The fact check is dead.
President Trump delivered his State of the Union address Tuesday evening. Remarkably, it contained only a small portion of the incendiary, untethered, free-wheeling rhetoric we’ve come to expect from the current White House resident.
In fact, the president was surprisingly on message — restrained even. He still got some things wrong, which isn’t that surprising. But, his speech wasn’t exactly a smorgasbord of falsehoods either.
Perhaps that’s why members of the press, in their ongoing, desperate effort to make something — anything! — stick against the president, have be-clowned themselves in such fantastic fashion with ignorant and outright petty “fact checks” of the State of the Union speech.
FACT CHECK: Jews don’t believe in heaven(?)
For example, Trump introduced one guest Tuesday evening with the following remarks:
Mentioning heaven while introducing a Jewish guest? Not on New York Times White House correspondent Annie Karni’s watch!
“Trump just ad-libbed ‘they came down from heaven’ when quoting a Holocaust survivor watching American soldiers liberate Dachau,” she tweeted. “Jews don’t believe in heaven.”
Yes, they do. This is about as funny as the time she asked unironically, “Jews believe in the concept of Hell?”
FACT CHECK: Only 31 percent of female migrants were abused, not one-third.
Politico, meanwhile, assigned a “partly true” rating to Trump’s assertion that “One in three [female migrants] is sexually assaulted on the long journey north.”
Thirty-one percent of female migrants say they have been abused while traveling through Mexico, Politico noted, citing Doctors without Borders. Yes, Politico. One-in-three is 33 percent. Trump rounded up by 2.3 percentage points. Way to keep him in check. This is almost as embarrassing as the time the Toronto Star’s Daniel Dale struggled with the meaning of “historically low.”
FACT CHECK: Democratic women don’t count as women, or something…
Trump also said Tuesday that “exactly one century after Congress passed the constitutional amendment giving women the right to vote, we also have more women serving in Congress than at any time.”
Not on National Public Radio’s watch!
“FACT CHECK: President Trump praised the record number of women in Congress, but that’s almost entirely because of Democrats, not Trump’s party,” the group tweeted.
This is not a fact check. It’s just added context, and petty added context, at that.
FACT CHECK: *ACTUALLY* Afghanistan isn’t in the Middle East, so our troops have been in the Middle East for ONLY 17-plus years.
Trump said Tuesday that our “brave troops have now been fighting in the Middle East for almost 19 years.”
The Associated Press wasn’t having any of it.
“Trump exaggerated the length of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,” the news wire complained. “The war in Afghanistan began in October 2001, in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks. The invasion of Iraq was in March 2003. The U.S. has been at war for a bit more than 17 years.”
The AP report adds, “Also, he refers to fighting in the Middle East. Iraq is in the Middle East, but Afghanistan is in south and central Asia.”
The New York Times fact check similarly included an attempt to correct Trump’s remarks on the forever war in Afghanistan.
“This is false,” the Times said in a since-deleted passage in its State of the Union post-game fact check. “American troops deployed to Afghanistan on Oct. 7, 2001, to begin Operation Enduring Freedom — the American military and NATO mission to rid Afghanistan of Al Qaeda. But Afghanistan is not technically considered part of the Middle East — it is in southwest Asia. The United States invaded Iraq, which is in the Middle East, in March 2003 — nearly 16 years ago.”
FACT CHECK: Our border situation isn’t an “urgent national crisis,” it’s merely a “humanitarian crisis.”
The Times also hit Trump for describing illegal border crossings as an “urgent national crisis.”
“This is false,” the paper declared. “The number of illegal border crossings have been declining for two decades. Customs and Border Protection arrested more than 50,000 people trying to illegally cross the southwestern border each month in October, November and December.”
Laughably, the Times adds, “While that is an uptick from the monthly average in the fiscal year that ended in September 2017, the numbers pale in comparison to early 2000s, when border arrests averaged about 100,000 per month.” Then it adds, “A record number of families have tried to cross the border in recent months, overwhelming officials at the border and creating a new kind of humanitarian crisis.”
Uh, great? I feel much better about the not-urgent crisis at the border.
I wrote in September that journalists’ fact checks of Trump had gotten lazier and lazier, to the point where they were no longer looking to establish facts but to impress one another with terrific “burns.” After the president’s speech Tuesday, I think media fact checking has moved beyond just lazy. I think it’s dead.
