The Washington Post’s fact-checking team was gracious enough to provide readers with the context necessary to interpret speeches delivered during the first day of the Republican National Convention.
Readers could have used similar help at last week’s Democratic National Convention.
Several of the 19 claims that the fact-checkers vetted from the RNC were not materially false but were deemed “misleading.” For example, it is not false that Robert Gates, who served as one of President Barack Obama’s defense secretaries, said of Joe Biden, “I think he has been wrong on nearly every major foreign policy and national security issue over the past four decades.” He did actually say that in his memoir.
But when Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz quoted those exact words on Monday, the fact-checkers deemed it misleading because the former secretary recently told NPR, “So, although I’ve got a lot of policy disagreements with the former vice president, he is a decent person. … I think that what the country needs is somebody who will try to bring us together.” Um, yeah — Gates didn’t retract his assessment of Biden’s foreign policy, but he did express his support for Biden. That somehow became the basis for a fact-check of an accurate quotation of his own writing. Go figure.
If the Washington Post wants to challenge convention claims by providing context that its fact-checkers deem necessary for proper understanding’s sake, then fine — even if it’s about a week late in adopting that standard. Here are a few claims that should have gotten the same contextual treatment during the DNC’s opening night.
“It was here that just weeks ago, Americans donned face masks and safely and peacefully protested the death of George Floyd,” said Washington, D.C., Mayor Muriel Bowser during her convention speech. “But while we were peacefully protesting, Donald Trump was plotting.” She continued, “He sent troops in camouflage into our streets. He sent tear gas into the air — and federal helicopters too.”
Sen. Bernie Sanders made a claim similar to Bowser’s, saying that Trump “deployed the military and federal agents against peaceful protesters.”
Washington saw many iterations of racial justice protests, though they were not all peaceful all the time. On May 31, the city’s police department announced arrests from the day before and detailed charges brought against 18 people “involved in felony rioting acts stemming from First Amendment assemblies.” Charges included felony rioting, looting, and destruction of property. They also published numerous pictures of suspects. On Sunday night, St. John’s Episcopal Church was set on fire, along with buildings and cars. Businesses were looted.
As for the events of May 31, and particularly the June 1 events surrounding Trump’s photo in front of the church, Attorney General William Barr has challenged the idea that the law enforcement coalition dispersed protesters in spite of a prevailing peace.
“They broke into the Treasury Department, and they were injuring police,” Barr told CBS’s Margaret Brennan. Critiquing media coverage, he said, “I didn’t hear about the fact that there were 150 law enforcement officers injured and many taken to the hospital with concussions. So, it wasn’t a peaceful protest.” Barr also said, “The officers were pummeled with bricks. Crowbars were used to pry up the pavers at the park, and they were hurled at police.”
None of these details alone establishes a normative claim about Trump’s photo or the use of the National Guard and federal law enforcement, but they do establish context that Bowser and Sanders excluded in order to leave a misleading or distorted impression of what happened. Either the D.C. police and Barr created the facts on the ground out of whole cloth, or the reality was more complex than law enforcement aggression versus peaceful protest.
Another series of claims made during the DNC that went unchecked dealt with the Postal Service. This was the stuff of pure conspiracy theory. Joe Biden said that Trump wants to “defund the post office.” Nevada Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto said, “And now, [Trump] is putting the lives of Nevada’s seniors at risk by trying to defund the post office. Here’s what that means: Seniors won’t be able to get their prescriptions because he wants to win an election.”
The Postal Service’s operations are not supposed to rely on annual appropriations from Congress. Suggesting that Trump wants to defund USPS in the same way that, say, Los Angeles has defunded its police department, is a category error. Moreover, Trump signed the CARES Act, which provided $10 billion in new credit to the Postal Service.
After saying he would compromise on new USPS funding, Trump did suggest to Fox News’s Maria Bartiromo that he would not approve it. “They need that money in order to have the post office work so it can take all of these millions and millions of ballots,” Trump said. “Now, in the meantime, they aren’t getting there. By the way, those are just two items. But if they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.”
Setting aside the merits of Trump’s dim view of mail-in voting, even these words do not support the Democrats’ “defund” claim. You can’t defund monies from an agency that doesn’t already have those monies or isn’t regularly scheduled to have them. That isn’t what “defund” means.
Another claim came from Kristin Urquiza, a woman whose father died from COVID-19. Urquiza blamed her Trump-supporting father’s death on Trump himself, who she said told the world that “if you had no underlying health conditions, you’d probably be fine.” The insinuation was that her father’s death was a counterexample — proof that Trump was wrong in saying that.
Trump certainly has stressed the high recovery rates among those without underlying health conditions who come down with COVID-19. Public health officials have, too, because yes, recovery rates are high among those without underlying conditions.
“A key point is that we want to make sure that people know that as your numbers of underlying medical conditions increase, your risk of severe illness from COVID also increases,” CDC Director Robert Redfield said in a June 25 press conference. Redfield and others have noted this fact repeatedly, even as an argument for opening up schools.
Those are just a couple of examples of misleading claims that could have used more context last week. When asked why the fact-checkers are so much busier this week, several prominent media voices have predictably chimed in with the claim that Trump and the Republicans simply lie more than Democrats do. But even if that were true, it would be impossible to come to that conclusion by reading the Washington Post, because its fact-checkers judge political claims differently based on which party they’re coming from.
