So often, the “fact-checking” industry in the establishment media serves as an organ of the Democratic Party.
Even then, the Washington Post may have made it a bit too obvious.
Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post decided to fact-check claims by Republicans that Democrats support abortion “until the moment of birth,” citing comments from both Florida Sen. Marco Rubio and Arizona Senate candidate Blake Masters, who used that phrase. It’s not a particularly difficult fact to check, given that Democrats do support keeping abortion legal at any point in pregnancy and frequently decline or refuse to name a single abortion restriction they would ever support.
But Kessler decided instead to fact-check a claim that was never made.
Kessler says that the “GOP attacks are disingenuous at best” because “they imply that late-term abortions are common.” He then proceeds to “fact check” how many late-term abortions are performed in the United States. In his verdict, Kessler concludes, “The campaign rhetoric suggests such late-term abortions happen frequently. The truth is that they do not.”
But again, this is the claim he was supposedly “fact-checking.” Kessler fabricated a strawman claim to give him an article that is more favorable to Democrats. He knows that Democrats oppose all abortion restrictions — everyone knows it because they keep saying so — and their stance is out-of-touch with most people’s views on the issue. So he decided to make the issue about the frequency of late-term abortions, which he concludes is at least 10,000 per year.
Speaking of which, that 10,000-a-year number also gives the lie to the claim that late-term abortion is “extremely rare.” It is much more common, for example, than deaths from AR-15s or other so-called “assault weapons.” All rifles combined, AR-15s included, accounted for only 364 gun homicides in 2019. (There were 10,258 total gun homicides in 2019, which is almost as many late-term abortions as Kessler decided are “extremely rare.”)
According to the Washington Post’s own police shooting database, there have been 7,768 people shot and killed by police since 2015. That hasn’t stopped the Democrats and their allies in the media from claiming that it is an epidemic. The Black Lives Matter movement is given national reverence by liberals, including Kessler’s paper, even though only 1,689 of those victims were black and, of that group, only 144 in the last eight years were unarmed. So police misconduct and shootings with so-called “assault weapons” are both considerably rarer than late-term abortions, which Kessler declared “extremely rare” at 10,000 per year.
Would Kessler ever claim that Democrats are out of line on gun control or police shootings? Of course, he wouldn’t. Today’s Democratic Party is essentially a political arm of the legacy media corporations.
But abortion is an issue that makes liberals squeamish, so they must distract from the fact that they, and the Democratic politicians they support, want abortion to be legal through all nine months of pregnancy for any reason, with no limits or restrictions whatsoever, and also funded by taxpayers.
This was yet another political attack dressed up as a fact check — and a pretty lazy one at that.
