Of all the things voters can be relieved to see go away once the election is over, the national media’s incessant self back-patting for “fact-checking” Donald Trump should be somewhere near the top of the list.
It’s been a bizarre point of pride among politics reporters for having “fact-checked” the most inconsequential, throw-away lines from Trump that the average person would otherwise hear, laugh off and move on.
At a campaign rally in North Carolina on Monday, Trump made a joke about Beyonce and Jay Z, who have come out in support of Hillary Clinton.
“Beyonce and Jay Z, I like them, I like them,” he said. “And you know what they do? I get bigger crowds than they do. It’s true. I get far bigger crowds.”
His supporters roared.
Not a single person in the audience or watching on TV thought to themselves, “Wait a second, something’s not adding up here.”
But the fact-check website PolitiFact put its reputation on the line to refute Trump one more time: “There is no question Trump is fixated on the size of his crowds,” the site said, in earnest. “And there is no question, this claim — as it relates to Beyonce and Jay Z — is incorrect.”
The Republic was saved once more.
Even if PolitiFact was being intentionally dense, this was the kind of thing the news media did all year, with reporters congratulating themselves for living up to some unknown sacred oath of their profession.
CNN’s media correspondent Brian Stelter said in a story online Monday that Trump “made fact-checking great again.”
In that story, the Washington Post’s fact-checker Glenn Kessler bragged that “Trump earned significantly more four-Pinocchio ratings than Clinton,” referring to the ratings system he uses to gauge the truth of political statements. “The numbers don’t lie, and we frequently reminded readers of the differences.”
A day after Trump launched his campaign in June of last year, Kessler said one of the lines in Trump’s announcement speech was “totally false.”
Here is the line from Trump’s speech that Kessler was rebutting: “A lot of people up there can’t get jobs. They can’t get jobs, because there are no jobs.”
After what was probably a very labor-intensive Google search, Kessler apparently found out that there actually are some jobs and not “no jobs.”
If those are the kinds of claims we’re going to spend our time verifying, it’s obvious why someone who talks like Trump — that’s to say: Anyone who speaks like a normal human — would earn “significantly more Pinocchio ratings” than Clinton, who talks like a lawyer. A very loud lawyer.
In August, CNN did its part to uphold Democracy by fact-checking Trump in an on-screen graphic that assured viewers his claim that President Obama was “the founder of ISIS” was untrue.
Anyone who heard Trump call Obama and Clinton the “founders” of ISIS knew exactly what he meant.
CNN took the position that the Republican nominee was actually claiming that Obama and Clinton established their own Islamic terrorist network in the Middle East.
That these breezy comments from Trump were confronted with such grave concern by the news media made for some awkward moments.
In September on MSNBC, Bloomberg Politics’ Mark Halperin spent more than four minutes of airtime — an eternity in cable news — pressuring Trump’s campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on why her candidate had claimed NBC’s Lester Holt is a Democrat when he’s actually a registered Republican.
Trump made the accusation against Holt leading up to the first presidential debate, an obvious move to cast doubt on how fair the event would be.
“How could he say such a thing that’s just black-and-white, factually incorrect?” said Halperin.
Conway said Trump was “trying to convey that the media are filled writ-large with [liberal Democrats.]
Sure that he was on to something that kept voters awake at night, Halperin pressed, “I’m asking you how someone who’s running for president can assert on the eve of the debate that the moderator’s a Democrat, which is factually incorrect. How can he do that?”
Who cares?
The national media are overwhelmingly liberal, as proven by countless studies and campaign donation records.
That Trump got the party registration of a single news anchor wrong — and still no one would mistake Holt for a closeted Trump supporter — is insignificant.
It’s unclear what benefit this type of journalism is supposed to give news consumers preparing to elect their next president.
But at least reporters get to look stern and exacting on TV, which media people love and normal people find irritating.
Eddie Scarry is a media reporter for the Washington Examiner. Thinking of submitting an op-ed to the Washington Examiner? Be sure to read our guidelines on submissions.
