reflects a simple fallacy: