We’re not in Kansas anymore.
The Associated Press ran a 300-plus-word “fact-check” Monday afternoon investigating whether President-elect Trump is correct to call Meryl Streep “one of the most over-rated actresses in Hollywood.”
Yes, really.
The AP published an honest-to-God “fact check” on an objectively subjective riff.
Remember that scene in “Wizard of Oz” where Dorothy is in her bedroom, and her house is spinning around and around in the tornado, and she’s seeing all sorts of weird and crazy stuff?
America is Dorothy right now. Up is down, down is up and everyone and everything has lost its damn mind.
Beyond being trivial, the AP story, which states upfront that Trump’s claim is an “opinion,” is also another mark against a subdivision of media that is already struggling for credibility following several years of bad missteps.
As Current Affairs’ Nathan Robinson noted recently, “fact-checking” websites “are ostensibly dedicated to promoting objective truth over eye-of-the-beholder lies, but … often simply serve as mouthpieces for centrist orthodoxies, thereby further delegitimizing the entire notion of ‘fact’ itself.”
“[W]ebsites like PolitiFact frequently disguise opinion and/or bulls—t as neutral, data-based inquiry,” he continued, adding, “such websites frequently produce meaningless statistics, such as trying to measure the percentage of a candidate’s statements that are false.”
This creates an obvious problem.
“The fact-checkers might think that by going beyond the literal meaning of statements, and evaluating the impressions they leave, they are in fact doing a greater service to truth and reality,” he wrote. “In fact, they are opening the door to a far more subjective kind of work, because evaluating perceptions requires a lot more interpretation than evaluating the basic truth or falsity of a statement. It thereby creates far more room for bias and error to work their way into the analysis.”
“Fact-checkers [frequently] claim that while claims may literally be true, they are nevertheless false for giving ‘misleading’ impressions or missing crucial context,” he added.
We’ll say it again and again until we’re blue in the face: Media’s best hope to defeat the prevalence of fake news is to re-establish its own credibility. Fact-checking Trump over whether a certain actress is overrated accomplishes the exact opposite of this.
