The Washington Post claims Republicans are waging war on fact-checkers

Liberal journalists like to paint Republicans as opposed to the facts, implying that liberal journalists own the facts and determine who uses them properly.

The Washington Post ran this aggressive headline at the top of its October 15 edition: “Campaign Opposes Fact-Checking: On Live Stages, Trump Aims to Let His Falsehoods Go Unquestioned.”

Journalists Ashley Parker and Josh Dawsey begin by noting that the Trump campaign has “led an aggressive campaign against fact-checking in recent months,” pushing the media to “abandon the practice if they hope to engage with Trump.”

They describe former President Donald Trump’s resentment of PolitiFact’s joining the anti-Trump brigade in beating the National Association of Black Journalists and the “fact-checking” that occurred during Trump’s ABC News debate with Vice President Kamala Harris, as well as Trump’s “60.” Minutes’ on CBS News’ ‘fact checking’.

One crucial fact emerged very late in this history of Republican hate-facts: the dramatic imbalance of who gets labeled as fake.

ABC debate moderators singled out Trump for five combative “fact checks.” CBS debate moderators said they would not fact-check the candidates and then pushed JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, on Haitian migrants in Ohio. The word “moderator” is a bad joke.

Parker and Dawsey return to an old saw: “The Washington Post Fact Checker team counted that by the end of Trump’s presidency, he had made 30,573 false or misleading claims, an average of about 21 false, erroneous or misleading claims per day”.

They fail to mention that Glenn Kessler, the Post’s so-called Fact Checker, proclaimed in 2021 that there would be no systematic count of false or misleading statements by President Joe Biden.

Doesn’t this suggest that “fact checking” is a weapon used against Republicans? And doesn’t it betray a partisan bent, that Democrats are remarkably more honest politicians?

A glance at the Post’s “Fact Checker” homepage on October 15 shows that this dramatic imbalance is still in place. Just counting the Pinocchio cartoons on the front page shows that Trump and his team have drawn 39 Pinocchios. Team Harris has…zero.

For one article, the Fact Checker delicately notes, “Harris flubs claim on manufacturing jobs in MSNBC interview.” Seven articles on Trump’s side receive the maximum judgment of “Four Pinocchios” (pants on fire).

A new tally of fact-checking by the Media Research Center at PolitiFact shows similar aggression. There are 24 “Pants on Fire” rulings for Republicans from January to September (20 of them Trump) and only one for Democrats (Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker). Overall, Republican politicians were judged “Mostly False” or worse 79 percent of the time, while Democrats were in that penalty box just 36 percent of the time.

Post reporters found a liberal expert to back up their case. University of Wisconsin professor Lucas Graves gets the big, bold, italicized quote inside the paper: “Within the right-wing political establishment, it is now considered quite legitimate—and quite legitimate to say publicly and openly—that you disapprove the fact. -check.”

It is “tribalism” to oppose liberal fact-checking. But you can’t call it “tribalism” that liberal fact-checkers smear Republicans much more often and much more harshly. They should be charged with police brutality.

Naturally, the Post concludes this partisan piece by citing how the liberal bias was followed by liberal mockery on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live,” where Bowen Yang, the Asian comedian who plays Vance on the CBS debate, said: “Don’t check the facts. this” several times in one sentence.

This is the stance liberal journalists like to strike: they can’t criticize us. Oppose us and you hate facts, journalism, safety, sanity and democracy. They have a monopoly on the truth, whatever they decide it to be.

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