Balladeer's Blog

WHO CHECKS THE “FACT CHECKERS?” It’s no secret that the Democrats have transformed every aspect of life into an ugly political situation. “The personal is the political” is the shallow line that they have pushed for decades now in order to justify the insertion of their political prejudices into the lives of everyone around them.

“Education” (LMAO), news reporting and Social Media fell to Democrat power politics long ago, especially the Democrats’ discriminatory hiring practices and tendency to want people fired or censored for expressing ANY opinion with which even the most emotionally fragile Democrat disagrees. Therefore it came as no surprise that Teacher’s Unions, media outlets and Social Media tycoons make their political donations almost exclusively to Democrat candidates. 

One of the biggest downsides to this has been the death of ANY attempt at objectivity. No “experts” or “authorities” or – most ridiculously of all – “fact checkers” are to be trusted anymore. Self-proclaimed Fact Checkers serve no purpose except confirmation bias for their target audience.

Sharyl Attkisson, the Ida Tarbell of the 21st Century, has done a deep dive into the biases and prejudices of “fact checking.” The link is below, but first some excerpts:

“That discord is likely to persist because in large part the fact-checking solution is illusory. Many such efforts fail because they amount to a circular feedback loop of verification. The fact-checkers are like-minded journalists or often liberal Silicon Valley gatekeepers, who frequently rely on partisan news sources and political activists to control narratives on a wide variety of issues and controversies. This small group of players exerts an oversized influence, using fact checks to shape and censor information.” 

In that same article Attkisson covered one of Twitter’s absurd “fact checks” … about a hypothetical situation that hasn’t even happened (or not happened) yet – 

“Like many questionable “fact checks” at issue, Twitter’s critique wasn’t really a fact check at all. It used past reporting from selected partisan news sources to claim that a prediction about what could happen in the future is untrue — before it even happens or doesn’t happen. It was, in short, a Democratic Party talking point.”

” … today’s brand of “fact-checking” is rarely cut and dry, such as verifying the date an event occurred. Now, fact checks are frequently used to litigate matters of opinion or debate, and to proclaim the truth about facts that are unknown, or cannot possibly be known, at the time. They commonly provide what they call the “context” they claim is necessary to assess a factual claim, rather than a simple assessment of whether a statement is correct or incorrect. As a result, many factually correct statements are deemed to be “half true” or “mostly false.”  “

“Keeping this in mind, the biggest inherent flaw with efforts to fact-check information may lie in the qualifications, bias, and conflicts of interest among the ranks of the fact-checkers themselves. One example is the fact-checking nonprofit First Draft, started by Google at the beginning of the 2016 election cycle. Google is owned by Alphabet, Inc. Alphabet executives and employees comprise a politically active group that ranks among the largest political donors to Democrats in the country. During the 2016 campaign, Alphabet was led by an ardent Hillary Clinton supporter and campaign volunteer, executive chairman Eric Schmidt.” Continue reading →