The concept of political “fact-checking” was rendered effectively obsolete the moment Donald Trump launched his campaign for president, but it’s gotten to the point now where it’s actually scary how the guy’s critics have robbed the term of any meaning at all.
Like the word “racist,” a “fact check” is now apparently whatever liberals want it to be.
There is now physical and testimonial evidence substantiating the New York Post story from last week, showing that former vice president Joe Biden was well aware of his son’s very lucrative, very shady business dealings with foreign countries including Ukraine and China.
Even without that, though, the New York Post is a major news publication that put its perfectly fine credibility on the line to report the story. That should be enough to have at least given it an initial benefit of the doubt.
But no. The rest of the national media, Facebook, and Twitter were and are eager to keep the story hidden from as many voters as possible.
In a to-be-aired interview with CBS’s Leslie Stahl, Trump is seen criticizing Stahl and others for declining to cover the story, only to have Stahl tell him, “Well, because it can’t be verified.” He asks her why. Her answer is, “Because it can’t be verified.”
Let’s try that with anything else: God is real. How do I know? Because he’s real.
Amazing!
This happens at other points throughout the interview, too, where Stahl dismisses virtually everything positive Trump says about his record in office, telling him, “I don’t want to fact check you.”
Twitter and Facebook both made snap decisions to ban the original New York Post story from being shared on their platforms. To be fair, Twitter gave the almost-reasonable excuse — that photos accompanying the story exposed private contact information for Hunter Biden — before reversing the ban.
But Facebook made the ridiculous argument that it needed to fact check the story before it could allow for its sharing. “This story is eligible to be fact checked by Facebook’s third-party fact-checking partners,” a company spokesman said.
That’s interesting. This was an exclusive story with new information unreported elsewhere. How is “fact-checking” possible when there’s nowhere to cross-reference the material? What makes the people of Facebook so certain that their “fact-checking” capabilities are superior or even comparable to those of a major newspaper that has been around 200 years longer?
It’s absurd.
They’re not engaging in fact-checking. They’re engaging in partisan politics.
